Export metrics to AWS Kinesis Data Streams

Prerequisites

To use AWS Kinesis for metric collecting and processing, you should first install AWS SDK for C++. libcrypto, libssl, and libcurl are also required to compile Netdata with Kinesis support enabled. Next, Netdata should be re-installed from the source. The installer will detect that the required libraries are now available.

If the AWS SDK for C++ is being installed from source, it is useful to set -DBUILD_ONLY=kinesis. Otherwise, the build process could take a very long time. Note, that the default installation path for the libraries is /usr/local/lib64. Many Linux distributions don't include this path as the default one for a library search, so it is advisable to use the following options to cmake while building the AWS SDK:

sudo cmake -DCMAKE_INSTALL_PREFIX=/usr -DBUILD_ONLY=kinesis <aws-sdk-cpp sources>

The -DCMAKE_INSTALL_PREFIX=/usr option also ensures that third party dependencies are installed in your system during the SDK build process.

Configuration

To enable data sending to the Kinesis service, run ./edit-config exporting.conf in the Netdata configuration directory and set the following options:

[kinesis:my_instance]
    enabled = yes
    destination = us-east-1

Set the destination option to an AWS region.

Set AWS credentials and stream name:

    # AWS credentials
    aws_access_key_id = your_access_key_id
    aws_secret_access_key = your_secret_access_key
    # destination stream
    stream name = your_stream_name

Alternatively, you can set AWS credentials for the netdata user using AWS SDK for C++ standard methods.

Netdata automatically computes a partition key for every record with the purpose to distribute records across available shards evenly.