AWS CloudFormation is a service that enables you to create and provision AWS infrastructure deployments predictably and repeatedly. This helps you leverage AWS products such as EC2 instances, Amazon Elastic Block Store, Amazon SNS, Elastic Load Balancing, and Auto Scaling to build highly reliable, highly scalable, cost-effective applications in the cloud – without worrying about creating and configuring the underlying AWS infrastructure. Most important of all, AWS CloudFormation enables you to use a template file to create and delete a collection of resources together as a single unit (a stack).

Last June, AWS announced their Public Registry for CloudFormation. The registry provides a searchable collection of extensions – resource types or modules – published by AWS, APN partners, third parties, and the developer community at large. The public registry makes it easy to discover and provision these extensions into your CloudFormation templates and CDK applications in the same manner you would use your AWS-provided resources. Using extensions, you no longer need to create and maintain custom provisioning logic for resource types from third-party vendors. In addition, you can use a single infrastructure-as-code tool, CloudFormation, to provision and manage both AWS and third-party resources, further simplifying the infrastructure provisioning process (the CDK uses CloudFormation under the hood).

While you can already use our CloudFormation templates to easily deploy our integrations, Logz.io has also moved to expand our collaboration with AWS. Specifically, we’ve added our AWS integrations as CloudFormation extensions made available on the CloudFormation Public Registry for use in your CloudFormation templates. Pretty cool right?

Now, you can add Logz.io resources directly to your templates via the CloudFormation registry’s public extensions, enabling you to reference the entire schema of a Logz.io resource and automatically update it as new versions become available. This makes it easier than ever to manage Logz.io components as code and get real-time visibility into your cloud applications.

You can use Logz.io resources to automatically:

• Monitor your cost and usage billing
• Forwards logs from CloudWatch
• Utilize Kinesis datastreams
• Enhance your cloud security with AWS Security Hub and Logz.io Cloud SIEM

Let’s begin by highlighting an example of how you can start using Logz.io’s CloudFormation resources to build a reliable, repeatable process for monitoring your infrastructure in real time.

Activate the Logz.io Module

To activate and register Logz.io resources via the AWS Console, sign in to your account and navigate to the CloudFormation service. Under “Public extensions,” filter by “Third party” publisher and “Modules” extension types and then use the “Extensions” search bar to search for the “Logzio” prefix.

You can click on the desired resource to view more information, such as the schema, resources, input parameters and example template. From here, you can then click on the “Activate” button to follow the prompts for registering the resource to your account. Once you register these resources and configure them with your Logz.io credentials, you can use them within your new and existing CloudFormation templates.

Using the Logz.io Module inside a CloudFormation Template

After activating your Logz.io module you can start using it in your CloudFormation template.

Just add this yaml to your CloudFormation template to start using it.

{
    "Resources": {
        "MyModule": {
            "Type": "Logzio::KinesisShipper::KinesisShipper::MODULE",
            "Properties": {
                "LogzioTOKEN": "LogzioTOKEN",
                "LogzioFORMAT": "LogzioFORMAT",
                "LogzioREGION": "LogzioREGION",
                "LogzioCOMPRESS": "LogzioCOMPRESS",
                "LogzioMessagesArray": "LogzioMessagesArray",
                "KinesisStreamBatchSize": "KinesisStreamBatchSize",
                "LogzioURL": "LogzioURL",
                "KinesisStreamStartingPosition": "KinesisStreamStartingPosition",
                "LogzioTYPE": "LogzioTYPE",
                "KinesisStream": "KinesisStream"
            }
        }
    }
}

Once you run your CloudFormation template, this module will deploy a Lambda function that monitors your AWS cost and usage, then send the data to Logz.io for visualization and analysis.

Conclusion

No one likes to waste time running things manually. Customers can now save time and energy by launching and deploying applications stacks with Logz.io monitoring tools the same way they run the rest of their cloud native infrastructure.

If you don’t already have a Logz.io account, you can sign up for a 14-day free trial.