Monitor AWS DynamoDB with SigNoz

One-Click Integration

Step 1: Connect Your AWS Account

Follow the One-Click AWS Integrations Guide to:

1. Deploy the CloudFormation stack
2. Connect your AWS account to SigNoz

Step 2: Enable DynamoDB Monitoring

Once connected, SigNoz will auto-discover your DynamoDB tables and begin collecting CloudWatch metrics.

What's Collected

Pre-built Dashboards

Navigate to Dashboards and search for "DynamoDB" to find automatically imported dashboards showing:

• Capacity utilization
• Throttling events
• Request latency distribution
• Error rates

Manual Setup (CloudWatch Exporter)

DynamoDB metrics are only available via CloudWatch. To collect DynamoDB metrics manually, you can use the Prometheus CloudWatch Exporter. This tool scrapes metrics from AWS CloudWatch and exposes them in Prometheus format, which the OpenTelemetry Collector can then scrape and forward to SigNoz.

Prerequisites

Before proceeding, ensure you have:

• OpenTelemetry Collector installed and configured. See Get Started with OTel Collector.
• Java 11 or higher installed on the host machine (for JAR-based setup), or Docker (for container-based setup).
• AWS credentials configured via environment variables (AWS_ACCESS_KEY_ID, AWS_SECRET_ACCESS_KEY), IAM role, or ~/.aws/credentials.
• IAM permissions for the credentials:
  • cloudwatch:ListMetrics
  • cloudwatch:GetMetricStatistics

Where to Run the CloudWatch Exporter

The CloudWatch Exporter should run on a machine that:

1. Has network access to AWS CloudWatch APIs.
2. Has AWS credentials configured.
3. Is network-accessible from your OpenTelemetry Collector.

For SigNoz Cloud users, run the exporter on any EC2 instance, VM, or container with AWS credentials. The OTel Collector on the same host will forward metrics to SigNoz Cloud.

For Self-Hosted users, run the exporter on the same host as your OTel Collector, or ensure network connectivity between them.

Step 1: Create Configuration File

Create a file named dynamodb-metrics.yaml with the following configuration:

region: <aws-region>
metrics:
  - aws_namespace: AWS/DynamoDB
    aws_metric_name: ConsumedReadCapacityUnits
    aws_dimensions: [TableName]
    aws_statistics: [Sum, Average]

  - aws_namespace: AWS/DynamoDB
    aws_metric_name: ConsumedWriteCapacityUnits
    aws_dimensions: [TableName]
    aws_statistics: [Sum, Average]

  - aws_namespace: AWS/DynamoDB
    aws_metric_name: ReadThrottleEvents
    aws_dimensions: [TableName]
    aws_statistics: [Sum]

  - aws_namespace: AWS/DynamoDB
    aws_metric_name: WriteThrottleEvents
    aws_dimensions: [TableName]
    aws_statistics: [Sum]

  - aws_namespace: AWS/DynamoDB
    aws_metric_name: SuccessfulRequestLatency
    aws_dimensions: [TableName, Operation]
    aws_statistics: [Average]
    aws_extended_statistics: [p99]

Verify these values:

• <aws-region>: Your AWS region where DynamoDB tables are deployed (e.g., us-east-1, eu-west-1, ap-south-1).

See example configurations for more service templates.

Step 2: Download and Run the Exporter

curl -LO https://repo1.maven.org/maven2/io/prometheus/cloudwatch/cloudwatch_exporter/0.16.0/cloudwatch_exporter-0.16.0-jar-with-dependencies.jar

java -jar cloudwatch_exporter-0.16.0-jar-with-dependencies.jar 9106 dynamodb-metrics.yaml

docker run -d \
  --name cloudwatch-exporter \
  -p 9106:9106 \
  -v $(pwd)/dynamodb-metrics.yaml:/config/config.yml \
  -e AWS_ACCESS_KEY_ID=$AWS_ACCESS_KEY_ID \
  -e AWS_SECRET_ACCESS_KEY=$AWS_SECRET_ACCESS_KEY \
  prom/cloudwatch-exporter

Verify the exporter is running by checking the metrics endpoint:

curl http://localhost:9106/metrics | grep aws_dynamodb

You should see metrics like aws_dynamodb_consumed_read_capacity_units_sum, aws_dynamodb_read_throttle_events_sum, etc.

Step 3: Configure OpenTelemetry Collector

Add the following prometheus receiver to your existing otel-collector-config.yaml to scrape the CloudWatch Exporter:

receivers:
  prometheus:
    config:
      scrape_configs:
        - job_name: 'dynamodb-cloudwatch'
          scrape_interval: 60s
          static_configs:
            - targets: ['<exporter-host>:9106']

Verify these values:

• <exporter-host>: The hostname or IP where the CloudWatch Exporter is running. Use localhost if running on the same machine.

Enable the prometheus receiver in your metrics pipeline by updating the service section:

service:
  pipelines:
    metrics:
      receivers: [otlp, prometheus]
      processors: [batch]
      exporters: [otlp]

Restart your OpenTelemetry Collector to apply the changes.

Validate

To confirm that DynamoDB metrics are flowing to SigNoz:

1. Navigate to Dashboards → New Dashboard → New Panel in SigNoz.
2. In the query builder, search for metrics starting with aws_dynamodb_ (e.g., aws_dynamodb_consumed_read_capacity_units_sum).
3. Verify that metrics appear with table_name labels matching your DynamoDB tables.

If you see metrics with labels like table_name, your setup is working correctly.