AWS Classroom Series – 24/Jun/2021

Monitoring custom metrics using cloud watch

• In this series, lets see how to use cloud watch agent to monitor custom metrics
• Downloading and installing the cloud watch agent Refer Here
• Installing on Amazon linux2

 wget https://s3.amazonaws.com/amazoncloudwatch-agent/amazon_linux/amd64/latest/amazon-cloudwatch-agent.rpm
 sudo rpm -ivh amazon-cloudwatch-agent.rpm

• Install the collectd if you want to collect custom metrics (Collect application and system performance metrics on a periodic basis)

sudo amazon-linux-extras install collectd

• Creating an IAM role used by CloudWatch agent

  • Navigate to IAM Console and create an IAM Role

• Attach this IAM role to the ec2 instance

• Run the cloud watch agent on the ec2 instance

sudo /opt/aws/amazon-cloudwatch-agent/bin/amazon-cloudwatch-agent-config-wizard

• Once the wizard creation is completed it will create a configuration file @/opt/aws/amazon-cloudwatch-agent/bin/config.json
• To validate and start the cloud watch agent

sudo /opt/aws/amazon-cloudwatch-agent/bin/amazon-cloudwatch-agent-ctl -a fetch-config -m ec2 -c file:/opt/aws/amazon-cloudwatch-agent/bin/config.json -s

• To verify if the cloudwatch agent is running

ps aux | grep -i amazon-cloudwatch-agent

• Now navigate to the cloud watch and check metrics

CloudWatch Events

• AWS Cloud watch events are similar to alarms but instead of configuring alarms or thresholds, they match event patterns.
• The event patterns can be related to
  • EC2 state change
  • S3 File upload
  • RDS instance State change

• Exercise
  • Create an Event to notify when ec2 instance state is changed for all the ec2 instances.
  • Shutdown the ec2 instance and verify the email.