SLOs Made Easier with Nobl9 and CloudWatch Metrics Insights

Nov 14, 2022 | Author: Natalia Sikora-Zimna

Avg. reading time: 2 minutes

Originally Published at aws.amazon.com on November 30th, 2021

By Natalia Sikora-Zimna, Product Owner at Nobl9

Amazon CloudWatch has recently launched Metrics Insights – a fast, flexible, SQL-based query engine that lets customers identify trends and patterns across millions of operational metrics in real time. Metrics Insights allows customers to easily query and analyze metrics to gain better visibility into the health and performance of their infrastructure and large-scale applications.

Nobl9 and Amazon Web Services (AWS) have collaborated to extend the existing Nobl9 CloudWatch integration with CloudWatch Metrics Insights [Preview]. This will help users to retrieve metrics even faster and gain added flexibility in querying raw service level indicator (SLI) data to use for your SLOs.

Nobl9 launched the first version of its CloudWatch integration in September 2021, giving customers a versatile tool to monitor their products. CloudWatch collects data from over 70 AWS services, thereby providing AWS users with access to valuable infrastructure metrics. In addition, users can create their own custom metrics. Moreover, Nobl9’s CloudWatch integration provides customers with the power to translate these metrics into actionable SLOs. This means that companies have all of the information that they need to maintain a balance between cost and reliability, and to keep their customers happy.

CloudWatch Metrics Insights takes the SLO game to the next level. It’s an innovative analytics tool that works for both types of CloudWatch metrics: infrastructure and custom. The introduction of this feature lets Nobl9 customers benefit from using a powerful, SQL-based query engine for grouping, aggregating, and filtering metrics by labels in real time. This also helps them better organize their business insights. Furthermore, it gives users broad possibilities in defining metrics and choosing the granularity of insights that best fits their needs.

Metrics Insights comes with a query builder that lets customers select their metrics of interest, namespaces, and dimensions visually. Then the console automatically constructs Metrics Insights SQL queries based on their selections. Metrics Insights also provides a SQL query editor, where customers can type in raw SQL queries or edit the ones that they’ve created earlier and get down to the finest level of granular detail. Note that CloudWatch Metrics Insights comes with auto-completion support, which gives smart suggestions throughout the composition of the queries.

Once customers create their SQL queries, they can use them in the Nobl9 platform to set up SLOs that provide actionable data about multiple aspects of their business. Nobl9 keeps the integration as simple as possible: just choose the data center’s region, and paste in the metric SQL query, exactly as it was created in CloudWatch.

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