Quickstart

Assuming you're on a Debian-based system like Ubuntu, installation is a breeze:

1. Install the latest binary version. sudo dpkg -i cloudwatchd.deb
2. Update /etc/cloudwatchd/credentials.conf with your AWS API credentials. The user credentials only need read/write for cloudwatch, so you could make your IAM policy like this: { "Statement": [ { "Action": [ "cloudwatch:", "sns:", "autoscaling:Describe*" ], "Effect": "Allow", "Resource": "*" } ] }
3. Throw scripts in /etc/cloudwatchd/metrics. The only requirements there are: a) the script needs to send its metric to stdout b) the script needs to have an extension (currently sh,py,pl for bash/shell, python, perl respectively)
4. Profit. e.g. sudo service cloudwatchd start