Question

A CloudOps engineer manages a fleet of EC2 instances running a Java application that emits application-level performance counters (queue depth, active session count) using the StatsD protocol. The team wants these counters visible as CloudWatch custom metrics without modifying application code to call the PutMetricData API directly, and with the least operational overhead. What should the engineer do?

Accepted Answer

Configure the CloudWatch agent with the StatsD plugin enabled so it listens on the local UDP port and forwards the received metrics to CloudWatch.

Answer

Deploy a Lambda function on a schedule that SSH-connects to each instance, reads the StatsD socket, and calls PutMetricData.

Answer

Enable EC2 detailed monitoring so the StatsD counters are automatically collected as one-minute custom metrics.

Answer

Install the AWS Distro for OpenTelemetry Collector and enable the X-Ray exporter to publish the StatsD counters as metrics.