sidekiq-cloudwatch

AWS CloudWatch metrics for Sidekiq

Usage Scenarios

• Autoscaling an Elastic Beanstalk Sidekiq environment based off of the queue size

Configuration

Copy .env to .env.production and fill in .env.production with the real configuration values

Testing in Development

bundle exec foreman run -e .env.production rake metrics:update

Check the AWS console to see your custom metric

Deployment

Heroku

You can monitor your Sidekiq instances on AWS for free using Heroku Scheduler

1. Fork the repo
2. Push your fork to Heroku
3. Setup your config vars with heroku config:set
4. Use Heroku Scheduler to trigger rake metrics:update or rake metrics:schedule_update every 10 minutes
5. Have a beer

Notes:

To get finer granularity on Heroku you can run a job every minute with Heroku Scheduler by creating 10 jobs spaced 1 minute apart. POST to scheduler using the following command:

curl 'https://scheduler.heroku.com/jobs' --data 'command=rake+metrics%3Aupdate&dyno_size=11&every=10&at=9'

at is the minute you want to start the job and takes the values 0 to 9. You'll also need to post your cookie. To get the full curl command I used Chrome Develper Tools and captured a request.

Scheduling and update with rake metrics:schedule_update also works but the worker process will sleep on a free Heroku dyno.

Autoscaling with Elastic Beanstalk

Elastic Beanstalk doesn't let you configure alarms for custom metrics for autoscaling out of the box. However you can manually change the Autoscaling group to add custom Scaling Policies.

1. Configure an Elastic Beanstalk Environment with Autoscaling
2. Select CPU Utilization as your Trigger measurement with sensible defaults e.g. Upper threshold: 90, Lower threshold 45
3. After the environment has been created it will create a new Autoscaling Group. You can find it in the AWS Web Console under EC2 -> Autoscaling -> Autoscaling Groups
4. Note the name of the autoscaling group and configure it in the Heroku config. e.g. heroku config:set AWS_CLOUDWATCH_DIMENSION_VALUE=<auto-scaling-group-name>
5. Set up two new CloudWatch alarms for your Sidekiq metric in the AWS Web Consule under CloudWatch -> Custom Metrics. One should be for sidekiq-worker-overload and the other should be for sidekiq-worker-underload
6. Back in the AWS Web Console under EC2 -> Autoscaling -> Autoscaling Groups -> Scaling Policies add two new policies. One for aws-eb-autoscale-up and the other for aws-eb-autoscale-down. Select the appropriate alarm created in step 5 for each policy.
7. Remove the autogenerated scaling policies created by Elastic Beanstalk.
8. Optionally remove the autogenerated alarms created by Elastic Beanstalk or configure them to send a notification.

Note if you ever rebuild or terminate your environment, Elastic Beanstalk will create a new autoscaling group and CloudWatch put the CloudWatch alarms in it. You'll need to repeat steps. 3-8 above.