Cloudwatch Input: min/max/average/sum etc selective statistics

[CpuID]

Feature Request

It would be beneficial (for AWS costs) to be able to select specific "statistics" only for the given metrics/dimensions, so when pulling a high volume of metrics from Cloudwatch you can keep costs under control.

Proposal:

Eg. you may only care about average and max, but not min or sum. This would halve the % of retrievals involved.

https://docs.aws.amazon.com/AmazonCloudWatch/latest/APIReference/API_GetMetricData.html seems to provide the ability to specify, there also seems to be some on https://docs.aws.amazon.com/AmazonCloudWatch/latest/APIReference/API_GetMetricStatistics.html

Current behavior:

Retrieves all "statistics" for a given metric / dimension, which is somewhere around 6~ each.

Desired behavior:

Selectively pull the ones you want.

Use case: [Why is this important (helps with prioritizing requests)]

End user cost, plus this will have a rate limit benefit also (efficiency).

[CpuID]

Example from another project's implementation: https://github.com/crccheck/cloudwatch-to-graphite/blob/master/sample_templates/ec2.yml.j2#L9-L11

[CpuID]

Related: #5420 (same goal of optimizing traffic to Cloudwatch, different approach). Both probably complement eachother tbh.

[danielnelson]

I think this should be fairly easy to do, we should try to add this in while doing the #5420 improvement.

[CpuID]

@glinton ping for visibility, as per @danielnelson 's suggestion. Feel free to get the core functionality of #5420 working first, if you think you can sneak this into your improvements it would be awesome :)

lmk if you become time constrained for any reason, and I can see if I can find time to collaborate and get it over the line

[CpuID]

I'm inclined to say, if @glinton has time constraints and can't get it in, get #5420 out of the way first to avoid having to refactor this feature request twice.

[glinton]

I've started on implementing this, hoping to have a testable build for you by EOD Monday. Glad it was brought up when it was though, thanks!