Hi I am new to AWS and I started learning now. In my environment I noticed all the issues are getting raised by autoscaling only. Whenever new instances comes up there are some small issues happening in environment. So I thought if we have a script to trigger a alert whenever any ec2 instance get reboots or terminates or any new instance spins up but I do not have a idea how to achieve it.
While checking with AWS support they are pointing cloudwatch where we need to trigger alarm for each instance. When we have huge number of instances and multiple environments, setting up a alarm for individual instance is hectic job. Can anyone suggest how can I get information about a instance reboot, termination and new instance spin up. Thanks in advance.
You can create SNS notification whenever auto scaling scales.
Read AWS documentation
You can write your script in your favourite language which can subscribe to the particular SNS topic.
Related
I suddenly started having issues connecting to my EC2 instance, and in the AWS console, I noticed the instance status was stopped.
I am not very familiar with AWS EC2, but if I understand correctly, EC2 instances don't stop on their own, so I must have triggered it somehow. How could this happen? Could it have errored out somehow, or did someone have to explicitly stop it?
AWS doesn't take any action by own; there might a possibility you have triggered it by mistake. Since you can start it again also you can set one cloudwatch alarm to get more notification about the running Instance.
At the same time, you can create one topic for SNS and subscribe to it via email. so that if anything happens with your instance it will notify you or you can set the action for all the available events
I want to create a web app for my organization where users can schedule in advance at what times they'd like their EC2 instances to start and stop (like creating events in a calendar), and those instances will be automatically started or stopped at those times. I've come across four different options:
AWS Datapipeline
Cron running on EC2 instance
Scheduled scaling of Auto Scaling Group
AWS Lambda scheduled events
It seems to me that I'll need a database to store the user's scheduled times for autostarting and autostopping an instance, and that I'll have to pull that data from the database regularly (to make sure that's the latest updated schedule). Which would be the best of the four above options for my use case?
Edit: Auto Scaling only seems to be for launching and terminating instances, so I can rule that out.
Simple!
Ask users to add a tag to their instance(s) indicating when they should start and stop (figure out some format so they can easily specify Mon-Fri or Every Day)
Create an AWS Lambda function that scans instances for their tags and starts/stops them based upon the tag content
Create an Amazon CloudWatch Event rule that triggers the Lambda function every 15 minutes (or whatever resolution you want)
You can probably find some sample code if you search for AWS Stopinator.
Take a look at ParkMyCloud if you're looking for an external SaaS app that can help your users easily schedule (or override that schedule) your EC2, RDS, and ASG instances. It also connects to SSO, provides an API, and shows you all of your resources across regions/accounts/clouds. There's a free trial available if you want to test it out.
Disclosure: I work for ParkMyCloud.
I have launched an ec2 instance from an ami using lambda function.
I haven't enabled detailed monitoring. Now I want to keep track of the instances each time lambda set triggered to launch an instance. I want to get an email with instance id and status of that, when an instance is launched, stops/terminates and instances which running more than 2 hours. I tried cloudwatch, but is instance specific can't get configured for a newly launched instance. I can uses SNS, but how to keep track of these?
Use AWS Cloudtrail: http://aws.amazon.com/cloudtrail/
It gives more info than you are asking for. In cloudtrail, enable SNS Notifications of API activity and set a filter to notify you only when an instance creation/start/stop/terminate etc., For instances that are running for more than 2 hours, you can explore if cloudtrail provides it or it is very easy to write a script using Boto to fetch that information.
There are some AWS partners providing a similar service. Hope this helps.
I think you will be better off using an auto scale group and then use the auto scale life cycle hook to get notifications whenever any instance is added or removed.
http://docs.aws.amazon.com/AutoScaling/latest/DeveloperGuide/adding-lifecycle-hooks.html
When you use the life cycle hooks, you can have an SNS notification to not only get intimidated about the new instance but also take custom actions.
You can still use the aws lambda function to continue adding and removing new instances, only that you will increase and decrease the size of the auto scaling group.
While working with a g2.2xlarge spot instance, I have tried to set up an alarm that will notify me when the average CPU usage over a two hour period has dropped below 5% and will then automatically stop the instance. Here's a link to a nice article Amazon wrote up on how to use the stop/start instance feature. The AWS alarms seem to allow you to do this however after the trigger goes off I get this reply:
Dear AWS customer,
We are unable to execute the 'Stop' action on Amazon EC2 instance i-e60e21ec that you specified in the Amazon CloudWatch alarm awsec2-i-e60e21ec-Low-CPU-Utilization.
You may want to check the alarm configuration to ensure that it is compatible with your instance configuration. You can also attempt to execute the action manually.
These are some possible reasons for this failure and steps you can try to resolve it:
Incompatible action selected:
Your instance’s configuration may not be compatible with the selected action.
To execute the 'Terminate' action, your instance may have Termination Protection enabled. Disable this feature if you want to terminate your instance. Once you do that, the alarm will execute the action after the next applicable alarm state change.
To execute the 'Stop' action, your instance’s root device type must be an EBS volume. If the root device type is the instance store, select the 'Terminate' action instead. Once you do that, the alarm will execute the action after the next applicable alarm state change.
Temporary service interruption: There may have been an issue with Amazon CloudWatch or Amazon EC2. We have retried the action without success. You can try to execute the action manually, or wait for the next applicable alarm state change.
Sincerely, Amazon Web Services
Stop seems to be an option for the free micro instance but not for these other instances. When I try to change the shutdown behavior to stop in actions it says:
An error occurred while changing the shutdown behavior of this instance.
Modifying 'instanceInitiatedShutdownBehavior is not supported for spot instances.
Is there another way to get around this problem or will we have to wait until Amazon makes this feature available?
Use standard instances instead of spot instances. Spot instances allow you to bid on extra capacity within ec2. However, they may automatically shut down if the spot price exceeds your bid.
Its not really intended for an always on instance.
I'm wanting to apply a CloudWatch alarm to stop instances which aren't being used in our pre-production environment. We often have instances being spun up, used and then left turned on which is really starting to cost us a fair amount of money.
CloudWatch alarms have a handy feature whereby we can stop based on some metrics - this is awesome and what I'd like to use to constantly keep an eye on the servers with but let it tidy up the instances for me.
The problem with this is that it appears that the CloudWatch alarms need to be created individually against each instance. Is there a way in which I can create one alarm which would share values across all current and future instances which will be started?
ETA - Alternatively, tell me that these options are better than CloudWatch and I'll be happy at that.
AWS EC2 stop all through PowerShell/CMD tools
Add a startup script that creates the CloudWatch alarm to the base image you use to generate your VMs.
http://docs.aws.amazon.com/AmazonCloudWatch/latest/DeveloperGuide/CLIReference.html
I don't believe this is possible - CloudWatch seems designed to be 'very manual' or 'very automated'. i.e. You can't setup one alarm which would go off if any one instance is idle, you have to setup individual alarms for each instance.
A couple of possible solutions, which are probably not what you want to hear:
Script your instance creation, and add a call to cloudwatch to create an alarm for each instance.
Run a service continually, which looks for instances and checks to ensure that there is an alarm for the instance, create alarms for the new instances, and remove alarms for instances which have been terminated.
I think what you are actually looking for would be auto-scaling:
https://aws.amazon.com/documentation/autoscaling/