Monitoring Kinesis Agent health

Kinesis Agent publishes custom CloudWatch metrics with a namespace of AmazonKinesisAgent. It helps assess whether the agent is healthy, submitting data into Amazon Data Firehose as specified, and consuming the appropriate amount of CPU and memory resources on the data producer.

Metrics such as number of records and bytes sent are useful to understand the rate at which the agent is submitting data to the Firehose stream. When these metrics fall below expected thresholds by some percentage or drop to zero, it could indicate configuration issues, network errors, or agent health issues. Metrics such as on-host CPU and memory consumption and agent error counters indicate data producer resource usage, and provide insights into potential configuration or host errors. Finally, the agent also logs service exceptions to help investigate agent issues.

The agent metrics are reported in the region specified in the agent configuration setting cloudwatch.endpoint. For more information, see Agent configuration settings.

Cloudwatch metrics published from multiple Kinesis Agents are aggregated or combined.

There is a nominal charge for metrics emitted from Kinesis Agent, which are enabled by default. For more information, see Amazon CloudWatch Pricing.

Monitoring with CloudWatch

Kinesis Agent sends the following metrics to CloudWatch.