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AWS CloudWatch now Integrates with PagerDuty

by Tony Albanese October 18, 2013 | 3 min read

500px-Amazon_Web_Services_logoWe’re excited to announce that AWS CloudWatch now integrates with PagerDuty. In a recent survey we conducted, we learned that nearly 13% of people who use PagerDuty have AWS CloudWatch deployed in their IT environments, making an integration with CloudWatch a no brainer.

Although PagerDuty can already be used with all your existing monitoring tools by rerouting and creating incidents from email notifications, integrations allow us to push beyond certain limitations and more easily exchange data between systems.

AWS CloudWatch provides resources and monitoring solutions that track metrics to help you gain insights and keep your apps and business running smoothly. By combining PagerDuty with AWS CloudWatch’s system-wide visibility, you are given the ultimate flexibility in how you receive alerts and create incidents to reduce your teams mean time to repair (MTTR).

Quick and Complete Incident Reports

AWS CloudWatch is great at compiling statistics for anything that is wrong with your system. Whether your CPU Utilization is hitting critical levels or an error causes your product to go down, CloudWatch will provide all the necessary details so your team can resolve any issues.

PagerDuty will quickly alert you when your CloudWatch alarms are triggered and will include all of the juicy JSON details provided by CloudWatch. This makes it straightforward and easy to diagnose issues directly from PagerDuty without having to log into multiple services.

“Being able to use a direct API integration for CloudWatch versus email integration is a boon for us; it means latency problems or shorted-lived alerts can be automatically resolved without intervention from the Ops team in the middle of the night.” – Mike Cook, Director of Technical Operations at TuneIn

Only Get the Alerts You Need

AWS CloudWatch allows you to select specific notification thresholds. So whether you want PagerDuty to alert you each time your CPU Utilization hits 75% or rather cut it close with 99% that’s up to you.

CloudWatch offers over 100 metrics that you can attach to PagerDuty triggers to ensure your IT incidents are resolved quickly.

How Does This All Work?

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Once you set up a simple notification service (SNS) topic with our CloudWatch integration endpoint your SNS topic will bridge your AWS CloudWatch data with PagerDuty.

AWS CloudWatch collects statistics about various metrics. Whenever a threshold is exceeded, the CloudWatch alarm publishes a message to the SNS topic, which results in PagerDuty receiving an event.

Finally, PagerDuty parses the event details and notifies your on-call team about the incident so they can repair it quickly.

To get started with AWS CloudWatch and PagerDuty check out our AWS CloudWatch Integration Guide.