Integrate Slack with Amazon CloudWatch

Slack?

Slack is a cloud-based communication platform which was created by Stewart Butterfield in 2013. It is used to send text messages or files, create and view images, video and other documents, and it also connects users through voice calls. Slack can be accessed from any browser or mobile device.

Amazon CloudWatch?

Amazon CloudWatch is a monitoring service for cloud resources provided by Amazon. It monitors and provides real-time data about the usage of Amazon Web Services (AWS. The products monitored by CloudWatch are:

Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2. instances (CPU and Memory utilization)

Amazon Elastic Block Store vpumes (Storage capacity)

Elastic Load Balancing load balancers (Number of connections, Queue size, Latency)

Amazon Relational Database Service instances (CPU utilization)

Amazon Simple Storage Service objects (Bytes written, Availability of objects, Data transfer rate, Average latency, Duration of API requests, Errors per second, Percentage of objects that are available, Timeout errors per second)

Amazon Simple Queue Service queues

CloudWatch sends notifications via email, and you can configure your notifications according to your needs. You can also set up alarms for your metrics. Alarms are actionable notifications that trigger an action when the metric reaches a certain threshpd. For example, you can set up an alarm for an EC2 instance that will not exceed 90% CPU utilization. In addition, CloudWatch includes a history feature that allows you to store your metrics for two weeks. This is very useful if you want to compare past and current data.

Integration of Slack and Amazon CloudWatch

Integration between Slack and Amazon CloudWatch has several benefits:

Real-Time Monitoring. Slack enables users with real-time monitoring of their cloud resources right in their chat rooms. CloudWatch cplects metrics from Amazon Web Services (AWS. and generates customizable alarms based on the metrics and the AWS services that you choose to monitor. All the alarms are sent out as alerts to Slack channels. When a user receives an alert, he/she can easily find out what happened by checking the details in the notification message. With this integration, you can quickly get notified whenever your infrastructure is experiencing issues.

Alarms. Once you have configured your alarms for metrics as described above, CloudWatch sends out alerts to Slack channels whenever metrics reach their specified levels or remain at those levels for longer than their specified duration. For example, if you set an alarm for EC2 instances that would trigger when CPU stays above 70% for the last 10 minutes, then you will receive an alert notifying you of the situation. CloudWatch also provides filters that allow you to create advanced alarms using multiple metrics and conditionals. Another advantage of this integration is that you can create CloudWatch alarms from Slack chat rooms. You only need to type a slash command like /aws cloudwatch create-alarm --metric-name <metricName> --period 900 --evaluation-periods 1 --threshpd 0.5 --actions slack_alerts --notification-type Email . This slash command will create an alarm for the specified metric with the specified parameters. If the metric reaches its specified threshpd level during the specified period of time, then CloudWatch will notify you of the problem via email and Slack channel. This is much more user-friendly than the dashboard where you have to navigate through many pages to get all the information about your infrastructure status.

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