Monitoring AWS resources

GitLab supports automatically detecting and monitoring AWS resources, starting with the Elastic Load Balancer (ELB). This is provided by leveraging the official Cloudwatch exporter, which translates Cloudwatch metrics into a Prometheus readable form.


You must enable the Prometheus service.

Supported metrics

Name Query
Throughput (req/sec) sum(aws_elb_request_count_sum{%{environment_filter}}) / 60
Latency (ms) avg(aws_elb_latency_average{%{environment_filter}}) * 1000
HTTP Error Rate (%) sum(aws_elb_httpcode_backend_5_xx_sum{%{environment_filter}}) / sum(aws_elb_request_count_sum{%{environment_filter}})

Configuring Prometheus to monitor for Cloudwatch metrics

To get started with Cloudwatch monitoring, install and configure the Cloudwatch exporter. The Cloudwatch exporter retrieves and parses the specified Cloudwatch metrics, and translates them into a Prometheus monitoring endpoint.

The only supported AWS resource is the Elastic Load Balancer, whose Cloudwatch metrics are listed in this AWS documentation.

You can download a sample Cloudwatch Exporter configuration file that’s configured for basic AWS ELB monitoring.

Specifying the Environment label

To isolate and display only the relevant metrics for a given environment, GitLab needs a method to detect which labels are associated. To do this, GitLab looks for an environment label.