Amazon CloudWatch CpuUtilization PHP Script

I need a short simple PHP script that uses the Amazon AWS CloudWatch REST API to fetch the CPU Utilization metric. The difficult part of this seems to be creating the signature. The documentation is inconsistent, but there seem to be a few code samples out there, particularly there is one in Zend (don't know if it actually works) but I am unfamiliar with Zend, and don't want to set that up. I'm not a PHP guru, but I do have some code that does part of the job. I'm hoping someone out there has done this before. I don't want to use any big libraries (for example Zend) just a simple standalone script. It should compute the string, submit it to Amazon, and get back the numbers and print them out. You can get fancy with dimensions and such if you want, but it's mainly the signature that is giving me fits. ## Deliverables I will not provide you with our secret codes or instance IDs, you will have to test it on your own AWS server. I'll put in the codes later, and test it out from that point.