June 2016 Release Highlights

Despite summer vacation season settling in, our dev team hasn’t shown signs of stopping churning out new features. Metricly’s June 2016 release highlights include updated AWS EMR monitoring, AWS ECS support, and improved external event ingestion, including Sensu and Nagios support.

Improved External Event Ingestion

Metricly improved its ingestion of external events with a new Webhook datasource and Amazon SNS support. Events generated by either source allow for real-time notifications. With events coming in at quicker speeds, you can set up powerful alerting policies to narrow down the problems in your environments and speed up your troubleshooting and ultimately Mean Time To Repair (MTTR). You can even use regular expressions (Regex) to match text patterns in the title or body of the incoming messages. It’s powerful to see alerts generated based on performance analysis of ingested time-series data right alongside alerts generated based on text-based log entries and exceptions.

AWS EMR and ECS Support

In Metricly’s everlasting campaign to provide comprehensive AWS monitoring, two new elements are now available for monitoring:

• Elastic Map Reduce (EMR): Allowing Metricly to monitor your EMR clusters can provide visualization of the performance of your cluster, individual nodes, HBase (if used), and Input/Output (I/O). This performance monitoring can help track the progress of your cluster(s), detect idle clusters, and detect nodes that have no more storage left. Key performance metrics include IsIdle, S3 Bytes Written and Read, Apps Pending, and Apps Running.
• EC2 Container Service (ECS): Monitoring your ECS instances with Metricly grants a better perspective on how your services, tasks, EC2 instances, Docker Containers, and more are performing, depending on how much you use your ECS instance for. Key performance metrics include cluster-wide and service-specific CPU Utilization and Memory Utilization.

To speed up configuration and setup, when you add either of these data sources, Metricly installs a monitoring package complete with pre-built computed metrics, alerting policies, and monitoring dashboards.

Sensu and Nagios External Event Support

To assist in consolidating your monitoring views, Metricly now supports processing events from Sensu and Nagios. While there is a little bit of setup involved with either platform (depending on how you have configured those tools), you’ll be seeing your important events from Sensu and/or Nagios alongside Metricly’s powerful anomaly detection, eliminating the need to watch multiple tools for issues in your environment. This will save you precious time when diagnosing. Check out the Sensu and Nagios external event documentation for more information.

Monitoring Dashboards Favorites

With the introduction of dashboard favorites, no more will you have to scroll through long lists of dashboards created by your team to find the ones that you care about. Open the dashboard management page and star your frequently used dashboards; all your favorites will be listed when you hover on the Dashboards navigation menu section. All non-favorite dashboards will still be viewable from the dashboard management page.