Integrate Amazon CloudWatch with Zendesk

What is Amazon CloudWatch?

Amazon CloudWatch is a monitoring service for AWS cloud computing platform. With this service, multiple AWS resources can be monitored and analyzed.CloudWatch provides users with a variety of metrics that can be used to monitor the health and performance of various applications, servers, and instances. These metrics include CPU utilization, network traffic, number of requests per second, and disk usage.CloudWatch also offers access to several pre-built alarms that can be configured based on the metrics from various AWS resources. These alarms are useful in detecting certain events such as an EC2 instance or a RDS DB running out of disk space.CloudWatch is free to use by all AWS users, with no extra cost for using it.

What is Zendesk?

Zendesk is a customer service software for businesses. It allows users to manage their support requests and inquiries, regardless of the channel they are sent through.Zendesk has been designed so that even non-technical employees can handle customer service questions. Users can also create tickets to track issues and view statistics about how many tickets have been created and how many customers have been served.C. Integration of Amazon CloudWatch and Zendesk

Given that CloudWatch monitors metrics from AWS instances, CloudWatch metrics can be integrated with Zendesk. This can help businesses to manage their customer service issues better.Users can configure CloudWatch to send an alert whenever a certain metric threshold is exceeded. When this occurs, Zendesk can generate an email containing details of the incident. The email will contain the affected instance ID and time at which the incident occurred.This information can then be used to take appropriate action such as restarting the instance or moving it to another server etc.

Integration of Amazon CloudWatch and Zendesk

Integration of CloudWatch and Zendesk is achieved through the use of a custom script that takes data from CloudWatch and inserts them into Zendesk. The following steps describe how the integration is achieved:

• AWS credentials. First off, the user should configure credentials on AWS console in order to enable programmatic access to their account. Once configured, these credentials should then be saved in a file called "credentials" located in the same directory as the script. The location of this directory can be specified in the script.
• Create a bucket (optional. If you want to use a S3 bucket as a data store, you should create one first. In this case, you should specify the name of your bucket in the script using the following command. aws s3 mb s3://bucketname –region us-west-1
• Create an IAM user. You should create an IAM user with permissions to read from CloudWatch. You should specify its name in the script using the following command. aws iam create-user —user-name username —profile admin-user —password xxx —allow-console-access —region us-west-1
• Export AWS credentials. You should then export your AWS credentials and give them to your IAM user. You can do this using this command. aws creds exp —profile admin-user —region us-west-1 —output text > credentials

5. Add user information to script. You should add your IAM user's name along with its access key and secret key to the script using the following commands. echo -n '{"userName". "username", "key". "accessKey", "secretKey". "' > zendesk-cloudwatch-send.sh echo '"secretKey". "' >> zendesk-cloudwatch-send.sh chmod 700 zendesk-cloudwatch-send.sh 6. Install python module. You should then install python package "Boto" using pip (python package manager. You can do this by executing following command in your terminal. pip install boto 7. Configure variables. You should then edit your script file zendesk-cloudwatch-send.sh located in the same directory as where you installed "Boto" with editor and configure the variables as shown below. export AWSAccessKeyId=<AWS_Access_Key> export AWSSecretKey=<AWS_Secret_Key> export region=us-west-1 export metricName="CPUUtilization" export metricDimensions="InstanceId" export metricValue="0" export alarmActions="arn:aws:sns:us-west-1:<AWS_ACCOUNT_NUMBER>:<SNS_TOPIC>" 8. Execute script. You should then execute the script using the following command. bash zendesk-cloudwatch-send.sh <bucketname> <zendesk_user> <zendesk_password> <zendesk_host> <target_metric> <target_dimensions> <target_value>9. Test run. You should then test run your script by executing it without any parameters and make sure that everything works fine. If so, congratulations! Your integration has been successfully completed. If not, go back through each step above and check for any errors or inconsistencies in your code or configuration settings.

Benefits of Integration of Amazon CloudWatch and Zendesk

Integrating CloudWatch metrics with Zendesk helps businesses monitor their AWS resources effectively and efficiently without needing to add new tools or hire additional employees to manage their support systems.

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