I want to monitor free disk space on an EC2 instance using CloudWatch but can´t find any good tutorials. That instance is an Ubuntu Linux 18.
Any helps?
Start here: https://docs.aws.amazon.com/AmazonCloudWatch/latest/monitoring/Install-CloudWatch-Agent.html - this will install the cloudwatch agent.
The https://docs.aws.amazon.com/AmazonCloudWatch/latest/monitoring/CloudWatch-Agent-Configuration-File-Details.html - this shows the how to configure the agent. You can get it to send various metrics to CloudWatch including Disk usage.
One you have the metrics in CloudWatch you can setup alarms on the metric also in CloudWatch
Related
I am trying to build an analytics Dashboard using the below Metrics/KPIs for all the EC2 Instance.
Total CPU vs CPUUtilized
Total RAM vs RAMUtilized
Total EBS Volume vs EBSUtilized.
For example, I have lunch an EC2 instance with 4 CPU, 16GiB RAM and 50GB SSD, I would like to know the above KPIs in a time series trend. I am not getting any clue on where to get the data from EC2. Tried the EC2 instance metrics through CloudWatch using boto3 client, however did not get the above Metrics. I would like to know :
Where to find the data with above Metrics ?
Need the above metrics data in s3 on an daily basis.
Similarly is there a way to get similar metrics for AWS RDS and AWS EKS Cluster ?
Thanks!
The Amazon EC2 service collects information about the virtual machine (instance) and sends it to Amazon CloudWatch Logs.
See: List the available CloudWatch metrics for your instances - Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud
Note that it only collects metrics that can be observed from the virtual machine itself -- CPU Utilization, network traffic and Amazon EBS traffic. The EC2 service cannot see what is happening 'inside' the instance, since it is the Operating System that controls memory and manages the contents of the disks.
If you wish to collect metrics from the Operating System, then you would need to Collect metrics and logs from Amazon EC2 instances and on-premises servers with the CloudWatch agent - Amazon CloudWatch. This agent runs in the instance and sends metrics out to CloudWatch.
You can write code that calls the CloudWatch Metrics APIs to retrieve metrics. Note that the metrics returned are calculated over a time period (eg average CPU Utilization over a 5-minute period). It is not possible to retrieve the actual raw datapoints.
See also:
Monitoring Amazon RDS metrics with Amazon CloudWatch - Amazon Relational Database Service
Amazon EKS and Kubernetes Container Insights metrics - Amazon CloudWatch
I am a bit confused in monitoring of EC2 with and without Cloudwatch agent. As far as I know, Cloudwatch agent does not get installed by default on EC2 linux but some basic system metrics like CPU usage can still be monitored and shown in Cloudwatch.
My questions
If I need to monitor memory usage which is not being monitored by default in EC2 now, should I just setup Cloudwatch agent and memory usage can be published to CloudWatch metrics?
What about I don't setup Cloudwatch agent but just enable detailed monitoring? Can memory usage be monitored by just enabling detailed monitoring without cloudwatch agent?
If I need to monitor memory usage which is not being monitored by
default in EC2 now, should I just setup Cloudwatch agent and memory
usage can be published to CloudWatch metrics?
Yes, this is the correct way to monitor OS level metrics on your EC2 instances.
What about I don't setup Cloudwatch agent but just enable detailed
monitoring? Can memory usage be monitored by just enabling detailed
monitoring without cloudwatch agent?
Detailed monitoring just changes the monitoring interval from 5 minutes to 1 minute, it doesn't enable additional metrics. CloudWatch can't reach into the EC2 operating system to see things like memory usage, so you have to install the CloudWatch agent on the server to monitor memory usage.
I've several GCE instances located two zone: asia-southeast1-b and us-east4-c. All instances have already install stackdriver agent. In metrics explorer, I can't find asia-southeast1-b in CPU load metric:
But CPU Usage is OK:
What's wrong with this?
Can you execute this command inside the VM’s deployed in asia-southeast1-b:
grep collectd /var/log/{syslog,messages} | tail
This will show if there is any error with the agent.
