Question

A development team runs a custom Java microservice on an EC2 instance. The application emits internal performance counters (such as queue depth and request processing time) using the StatsD protocol over UDP to localhost. The SysOps administrator must collect these application-generated metrics in Amazon CloudWatch so the team can build dashboards and alarms, with the least amount of custom code. What is the MOST appropriate solution?

Accepted Answer

Configure the CloudWatch agent with the StatsD plugin to listen on the UDP port and forward the received metrics to CloudWatch as custom metrics.

Answer

Modify the application to call the CloudWatch PutMetricData API directly for each counter every time it changes.

Answer

Install the CloudWatch agent and enable collectd, then reconfigure the application to publish counters using the collectd network protocol.

Answer

Create a CloudWatch Logs metric filter that parses the StatsD UDP packets and converts matching values into metrics.