CloudWatch metrics exporter YACE is now a Prometheus community project

We’re thrilled to share that the open source Yet Another CloudWatch Exporter (YACE) is now a prometheus-community project! This move represents an exciting milestone in YACE’s journey and validates the project’s contribution to the Prometheus ecosystem.

Yace was started in 2018 by Thomas Peitz, who has overseen the dramatic evolution of the CloudWatch metrics exporter ever since. Being part of prometheus-community will give YACE increased visibility and help ensure its long-term sustainability. The project will also benefit from broader community oversight and contributions, and it will align better with Prometheus best practices and standards.

Grafana Labs’ continued support of YACE

Grafana Labs has been a big YACE user and contributor in recent years, and we’re excited to help in the continued growth of the project.

Since 2021, when we began expanding our AWS monitoring capabilities, Grafana Labs engineers have contributed hundreds of PRs and implemented major features and improvements to YACE. That includes better matching of CloudWatch metrics to AWS resources, support for AWS SDK v2, and improvements to performance and documentation.

Today, YACE is at the core of our AWS Observability app due to its unique ability to discover all resources for a particular AWS service and associate those resources to their respective CloudWatch metrics.

More than that, we offer multiple options for bringing your CloudWatch metrics to Grafana Cloud as part of our “big tent” philosophy. Most of those options are built around running YACE, either as a standalone exporter, as part of Grafana Alloy, or hosted within Grafana Cloud.

Engineers at Grafana Labs will continue to contribute in a seamless way and, over time, we will provide docs or even tools to migrate from cloudwatch_exporter over to YACE.

A heartfelt thank you

Finally, I want to extend a huge thank you to Thomas for creating YACE and giving other folks the opportunity to continue evolving the project. Go read his story in this Prometheus blog post to learn more.

At Grafana Labs, open source is in our DNA. We truly look forward to the next huge milestone for YACE as it moves to its new home in prometheus-community and becomes an even more indispensable tool in the AWS observability landscape. Here’s to the bright future of YACE!