Sumo Logic joins AWS to accelerate Amazon CloudWatch Metrics collection

We are excited to join AWS for the launch of Amazon CloudWatch Metric Streams; a fully managed, scalable, and low latency service that streams Amazon CloudWatch metrics to partners via Amazon Kinesis Data Firehose. AWS and Sumo Logic customers can now leverage AWS Kinesis Firehose for Metrics Source for streaming CloudWatch metrics into their Sumo Logic accounts, to help simplify the monitoring and troubleshooting of AWS infrastructure, services, and applications.

Existing agentless methods to collect CloudWatch metrics from AWS infrastructure, services, and applications rely on the CloudWatch API; which uses a polling mechanism to detect and collect CloudWatch metrics, and therefore may need manual intervention for increasing the quota. With CloudWatch Metric Streams, customers can stream CloudWatch metrics without such dependencies.

Solution Overview

The following schematic shows how CloudWatch metrics are streamed to Sumo Logic for analysis. Users can get the entire setup running by just creating a new Sumo Logic Source via our Collection UI or APIs and using a CloudFormation template to automate the setup on both the AWS and the Sumo Logic side in one step.

Here’s a summary of the benefits of this new solution:

• Reliable Delivery of CloudWatch Metrics: This streaming solution doesn’t consume your CloudWatch API quota, this rules out the possibility of potential data loss due to API throttling events.

• Automatic retry capabilities: Kinesis Data Firehose has an automatic retry mechanism for delivering metrics to Sumo Logic. In the event of a failure, the metrics are re-sent after the service is restored and if that fails, Kinesis Firehose stores all failed messages in a customer-owned S3 bucket for later recovery.

• Low latency: CloudWatch metrics are streamed to Sumo Logic as soon as they are made available by the CloudWatch service. Polling-based metrics collection mechanisms on the other hand can suffer from higher latencies due to low frequency of polling.

• Efficient Filtering: CloudWatch Metric Streams allows users to setup namespace filters prior to delivery to Sumo Logic, in addition to this Sumo Logic source enriches incoming metrics with AWS tags which can also be configured as tag filters to further refine the metrics ingestion.

To summarize, AWS and Sumo Logic customers now have a fully managed and reliable solution for streaming CloudWatch metrics into Sumo Logic to help simplify the monitoring and troubleshooting of AWS infrastructure, services, and applications. At this time, our AWS Observability solution has also been updated to leverage this new metrics streaming solution. To learn more about streaming CloudWatch Metrics, check out our documentation, or sign up for a free trial to start your Observability journey.