AWS stop alarm not working - amazon-web-services

I cannot get alarms to work reliably for an AWS ec2 instance. I have a g2.xlarge image running and want it to stop when it is not in use, i.e. when average usage falls below 2%.
When I try 1 or 2 periods of 1 hour below 2% it usually works but then when I start it up again it immediately stops itself as it is in an alarm condition. I have tried 12 periods of 5 minutes which allows it to start ok but now it doesn't stop at all despite being in an alarm condition for several hours.
I have tried various options and can't nail down what makes it work and what doesn't. It feels as if sometimes things work and sometimes they don't. Is it buggy or am I missing something?
Here is a screenshot of my setup which has failed to trigger a shutdown...

Related

AWS Glue job run not respecting Timeout and not stopping

I am running AWS Glue jobs using PySpark. They have set Timeout (as visible on the screenshot) of 1440 mins, which is 24 hours. Nevertheless, the job continues working over those 24 hours.
When this particular job had been running for over 5 days I stopped it manually (clicking stop icon in column "Run status" in GUI visible on the screenshot). However, since then (it has been over 2 days) it still hasn't stopped - the "Run status" is Stopping, not Stopped.
Additionally, after about 4 hours of running, new logs (column "Logs") in CloudWatch regarding this Job Run stopped appearing (in my PySpark script I have print() statements which regularly and often log extra data). Also, last error log in CloudWatch (column "Error logs") has been written 24 seconds after the date of the newest log in "Logs".
This behaviour continues for multiple jobs.
My questions are:
What could be reasons for Job Runs not obeying set Timeout value? How to fix that?
Why the newest log is from 4 hours since starting the Job Run, while the logs should appear regularly during 24 hours of the (desired) duration of the Job Run?
Why the Job Runs don't stop if I try to stop them manually? How can they be stopped?
Thank you in advance for your advice and hints.

How to stop a compute node with SLURM?

I am using SLURM on AWS to manage jobs as part of AWS parallelcluster. I have two questions :
When using scancel *jobid* to cancel a job, the associated node(s) do not stop. How can I achieve that ?
When starting, I made the mistake of not making my script executable so the sbatch *script.sh* worked but the compute node was doing nothing. How could I identify such behaviour and handle it properly ? Is the proper to e.g. stop the idle node after some time for example and output that in a log ? How can I achieve that ?
Check out this page in the docs: https://docs.aws.amazon.com/parallelcluster/latest/ug/autoscaling.html
Bottom line is that instances that have no jobs for a period of time longer than the scaledown_idletime (the default setting is 10 minutes) will get scaled down (terminated) by the cluster, automagically.
You can tweak the setting in the config file when you build your cluster, if 10 mins is too long. Just think about your workload first, because you don't want small delays between jobs to cause you a lot of churn whilst you wait for nodes to die and then get created again shortly after, hence the 10 minute thing.

How to fix CloudRun error 'The request was aborted because there was no available instance'

I'm using managed CloudRun to deploy a container with concurrency=1. Once deployed, I'm firing four long-running requests in parallel.
Most of the time, all works fine -- But occasionally, I'm facing 500's from one of the nodes within a few seconds; logs only provide the error message provided in the subject.
Using retry with exponential back-off did not improve the situation; the retries also end up with 500s. StackDriver logs also do not provide further information.
Potentially relevant gcloud beta run deploy arguments:
--memory 2Gi --concurrency 1 --timeout 8m --platform managed
What does the error message mean exactly -- and how can I solve the issue?
This error message can appear when the infrastructure didn't scale fast enough to catch up with the traffic spike. Infrastructure only keeps a request in the queue for a certain amount of time (about 10s) then aborts it.
This usually happens when:
traffic suddenly largely increase
cold start time is long
request time is long
We also faced this issue when traffic suddenly increased during business hours. The issue is usually caused by a sudden increase in traffic and a longer instance start time to accommodate incoming requests. One way to handle this is by keeping warm-up instances always running i.e. configuring --min-instances parameters in the cloud run deploy command. Another and recommended way is to reduce the service cold start time (which is difficult to achieve in some languages like Java and Python)
I also experiment the problem. Easy to reproduce. I have a fibonacci container that process in 6s fibo(45). I use Hey to perform 200 requests. And I set my Cloud Run concurrency to 1.
Over 200 requests I have 8 similar errors. In my case: sudden traffic spike and long processing time. (Short cold start for me, it's in Go)
I was able to resolve this on my service by raising the max autoscaling container count from 2 to 10. There really should be no reason that 2 would be even close to too low for the traffic, but I suspect something about the Cloud Run internals were tying up to 2 containers somehow.
Setting the Max Retry Attempts to anything but zero will remedy this, as it did for me.