To my understanding, this metric (CPU Load) is recollected from Stackdriver agent, then sent to Monitoring.
Let’s see if we can understand what is happening:
Is there a problem with Stackdriver Agent gathering that metric?
Or is there a problem in Monitoring API while ingesting it?
Let me ask you some questions:
Are you using different Operating Systems on the Instances on asia-southeast1-b in comparison to the one’s running in us-east4-c?
Which version of Stackdriver are you running?
In this link you will be able to determine which version you have installed.[2]
Did you make any changes in the configuration of the Stackdriver agent? The file is located in /etc/stackdriver/collectd.conf
Best regards,
[1] https://cloud.google.com/monitoring/agent/install-agent#agent-version
I've fixed this error by adding Monitoring Metric Writer permission to the service account.
https://stackoverflow.com/a/45068262/380774
Just wondering if the AWS cloudwatch runs on the same VPC where i have all my applications are running?
Is there any chance that AWS cloudwatch might go down and we may loose the monitoring capability?
Do we need to have a monitoring mechanism to check the Cloudwatch health?
Thanks
AWS Cloudwatch isn't run on your instances. Its infrastructure is fully managed by Amazon and independent from your VPC. You can see it as a SaaS (Software as a Service).
So you don't have to worry about that. For more informations, please see: https://aws.amazon.com/cloudwatch/
Cloudwatch collects data from the host OS, where your VMs are actually running.
If the physical server had a significant issue both cloudwatch and your VM would go down but in that case the VM would get started automatically on another physical server. In such a case, recovery would be usually quite quickly.
You don't need to check Cloudwatch at all because AWS handles that but you could add alerts for things such as CPU usage on your VMs.
Because Cloudwatch doesn't run on your machines it can't know some things such as memory usage, disk space usage or others so if you need more advanced monitoring capabilities you might consider running something like collectd inside your virtual machine.
Just wondering if the AWS cloudwatch runs on the same VPC where i have all my applications are running?
If you chose to install CloudWatch Agent on your EC2 then only it runs in your EC2 and thus in the VPC your EC2 is provisioned.
CloudWatch service that publishes/maintain logs, metrics, alarms etc is managed by AWS and runs outside your VPC.
CloudWatch has a SLA of 99.9%
https://aws.amazon.com/cloudwatch/sla/
Is there any chance that AWS cloudwatch might go down and we may loose the monitoring capability?
CloudWatch like any other service can have outages and it did have some in the past but I have never seen any data getting lost, only temporarily not being available or slow to retrieve during the outage.
Do we need to have a monitoring mechanism to check the Cloudwatch health?
SLA is already 99.9% for CloudWatch Service so chances of catching a blip is very rare on your own monitoring mechanism.
If you are using CloudWatch Agent then consider checking health of agent to make sure it is in running state (you can use AWS System Manager Run command).
I was wondering if it is possible to automatically monitor the usage percentage on a EBS volume in aws (the volume I wish to monitor is attached to a instance). Perhaps this can be done with alarms in cloudwatch? For example, I need to be alerted if the volume usage percentage reaches 95%. Any ideas?
Amazon won't do this for you - from their point of view an EBS volume is just a bunch of blocks
In the past I've done this by writing a script (run via a cronjob) that checked the amount of free space on the volume and posted it to cloudwatch (which was setup to trigger an alarm past a certain threshold).
Amazon also provide such a script
AWS provide a perl script which can be used to create CW alerts/metrics as detailed here
https://serverfault.com/questions/439928/making-alarm-in-disk-space-using-cloudwatch
An update on this question.
All the answers are now outdated and the links posted show deprecated procedures.
The new way to get disk usage in EC2, is to use the unified cloudwatch agent which has pre-built capabilities to extract metrics from EC2, if configured correctly.
You can follow the instruction from these docs: https://docs.aws.amazon.com/AmazonCloudWatch/latest/monitoring/Install-CloudWatch-Agent.html
Now you can actually create a cloudwatch alarm and find the EBS Volume and create a metric using freeDiskSpace and have it send notifications to the SNS.