Integrate with Amazon CloudWatch

This article highlights a new alerting feature that's natively available in Jira Service Management which is gradually rolling out to some Jira Service Management Cloud customers. It may not yet be visible or available on your site.

CloudWatch metrics play a critical role in monitoring the applications running on AWS cloud.

What does the integration offer?

A CloudWatch alarm watches a single metric over a specified time period and executes automated actions based on the value of the watched metric and given threshold. Jira Service Management acts as a dispatcher for these alarms. It determines the right people to notify based on on-call schedules– notifies them using email, text messages (SMS), phone calls, and iPhone & Android push notifications, and escalates alerts until the alert is acknowledged or closed. CloudWatch detects problems, and Jira Service Management ensures the right people are working on them.

How does the integration work?

When an alert is created in CloudWatch, an alert is created in Jira Service Management automatically through the integration. When the alert is closed in CloudWatch, the related alert is automatically closed in Jira Service Management through integration.

Set up the integration

AWS CloudWatch is an API-based integration. Setting it up involves the following steps:

Add an AWS CloudWatch integration in Jira Service Management
Set up alarms in AWS CloudWatch

Add a CloudWatch integration

Bidirectional integrations aren’t supported in Free and Standard plans. All the other integrations are supported at a team level in Free and Standard; however, for their outgoing part to work, you need to upgrade to a higher plan. To add any integration at a site level through Settings (gear icon) > Products (under JIRA SETTINGS) > OPERATIONS, you need to be either on Premium or Enterprise.

Adding an integration from your team’s operations page makes your team the owner of the integration. This means Jira Service Management only assigns the alerts received through this integration to your team.

To add a Cloudwatch integration in Jira Service Management, complete the following steps:

Go to your team’s operations page.
On the left navigation panel, select Integrations and then Add integration.
Run a search and select “AWS CloudWatch”.
On the next screen, enter a name for the integration.
Optional: Select a team in Assignee team if you want a specific team to receive alerts from the integration.
Select Continue.
The integration is saved at this point.
Expand the Steps to configure the integration section and copy the endpoint URL generated for your account.
You will use this URL while configuring the integration in AWS CloudWatch later.
Select Turn on integration.
The rules you create for the integration will work only if you turn on the integration.

Set up alarms in CloudWatch

Create an SNS topic with the name “Jira Service Management”.
Add an HTTPS subscription to the topic with the Jira Service Management API endpoint URL. This is the endpoint URL you copied while adding the integration in Jira Service Management. If the configuration is successful, a confirmation alert is created in Jira Service Management.
Create a CloudWatch alarm with any metric and select the SNS topic as the action.

Ensure that the alarm name includes resource and metric names for uniqueness and ease of readability. For example, SQS Queue chat_webhook messageCount Too High. Ensure that notifications are sent for all of the states ALARM, OK, and INSUFFICIENT to Jira Service Management. Notifications with state ALARM create alerts, and notifications with states OK and INSUFFICIENT close the matching alerts by default.

The integration creates an alias for each alert using Region - AlarmName, by default. This way, Jira Service Management uniquely identifies each CloudWatch alarm, creates, and closes them respectively.

Test the alerts

After setting up notifications for an alarm in CloudWatch, modify the alarm threshold for testing purposes so that it creates an alarm.
When the alarm condition is met, AWS CloudWatch passes alarm details to Jira Service Management, and Jira Service Management notifies the specified users (recipients parameter) based on the recipients’ notification preferences. The Jira Service Management alert contains all the relevant information provided by CloudWatch.
Revert the CloudWatch alarm threshold configuration back to its original after testing is complete.

Sample payload sent from CloudWatch

Create alert payload (in JSON format)

{
  "Type": "Notification",
  "MessageId": "1cf7a0eb-4179-4181-b15b-ea22c5aa0280",
  "TopicArn": "arn:aws:sns:us-east-1:08931xxxxxx:CloudWatchHTTPAlarms",
  "Subject": "ALARM: \"cpuUtilTest\" in US - N. Virginia",
  "Message": "{\"AlarmName\":\"cpuUtilTest\",\"AlarmDescription\":\"testing alarms for cpu utilization\",\"AWSAccountId\":\"08931xxxxxx\",\"NewStateValue\":\"ALARM\",\"OldStateValue\":\"OK\",\"NewStateReason\":\"Threshold Crossed: 1 datapoint (5.199) was greater than or equal to the threshold (5.0).\",\"StateChangeTime\":\"2012-08-05T22:31:25.524+0000\",\"Region\":\"US - N. Virginia\",\"Trigger\":{\"MetricName\":\"CPUUtilization\",\"Namespace\":\"AWS/EC2\",\"Statistic\":\"AVERAGE\",\"Unit\":null,\"Dimensions\":[{\"name\":\"InstanceId\",\"value\":\"i-39e64c5f\"}],\"Period\":900,\"EvaluationPeriods\":1,\"ComparisonOperator\":\"GreaterThanOrEqualToThreshold\",\"Threshold\":5.0}}",
  "Timestamp": "2012-08-05T22:31:30.673Z",
  "SignatureVersion": "1",
  "Signature": "XrsO2wtE0b+ofOl1ZxxxxxxxxlimTUg+rV4U9RmNSSBEdlmyWvtGgpjebsmNv1wkjUsBQOJZjZnpZp5FBn6quAn3twNdRMmMLf15lv6ESbYFxxxxxxxx0vmjj/ZLwiH9Pr/cxVYxxxxxxxYn8w6g=",
  "SigningCertURL": "https://sns.us-east-1.amazonaws.com/SimpleNotificationService-f3ecfb7224c72xxxxxxxxx6de52f.pem",
  "UnsubscribeURL": "https://sns.us-east-1.amazonaws.com/?Action=Unsubscribe&SubscriptionArn=arn:aws:sns:us-east-1:08931xxxxxxxx:CloudWatchHTTPAlarms:1841c5ca-ddda-450e-bbfb-xxxxxxxxx"
}

Payload parsed by Jira Service Management (in JSON format)

{
  "TopicArn": "arn:aws:sns:us-east-1:08931xxxxxxx:CloudWatchHTTPAlarms",
  "AlarmName": "cpuUtilTest",
  "Subject": "ALARM: \"cpuUtilTest\" in US - N. Virginia",
  "AlarmDescription": "testing alarms for cpu utilization",
  "NewStateReason": "Threshold Crossed: 1 datapoint (5.199) was greater than or equal to the threshold (5.0).",
  "NewStateValue": "ALARM",
  "OldStateValue": "OK",
  "StateChangeTime": "2012-08-05T22:31:25.524+0000",
  "Region": "US - N. Virginia",
  "Trigger": {
    "MetricName": "CPUUtilization",
    "Namespace": "AWS/EC2",
    "Statistic": "AVERAGE",
    "Unit": null,
    "Dimensions": [
      {
        "name": "InstanceId",
        "value": "i-39e64c5f"
      }
    ],
    "Period": 900,
    "EvaluationPeriods": 1,
    "ComparisonOperator": "GreaterThanOrEqualToThreshold",
    "Threshold": 5
  }
}

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