Publishing queue status on AWS Cloud-watch

In this years MVP retreat we did small Proof of concept to show the Publishing queue status on AWS cloud-watch in nice format. There are various ways to accomplish it.

- Using CoreService API to access the Queue.
- Directly querying the DB (not very recommended)
- PowerShell to read the queue (Yes its possible)

We choose last option as some Tridion Powershell Module created by SDL MVP Pkjaer makes it very easy.

Steps:

- Install Tridion Powershell module, details in above link.
- Install AWS Powershell module(s) on machine to work.
- Here is code snippet which do following

• Import AWS Powershell 
• Create Cloudwatch matrices based on two states "Waiting for Publish" and Waiting for Deployment"
• fill the matrices with count of above two states
• Write the data to cloudwatch

 Import-Module "C:\Program Files (x86)\AWS Tools\PowerShell\AWSPowerShell\AWSPowerShell.psd1"  
 $dat = New-Object Amazon.CloudWatch.Model.MetricDatum  
 $dat.Timestamp = (Get-Date).ToUniversalTime()  
 $dat.MetricName = "Waiting For Publish"  
 $dat.Unit = "Count"  
 $dat.Value = (Get-TridionPublishTransaction | Where-Object {$_.State -eq "WaitingForPublish"}).Count  
 $dat1 = New-Object Amazon.CloudWatch.Model.MetricDatum  
 $dat1.Timestamp = (Get-Date).ToUniversalTime()  
 $dat1.MetricName = "Waiting For Deployment"  
 $dat1.Unit = "Count"  
 $dat1.Value = (Get-TridionPublishTransaction | Where-Object {$_.State -eq "WaitingForDeployment"}).Count  
 set-AWSCredentials -AccessKey -SecretKey FT1nwN74NHkGtlJ -StoreAs "MVP17"  
 Set-AWSCredentials -ProfileName "MVP17"  
 Write-CWMetricData -Namespace "Usage Metrics" -MetricData $dat  
 Write-CWMetricData -Namespace "Usage Metrics" -MetricData $dat1  

Auto-scaling:

One of the purpose to push the queue data to AWS Cloudwatch is to configure the auto-scaling of instances.

if there are lots of items in queue, auto-scaling of publishing system can be configured on AWS infrastructure.