Amazon CloudWatch Metric Streams

Amazon CloudWatch Metric Streams is an AWS service that creates a real-time stream of metrics to a destination of your choice. To stream your AWS data to New Relic, you can create a custom Firehose that forwards AWS metrics to our CloudWatch Metric Streams integration. This lets you view your AWS data in the New Relic platform.

A screenshot that shows an example dashboard of AWS data in New Relic

Once you forward your AWS data to New Relic, you can view your data in a dashboard.

Choose your set-up method

Set minimum permissions

Before you integrate, you need to set certain permissions so New Relic can access your AWS data. At minimum, you need to create a ReadOnlyAccess policy and apply these minimum permissions to the AWS roles associated with New Relic:

config:BatchGetResourceConfig
config:ListDiscoveredResources
elasticache:DescribeCacheClusters
tag:GetResources

Depending on your set up, your configuration requirements may vary:

Migrate to the CloudWatch Metric Streams integration

You can migrate from API polling by creating a CloudFormation template, or by re-adding your AWS account and following our in-app guided install procedures. We recommend that you use the CloudFormation template method, as it's the most efficient way to migrate. These integrations are not supported by CloudWatch Metric Streams and can't be migrated to our integration:

  • AWS CloudTrail
  • AWS Health
  • AWS Trusted Advisor
  • AWS X-Ray

If you use these integrations, you still need to use the API polling method.

Our CloudWatch Metric Streams integration uses the Metric API to push metrics in the dimensional metric format. Our API polling method, on the other hand, pushes metrics based on events.

  • To assist in the transition, we provide a shimming mechanism that transparently lets you write queries in any format. These queries are processed as expected based on the source that's available, either from events to metrics or metrics to events.
  • We recommend reviewing some limitations about the shimming mechanism that lets you use event-based queries with the CloudWatch Metric Stream integration.

After migrating, some of New Relic features that depend on your API polling data may behave differently:

  • Dashboards: Custom dashboards that use poll-based AWS integration events will still work as expected.
  • Alerts: Alert conditions that use poll-based AWS events will still work. We recommend adapting those to the dimensional metric format that uses NRQL as source.
  • Entities: Your list of monitored entities might show duplicated entities for up to 24 hours.
  • Attributes: Poll-based AWS integrations prefix collected resource tags with label., while the AWS CloudWatch Metric Streams integration prefixes collected resource tags with tags.. If both integrations are enabled for the same AWS account, resource tags will appear under both prefixes when using the Event format.

Validate that your data appears in New Relic

To confirm you're receiving data from the Metric Streams, follow these steps:

  1. Go to one.newrelic.com > All capabilities > Infrastructure > AWS. Search for the AWS account you've connected to New Relic. Stream accounts.
  2. Check the account status dashboard and confirm that New Relic receives the metric data. This may include errors and number of namespaces and metrics ingested.
  3. Explore your data by writing queries for specififc sets of metrics.

It may take few minutes for New Relic to detect new resources and synthesize them as entities.

Tip

AWS CloudWatch metrics for global services, such AWS Billing, are only availble in the us-east-1 region. Make sure there's an active CloudWatch metric stream configured in that region.

What's next?

Now that you can view your AWS data, we recommend that you: