About Client
Electric Kiwi is an autonomous online New Zealand electricity retailer. Established in 2014, Electric Kiwi uses cloud computing and intelligent meters to service customers nationwide in major urban areas. Its services depend on the presence of the smart meters in the customer’s home. For the client, we did the POC for integrating AWS Support Services with Datadog’s CloudFormation template.
- http://www.electrickiwi.co.nz/
- Location: New Zealand
Project Background
The case study of the project provides a synopsis of how we did the POC for the client for integrating AWS Support Services, an AWS account with Datadog employing Datadog’s CloudFormation template. Creating an IAM role and associated policy enables Datadog’s AWS account to make API calls for collecting or pushing data into your AWS account. Using the CloudFormation template supplies all the tools required to send this data to your Datadog account, and Datadog helps the CloudFormation template to provide the latest functionality. The template even deploys the Datadog Forwarder Lambda operation for sending logs to Datadog.
After setting the initial connection, enable the individual AWS service integrations appropriate to your AWS domain. With a single click, Datadog provisions the required resources in your AWS account and starts analyzing the metrics and events for the services you use. For general AWS services you are using, Datadog needs out-of-the-box dashboards providing prompt and customizable visibility. The project background demonstrates setting up the integration and establishing the Datadog Agent on an Amazon Linux EC2 instance and feeds a broad outline of the integration’s capabilities. Visit the Enable integrations for individual AWS service factions for a list of the general sub-integrations.
This procedure can be repeated for multiple AWS accounts as required, or you can also use the API, AWS CLI, or Terraform to set up various accounts simultaneously. For more details, read the Datadog-Amazon CloudFormation guide.
Scope & Requirement
The scope & requirements involved the following:
- Datadog integration with AWS support services to measure and accomplish observability matrix
- Identified costing
- Updated pricing with partner discount as applicable
- Shortlisted services for which we did POC
- EC2, database Monitor Requirement, Steps, and Dashboard View
- Along with pricing and cost for using Datadog; for monitoring and analytical purpose
Implementation
Technology and Architecture
Technology/Services used
We used Datadog integration with AWS services to masure and do observability matrix and helped them to setup below
- Cloud: AWS
- Shortlisted services for which we did POC
- Organization setup: Control tower
- Policies setup: Created AWS service control policies
- Templates created for using common AWS services
Security & Compliance:
- Tagging Policies
- Azure config for compliance checks
- NIST compliance
- Guardrails
- Security Hub
Backup and Recovery
- AWS Backup provided a simple, secure, cost-effective, and cloud-based backup solution which was already implemented for the client
Network Architecture
- Site to Site VPN Architecture using Transit Gateway
- Distributed Azure Network Firewall
- Monitoring with Cloud Watch and VPC flow logs.
Cost Optimization
- Alerts and notifications are configured in the AWS cost
- Identified Costing
- Updated pricing with partner discount as applicable
Code Management, Deployment
- Cloudformation scripts for creating stacksets and scripts for generating AWS services was handed over to the client
Challenges
- Access was not provided to the actual environment and setting up
- Complex environment setup and monitoring for production cost was only possible to evaluate if we have got the access for the actual environment from the client
Support
- 1 month of extended support
- A template for Cloud formation stack to create more AWS resources using the available stacks
- Screen-sharing sessions with a demo of how the services and new workloads can be deployed.
