New Relic offers several methods to collect performance data about your Amazon Web Services (AWS) environment. After you've connected New Relic with AWS, you can access your system's AWS telemetry, letting you closely monitor the health of your AWS stack. Our AWS observability solution supports Amazon CloudWatch Metric Streams integration to get metrics, and Forward AWS service logs to New Relic to get logs into New Relic. This document describes how to get started with AWS monitoring and provides an overview about AWS costs.
Start with the CloudWatch Metric Streams integration
Our AWS observability solution is the Amazon CloudWatch Metric Streams integration, which collects data about your entire AWS stack with Amazon CloudWatch Metric Streams. For the majority of use cases, you begin monitoring your AWS stack by installing our Amazon CloudWatch Metric Streams integration.
Our CloudWatch Metric Streams integration provides the best data about your AWS stack, but if you use integrations not supported by CloudWatch Metric Streams, you may need to use our legacy API polling solution. If you're currently using API polling for supported integrations, we recommend you migrate your data to Amazon CloudWatch Metric Streams.
Tip
If your AWS stack has specific regulatory needs for US federal, state, and local agencies, or you're an education institution, then follow our procedures for AWS GovCloud.
Collect data about EC2 instances and Amazon EKS
Our Amazon CloudWatch Metric Streams integration lets you collect data about your EC2 instances and Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service (EKS) environments. If you want more granular data, you can install additional integrations on top of the CloudWatch Metric Streams integration for deeper visibility.
- You can monitor your EC2 instances by installing the infrastructure agent on your EC2 hosts, or by assigning the AWS System Manager Distributor to install the infrastructure agent for you.
- To monitor your Kubernetes clusters, follow our procedures to install the New Relic EKS add-on.
Calculating AWS costs for integrations
This section directs you to relevant AWS docs that explain how our integrations affect your AWS billing.
- The AWS CloudWatch Pricing pagedefines AWS CloudWatch metric streams pricing based on the number of metric updates.
- We sometimes use AWS Kinesis Data Firehose as the delivery method from AWS to New Relic, so we recommend reviewing the AWS Firehose pricing page.
- When you enable AWS Config to enrich CloudWatch metrics with resource metadata, you're charged based on the number of configuration items recorded. See the AWS Config pricing page for details.
- AWS Resource Groups Tagging API enriches metrics with custom tags defined in the associated AWS resources. This affects both polling and metric streams.
New Relic uses the Amazon CloudWatch API to capture data about AWS services when you use the API polling integration instead of CloudWatch Metric Streams. Some situations may increase the number of calls to the CloudWatch API to exceed the 1 million free limits granted by AWS and increase your CloudWatch bill. This may happen when you enable additional integrations through API Polling, add AWS resources to those integrations, or scale those integrations across more regions.
AWS offers enhanced monitoring for some of their services that allows for more metrics at a higher frequency. You can check out RDS enhanced monitoring costs for more information.
Region availability
Most AWS services offer regional endpoints to reduce data latency between cloud resources and applications. New Relic can obtain monitoring data from services and endpoints that are located from all AWS regions except China.