Using AWS Cloudwatch to monitor C++ (on-premises, not cloud) program - c++

I am trying to create a simple C++ program that sends something like a real-time status message to AWS CloudWatch to inform that it is up and running, and the status goes offline when it's closed (real-time online/offline status). The C++ program will be installed at multiple users' computers, so there will be like a dashboard on CloudWatch. Is this even possible? I'm lost on AWS between Alarms/Logs/Metrics/Events..etc.
I also want to send some stats from each PC where the program is installed, like CPU usage for example, is it possible to make a dashboard on CloudWatch to monitor this as well? Am I free to create dashboard with whatever data I want? All the tutorials I found talk about integrating CloudWatch with other AWS services (Like Lambda and EC2) which isn't my case.
Thank you in advance.

The best way to monitor a process will be using AWS CloudWatch procstat plugin. First, create a CloudWatch configuration file with PID file location from EC2 and monitor the memory_rss parameter of the process. You can read here more.
For stats you can install CloudWatch Agent on each machine and collect necessary metrics. You can read here more.

Related

Send AWS EC2 metrics to AWS Elasticsearch Service Domain for monitoring in Kibana

I am stuck on one point I have created one EC2 Linux based instance in Aws.
Now I want to send the EC2 metrics data to the managed Elasticsearch domain for monitoring purposes in Kiban, I go through the cloud watch console and check the metric is present of instance but didn't get how to connect with the Elasticsearch domain that I have created.
Can anyone please help me with this situation?
There is no build in mechanism for extraction/streaming of metrics data points in real time. You have to develop a custom solution for that. For example, by having a lambda function which is invoked every minute and which reads data points using get_metric_data. The the lambda would inject the points into your ES.
To invoke a lambda function periodically, e.g. every 1 minute you would have to setup CloudWatch Event rule with schedule Expressions. Lambda function would also need to have permissions granted to interact with CloudWatch metrics.
Welcome to SO :)
An alternative to the solution suggested by Marcin is to install metricbeat on the EC2 Instance and configure the metricbeat config file to send metrics to your Managed AWS ES Domain.
This is pretty simple and you should be able to do this fairly quickly.

If you are using AWS to autoscale spot instances of your application, how do you handle logging?

Looking into adding autoscaling of a portion of our application using AWS simple message queuing which would launch EC2 on-demand or spot instances based on queue backlog.
One question I had, is how do you deal with collecting logs from autoscaled instances? New instances are spun up based on an image, but then they are shut down when complete. Currently, if there is an issue with one of our services, which causes it to crash, we have a system to automatically restart the service, but the logs and core dump files are there to review. If we switch to an autoscaling system, where new instance are spun up, how do you get logs and core dump files when there is a failure? Particularly if the instance is spun down.
Good practice is to ship these logs and aggregate them somewhere else, and there are many services such as DataDog and Rapid7 which will do this for you at a cost.
AWS however provides CloudWatch logs, which gives you a central place to store and view logs. It also allows you then to give users access to logs on the AWS console without them having to ssh onto a server.
Shipping your logs to CloudWatch logs requires the installation of the CloudWatch agent on your server and specifying in the config which logs to ship.
You could install the CloudWatch agent once and create an AMI of that server to use in your autoscaling group, or install and configure the CloudWatch agent in userdata for every time a server is spun up.
All the information you need to get started can be found here:
https://docs.aws.amazon.com/AmazonCloudWatch/latest/monitoring/Install-CloudWatch-Agent.html

Using CloudWatch API to get statistics

I have deployed a LAMP stack application on AWS. I need to monitor that using CloudWatch.
Can someone guide me on how to use the CloudWatch API for GetMetrics for CPU utilization? The AWS documentation is very scarce.
I see that the putmetrics call will let me create my own metrics.
My requirement is that I need to display those metric results in a mobile app.
My app monitors a project deployed on AWS. The alerts and metrics that come in must stream into the app.
I don't want just the metrics data in the AWS console,
I want it viewable in my mobile app. The app is developed in MEAN stack.
I must also add that the app is deployed on AWS and the application that is
being monitored is also in there(its a LAMP stack). I have managed to set 2 endpoints(HTTP and DB) and I have written
simple scripts in Javascript to monitor them. But ideally they should happen via Cloudwatch.
Providing a piece of code that replicates the issue that you are seeing normally allows who sees the question to help you better than guessing what you're doing.
Are you using an SDK to do this? What language/version?
here are links to the API docs:
http://docs.aws.amazon.com/AmazonCloudWatch/latest/APIReference/API_GetMetricStatistics.html
http://docs.aws.amazon.com/AmazonCloudWatch/latest/APIReference/API_ListMetrics.html
The pattern is to list the metrics and after that use the result and feed it into getmetricsstatistics.
In your specific case, googling the issue a bit before might answer the question before you ask it on SO. For example:
https://forums.aws.amazon.com/thread.jspa?messageID=295740
This can happen when you are hitting the wrong endpoint. Check if you are hitting endpoint of the right AWS service.
For example, trying to hit DynamoDB's endpoint when you want to access CloudWatch APIs.

Easier way to access ElasticBeanstalk EC2 Log files

I am programming a Jersey service on Tomcat via EBS with LoadBalancer. I am finding getting the EC2's S3 catalina files very cumbersome. Currently I need to determine the EC2 instance(s) then work my way to each of the S3 locations, download the files, then I can diagnose.
The snapshot doesn't help due to the amount of requests that come in, it doesn't hold enough info and by the time I get the snapshot, it has "rolled" off the snapshot.
Two questions:
1) Is there an easier approach to logs files via AWS? (Increase time before rotation which I don't believe is supported as of now, scripts, etc)
2) Is there any software or scripts to access all the logs under load balancer? I am basically wanting to say "give me all logs for this EBS" and have it get all logs for that day under all servers for that load balancer (up or down)". The clincher is down. Problem becomes more complex when the load balancer takes down an instance right when the issue occurs.
Thanks!
As an immediate solution to your problem you can follow the approach suggested in this answer. Essentially you can modify the logrotate configuration to rotate for a bigger log size using ebextensions.
Then snapshot logs should work for you.
Let me know if you need more clarifications on this approach.
AWS has released CloudWatch Logs just last week, which enables you to to monitor and troubleshoot your systems and applications using your existing system, application, and custom log files:
You can send your existing system, application, and custom log files to CloudWatch Logs and monitor these logs in near real-time. [...] you can store your logs using highly durable, low-cost storage for later access.
See the introductory blog post Store and Monitor OS & Application Log Files with Amazon CloudWatch for an illustrated walk through, which touches on using Elastic Beanstalk and CloudWatch Logs already - this is further detailed in Using AWS Elastic Beanstalk with Amazon CloudWatch Logs.

Background Process in AWS

I am new to AWS and have a question about an application I'm trying to write. I have a bunch of data that sits within Amazon RDS. On a periodic basis, I would like a small snippet of code to run against this data and in certain situations have notifications sent where appropriate. Of all the AWS services, what is the best architecture for this?
Thanks
You could use a simple cron job running on an EC2 instance. The cron job could run a script (PHP, Perl, whatever) to go fetch the data and then do something with it (notify people, generate reports etc)
Does that help?
See here for details on getting started with a Linux instance: http://docs.aws.amazon.com/AWSEC2/latest/UserGuide/EC2_GetStarted.html
You could achieve the same results using a Windows machine and Scheduled Tasks. Here's the getting started guide for Windows instances: http://docs.aws.amazon.com/AWSEC2/latest/WindowsGuide/EC2Win_GetStarted.html
You can use Scheduled Lambda service driven by CloudWatch events. It acts as a resilient cron.