Improving the Prometheus exporter for Amazon CloudWatch

In the pursuit of improving Prometheus monitoring for AWS CloudWatch, the Sysdig team enhanced the Yet Another CloudWatch Exporter (YACE) to ensure it is production-ready, focusing on stability and cost-effectiveness. These enhancements include optimizing API calls to prevent throttling and reduce billing costs, achieved by implementing a proxy mechanism that decouples metric serving from data querying, thus reducing API call frequency. The article explains how these improvements allow Prometheus to effectively integrate and monitor AWS CloudWatch metrics, enabling the use of PromQL for advanced querying and creating a robust observability stack. Additionally, the YACE exporter now supports AWS Fargate metrics, enriching resource monitoring capabilities, and further optimizations were made to handle errors more reliably, making it suitable for production environments. These contributions support the synergy between AWS CloudWatch and Prometheus, offering a comprehensive monitoring solution that leverages the strengths of both platforms.