AWS CloudWatch alarms on your SmartPhones with OpsGenie

<p>Amazon <a href="http://aws.amazon.com/cloudwatch/">CloudWatch</a> provides monitoring for Amazon Web Services (AWS) and the applications that make use of AWS. There are many alternatives to collecting resource utilization metrics from EC2 instances, however when AWS services like ELB, RDS, DynamoDB, SQS, etc. are used, <a href="http://docs.amazonwebservices.com/AmazonCloudWatch/latest/DeveloperGuide/CW_Support_For_AWS.html">CloudWatch metrics</a> play a critical role in the monitoring of the applications running on AWS cloud. One of the key capabilities of CloudWatch service is the alarms. A <a href="http://aws.typepad.com/aws/2012/07/ec2-instance-status-metrics.html">CloudWatch alarm</a> can watch a single metric over a specified time period and execute automated actions based on the value of the watched metric and given threshold. The automated action may be sending emails, or calling HTTP/S end points, etc.</p><h3>Notify users via iPhone/Android apps, SMS, and phone calls</h3><p>OpsGenie customers can configure CloudWatch to call OpsGenie web services API, get the right people notified rapidly via push notifications to iPhone/Android apps, SMS, voice calls, etc. according to the preferences of the recipients. It&#8217;s very easy to set this up and try:</p><ul><li>If you don&#8217;t already have one, <a href="https://www.opsgenie.com/customer/signUp">Create an OpsGenie account</a>.</li><li>Get the customerKey for your account from the &#8220;<a href="https://www.opsgenie.com/customer/settings">Account Settings</a>" page</li><li><a href="http://docs.amazonwebservices.com/sns/latest/gsg/CreateTopic.html">Create an SNS topic</a>, and an <a href="http://docs.amazonwebservices.com/sns/latest/gsg/Subscribe.html">HTTPS subscription</a>. The endpoint should point to OpsGenie. customerKey and recipients are mandatory parameters, and message, description, alias, actions, and entity are optional parameters. For example:</li></ul><p><a href="https://api.opsgenie.com/v1/json/cloudwatch?customerKey=342532b52342&amp;setAlias=AlarmName&amp;recipients=operations&amp;actions=acknowledge,reboot">https://api.opsgenie.com/v1/json/cloudwatch?customerKey=342532b52342&amp;setAlias=AlarmName&amp;recipients=operations&amp;actions=acknowledge,reboot</a><br/> <img alt="image" src="http://media.tumblr.com/16bf8d3d4e2fc9504e8a6acd6f0e5c1a/tumblr_inline_mu3esl7N9L1soq1dj.png"/></p><ul><li><a href="http://docs.amazonwebservices.com/AmazonCloudWatch/latest/DeveloperGuide/AlarmThatSendsEmail.html">Create a CloudWatch alarm</a> with any metric and select the SNS topic you&#8217;ve created as the action</li></ul><p><img alt="image" src="http://media.tumblr.com/34a9f006c9907ed803a91828a79648e5/tumblr_inline_mu3etgGbiQ1soq1dj.png"/></p><p></p><p><br/> That&#8217;s all it takes. When the alarm condition is met, AWS CloudWatch will pass the alarm details to OpsGenie, and OpsGenie will notify the specified users (recipients parameter) based on the recipients&#8217; notification preferences.</p><p><img alt="image" src="http://media.tumblr.com/f6c1533510216f45d8b4b45381bcbeae/tumblr_inline_mu3eu3Q0mS1soq1dj.png"/></p><p><br/><br/> If you don&#8217;t already have one, <a href="https://www.opsgenie.com/customer/signUp">create a free OpsGenie account</a> now, and give it a try. If you have an iPhone or Android phone, you can download OpsGenie app, and get notified via mobile push notifications, for other phones you can get notifications via SMS and voice calls, and use OpsGenie mobile or desktop web apps. <br/><br/></p><h3>Enrich CloudWatch alarms and provide context</h3><p>Using OpsGenie, you can not only send CloudWatch alarms to users as described above, but also can provide additional information to enable the recipients to make an assessment and determine the right course of action. For example, you can retrieve data for the relevant metrics, from CloudWatch via its APIs, generate graphs with the metric data, and attach the graphs to the alert using OpsGenie APIs. Similarly, you can retrieve relevant information from other systems such as configuration management tools, and attach to the alert. Recipients can view all the information directly from OpsGenie apps and determine what to do next.<br/><br/> As both CloudWatch and OpsGenie provide web APIs, this functionality can be implemented on any platform using your choice of language. OpsGenie provides a handy tool called Marid that makes the process as easy as possible. Marid can execute a groovy or ruby script for a web request, hence script can be triggered by a CloudWatch alarm. OpsGenie AWS integration files include an example script that retrieves configured metrics for the alarm from CloudWatch, generates metric charts, creates an OpsGenie alert and attaches the charts to the alert. <br/><br/></p><div><img alt="image" src="http://media.tumblr.com/e436774cf4d5f9bd027e2348dea96f38/tumblr_inline_mu3ev05DC31soq1dj.png"/><p><img alt="image" src="http://media.tumblr.com/e96601f3af6b343b47032b582db5073a/tumblr_inline_mu3ev4gNT11soq1dj.png"/></p></div><p></p><h3>Empower recipients to initiate corrective actions from anywhere</h3><p>When an alert requires rapid attention of the users, it is often necessary for the recipients to take action rapidly; acknowledge the alert, communicate with others, gather more information, initiate corrective actions, etc. As described above, with OpsGenie, recipients can be provided with the information they need to determine the right course of action. Furthermore, OpsGenie enables the users to initiate actions directly from OpsGenie apps., potentially significantly reducing mean time to repair, preventing impact on services. etc.<br/><br/><img alt="image" src="http://media.tumblr.com/edde9a5553a43e3ee3393a23410f1ba7/tumblr_inline_mu3evjVwbm1soq1dj.png"/></p><p><br/><a href="http://support.opsgenie.com/customer/portal/articles/719296-marid-integration-server-for-opsgenie">Instructions on how to setup and configure Marid </a>can be found on our <a href="http://support.opsgenie.com">support site</a>.&lt; <br/><br/>OpsGenie also provides another integration which can be used to create alerts and also attach CloudWatch performance graphs to the alert&#160;: <a href="http://support.opsgenie.com/customer/portal/articles/714183-all-downloads#cloudwatch-integration">AWS CloudWatch Integration Download.</a></p>