Why is AWS EC2 CPU usage shooting up to 100% momentarily from IOWait?

I have a large web-based application running in AWS with numerous EC2 instances. Occasionally -- about twice or thrice per week -- I receive an alarm notification from my Sensu monitoring system notifying me that one of my instances has hit 100% CPU.
This is the notification:
CheckCPU TOTAL WARNING: total=100.0 user=0.0 nice=0.0 system=0.0 idle=25.0 iowait=100.0 irq=0.0 softirq=0.0 steal=0.0 guest=0.0
Host: my_host_name
Timestamp: 2016-09-28 13:38:57 +0000
Address: XX.XX.XX.XX
Check Name: check-cpu-usage
Command: /etc/sensu/plugins/check-cpu.rb -w 70 -c 90
Status: 1
Occurrences: 1
This seems to be a momentary occurrence and the CPU goes back down to normal levels within seconds. So it seems like something not to get too worried about. But I'm still curious why it is happening. Notice that the CPU is taken up with the 100% IOWaits.
FYI, Amazon's monitoring system doesn't notice this blip. See the images below showing the CPU & IOlevels at 13:38
Interestingly, AWS says tells me that this instance will be retired soon. Might that be the two be related?
AWS is only displaying a 5 minute period, and it looks like your CPU check is set to send alarms after a single occurrence. If your CPU check's interval is less than 5 minutes, the AWS console may be rolling up the average to mask the actual CPU spike.
I'd recommend narrowing down the AWS monitoring console to a smaller period to see if you see the spike there.
I would add this as comment, but I have no reputation to do so.
I have noticed my ec2 instances have been doing this, but for far longer and after apt-get update + upgrade.
I tough it was an Apache thing, then started using Nginx in a new instance to test, and it just did it, run apt-get a few hours ago, then came back to find the instance using full cpu - for hours! Good thing it is just a test machine, but I wonder what is wrong with ubuntu/apt-get that might have cause this. From now on I guess I will have to reboot the machine after apt-get as it seems to be the only way to put it back to normal.

AWS EC2 reaches high CPU uses during nighttime

I just implemented a few alarms with CloudWatch last week and I noticed a strange behavior with EC2 small instances everyday between 6h30 and 6h45 (UTC time).
I implemented one alarm to warn me when a AutoScallingGroup have its CPU over 50% during 3 minutes (average sample) and another alarm to warn me when the same AutoScallingGroup goes back to normal, which I considered to be CPU under 30% during 3 minutes (also average sample). Did that 2 times: one for zone A, and another time for zone B.
Looks OK, but something is happening during 6h30 to 6h45 that takes certain amount of processing for 2 to 5 min. The CPU rises, sometimes trigger the "High use alarm", but always triggers the "returned to normal alarm". Our system is currently under early stages of development, so no user have access to it, and we don't have any process/backups/etc scheduled. We barely have Apache+PHP installed and configured, so it can only be something related to the host machines I guess.
Anybody can explain what is going on and how can we solve it besides increasing the sample time or % in the "return to normal" alarm? Folks at Amazon forum said the Service Team would have a look once they get a chance, but it's been almost a week with no return.