This guide provides the steps to transition customers who are using Amazon Web Services (AWS) monitoring to BindPlane. Google Cloud and Blue Medora have partnered together to provide BindPlane to Cloud Monitoring users. BindPlane is a service that connects the health, performance data, and logs of over 150 different data sources directly into Monitoring.
BindPlane is offered at no additional cost to Cloud Monitoring customers, but using BindPlane might increase ingestion of monitoring or log data. Refer to the Cost section of this guide for information on managing these costs.
For more information about BindPlane, refer to the BindPlane documentation.
Install the BindPlane Integration
Begin the installation process by creating a BindPlane account.
Once logged in, complete the steps to connect to Cloud Monitoring, install a Collector, and connect to a data source.
Connecting to Cloud Monitoring
To connect to Cloud Monitoring, complete the following steps.
In BindPlane, click Add Destination.
Select Cloud Monitoring.
To configure the Monitoring destination, add a JSON key from a service account that has Monitoring Admin permissions.
For help finding this information, refer to Blue Medora's Google Cloud Monitoring document.
Installing the Collector
BindPlane Collectors reside inside your network and connect to any data source you want to monitor. The Collector requires a server with network access to the data sources you're monitoring, and you can add multiple Collectors if you have multiple isolated networks.
To install the Collector:
In BindPlane, click Add Collector.
Select the platform on which you want to run your Collector.
You can either select the Operating System on which to run your Collector, or you can select a template that deploys a linux image with the collector for AWS.
For more information about the AWS template, refer to the Blue Medora AWS Collector Deployments guide.
Copy the installation command by clicking the Clipboard icon.
Log into the machine you want to install the collector on and run the command.
Connecting to the data source
A Source is any object you want to monitor. It could be a database, a web service, or even a hardware device in your data center.
To add a source:
In BindPlane, click Add Source.
Select which the Source you want to monitor.
Select a Collector to use.
If you added multiple Collectors for multiple networks or data centers, select the Collector in the same region as your Source.
Enter your credentials and click Test Connection to verify that everything's working correctly.
Click Add to begin monitoring.
For every AWS data source, an AWS user with certain permissions must exist to monitor that particular source. BindPlane provides a Master AWS Least Privileged User to monitor every AWS source currently available.
Dashboards
BindPlane provides dashboards for various monitored data sources. You can use these dashboards as templates or replacements for your existing dashboards.
Replacement dashboards
To ease the transition for existing plugin users, BindPlane includes dashboards for each technology being monitored that have the same functionality as the built-in Monitoring dashboards. These dashboards have KPI in the title. For example, the Postgresql KPI dashboard has the same metrics as the PostgreSQL Instance view with the deprecated plugins.
Installing dashboards from BindPlane to your project
You can install dashboards into your Cloud Monitoring project in BindPlane by completing the following steps.
In BindPlane, select Destinations.
Click on your Cloud Monitoring Connection.
The list of dashboards that are available for the Sources that you are monitoring is displayed.
Click Install.
The dashboard is available in your project.
Disconnect your AWS Project
After finishing the migration to BindPlane, complete the steps to disconnect your AWS project from your Google Cloud project.
Managing your costs
Google Cloud has partnered with Blue Medora to bring BindPlane to Monitoring customers at no additional cost, licenses, or contracts. However, if you ingest more monitoring data and log data through Blue Medora than you did through the Monitoring agents, you might incur higher usage fees. For information on pricing, which applies to all custom metrics and logs over the free quota, see Pricing.
To help manage your costs, BindPlane allows you to control how much data is sent to Monitoring in two ways:
Tune your collection intervals: Collection intervals are set to 1 minute by default. Increasing the collection interval to 2 minutes would send half as much data to Monitoring for the given source. Increasing the interval to 10 minutes would send one-tenth as much data. Tuning the data collection interval allows you to find the balance between data resolution and cost that is right for your organization.
To tune this interval, on the Sources detail page, click Configure and then update the Collection interval field.
Disable the collection of unneeded metrics: When a source is configured, collection is enabled for all resource types and metrics. If you don't need a specific resource type or individual metric sent to Cloud Monitoring, then you can disable them to reduce the amount of data sent, reducing your costs.
To disable unneeded metrics, on the Sources detail page, click Metrics and disable metrics collection by clicking the Collect toggle.
Example use cases
The following examples are use cases that are possible through monitoring with BindPlane.
Comprehensive AWS monitoring with additional sources
With BindPlane, you can get complete monitoring coverage of your AWS deployment. You can gather metrics for additional Amazon technologies and services that were not part of the previous AWS monitoring features. They are available in the list of Sources within BindPlane.
For information about these sources, refer to their documentation:
Monitoring for AWS-hosted workloads
In addition to monitoring the core AWS services, BindPlane offers in-depth coverage for your AWS hosted workloads.
In this example, Cloud Foundry is running on Amazon EC2 VM’s. With this dashboard, you can see the usage of the Diego Cells and KPI’s, such as AWS Credit usage and Network Throughput for the underlying EC2 VM’s.