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Key Takeaways
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In fast-paced cloud environments, traditional monitoring methods often fall short. This leaves teams with latency and data gaps. It’s time to gain near real-time visibility into your AWS telemetry, enabling faster incident response and deeper insights. With its new streaming ingestion capabilities, DX Operational Observability (DX O2) is revolutionizing cloud monitoring—enabling teams to leverage AWS CloudWatch Metric Streams and Amazon Kinesis Data Firehose.
Why streaming ingestion is a game changer
By taking advantage of CloudWatch Metric Streams, which continuously emit AWS metrics with incredibly low latency, DX O2 helps organizations to move beyond traditional, periodic polling. This transformation offers a range of significant advantages:
- Substantially reduced latency: Metrics reach DX O2 in near real time so teams receive more timely alerts and can begin root cause analysis sooner. This significantly improves responsiveness compared to teams relying on traditional agent polling cycles.
- Centralized scope control: Administrators can create streams for specific AWS services or namespaces, and can apply filters for precise metric inclusion (or exclusion) and more granular control.
- Avoid API throttling: API rate limits are common with traditional polling methods. The streaming model pushes data, effectively bypassing these constraints, to ensure continuous data flow.
With timely alerts, better controls, and comprehensive data, you can significantly improve operational responsiveness for both cloud-native and hybrid workloads.
Benefits for DX O2 practitioners: A deeper dive
DX O2 delivers unparalleled observability to practitioners across the IT estate. For business and IT stakeholders alike, full-stack, end-to-end observability is shifting from a benchmark goal to an expected norm. How this level of observability is achieved is vital, especially for AWS environments. DX O2 delivers:
- Near real-time visibility: Continuous metric flows allow operators to detect and respond to incidents with unprecedented speed.
- Expanded metadata enrichment: DX O2 intelligently pulls additional tags and service metadata from the AWS Metadata Service, which the product uses to enrich monitoring data with context. This improves understanding and “actionability” for teams across the IT estate. Teams receive the context they need without delays and without having to send special requests to other teams within IT.
- Flexible metric format support: DX O2 supports OpenTelemetry 1.0 and JSON formats, aligning with AWS recommendations and offering broad compatibility.
- Efficient data transfer: Support for GZIP content encoding reduces network load, while optimizing data transfer speeds.
- Reliable delivery: Firehose buffering and configurable retry settings ensure reliable metric delivery with backup options to Amazon S3 for failed data. This improves troubleshooting by minimizing data gaps for monitored services.
- Cost efficiency: Historical telemetry is stored within DX O2. By removing the need for expensive, repetitive data polling when performing trend analysis, DX O2 helps to minimize direct and indirect costs for IT.
How the integration works: A seamless flow
The design for AWS streaming ingestion follows AWS recommendations. Telemetry from various regions within an account can be streamed using Kinesis Firehose on a per-region basis, allowing for better control over the ingestion pipeline.
Implementing this powerful integration is straightforward:
- AWS CloudWatch Metric Stream creation: In the AWS Console, set up a Metric Stream by selecting the CloudWatch namespaces you wish to stream. Configure the Metric Stream to deliver data via Firehose.
- Firehose stream setup: Create a Firehose delivery stream with "Direct Put" as the source and a DX O2 HTTP endpoint as the destination. These settings will be specific to your AWS region and desired metric format.
- Authentication configuration: Securely authenticate Firehose to DX O2 using an agent token that is configured as a Bearer token.
- DX O2 AWS integration: Within DX O2, create an AWS Integration. This entails selecting your regions and services, validating credentials, and copying the ingestion URLs for Firehose setup.
- AWS AssumeRole setup: For robust security and manageable cross-account access, use AWS AssumeRole to configure IAM roles with appropriate policies and trust relationships. This will reduce ongoing administration work by eliminating the need for long-lived credentials.
- Metric visualization and analysis: Once set up, metrics will continuously stream into the Telemetry Analytics Service of DX O2. These metrics will immediately be available in DX O2, including visualization in dashboards, alerting, and in-depth diagnostics and analysis with enriched metadata.
For details, refer to the technical documentation.
Transforming your ways of working
Integration between AWS and DX O2 offers significant gains for speed, scalability, and precision that improve operational workflows. Here are some of the key advantages:
- Automated ingestion workflows: Reduce manual intervention and the risk of data gaps with seamless, automated ingestion.
- Scalable observability: Confidently manage distributed AWS workloads with a monitoring approach designed for large enterprises.
- Deeper insights: Gain a richer understanding of the performance of your AWS services and functions by associating comprehensive metadata and rich contextual information with your metrics.
- Customization of monitoring scope: Flexible filtering and namespace selection allow you to tailor your monitoring to align precisely with your organization’s business priorities.
- Operational resilience: Enhance data reliability and resilience through robust backup and retry configurations.
Summary: The future of AWS observability is here
DX O2’s support for AWS streaming ingestion, powered by CloudWatch Metric Streams and Amazon Kinesis Data Firehose, delivers game-changing, real-time telemetry ingestion. Organizations benefit from faster, more scalable, and more intelligent cloud observability, which is particularly important in modern multi-cloud environments, where ensuring reliability can be challenging.
With this integration, teams can move beyond the constraints of traditional polling to establish proactive cloud operations that accelerate innovation, improve SLA adherence, and speed responsiveness when issues arise. Plus, practitioners can expect enhanced efficiency, security, and flexibility in their AWS observability workflows.
Ashish Aggarwal
Ashish is a seasoned product management leader with extensive experience in the enterprise software industry, specializing in observability solutions. As a lead product manager, Ashish spearheads the modernization of ingestion processes for DX Operational Observability and oversees Infrastructure Observability,...
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