AWS EC2 Monitoring

AWS EC2 Monitoring Opspack

Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) is a web service that provides secure, resizable compute capacity in the cloud. It is designed to make web-scale cloud computing easier for developers and send metrics to CloudWatch for your EC2 instances making AWS Monitoring Simple.

What You Can Monitor

Opsview contains all the performance metrics needed to monitor, diagnose, and view metrics for your EC2 instance such as CPU utilization, CPU credit usage, Disk Read/Write, Network Bytes/Packets, and more.

By default, you can retrieve metrics with a resolution of 5 minutes free of charge. Users are allowed to enable 1-minute resolution metrics from AWS which incur a cost upon usage and should be enabled through your AWS console. The Opsview plugin is able to cater for both resolutions.

AWS EC2 Monitoring Service Checks

Service Check	Description	Default Threshold	Unit of Measurement
AWS/EC2.CPUUtilization	Reports the usage of the CPU in percentage, thresholds can be set to get critical and warnings.	Warning: 80 Critical: 90	Percentage
AWS/EC2.CPUCreditBalance	T2 instances only The number of earned CPU credits that an instance has accrued since it was launched or started. For T2 Standard, the metric also includes the number of launch credits that have been accrued.	-	Credits
AWS/EC2.CPUCreditUsage	T2 instances only The number of CPU credits spent by the instance for CPU utilization. One CPU credit equals one vCPU running at 100% utilization for one minute or an equivalent combination of vCPUs, utilization, and time (for example, one vCPU running at 50% utilization for two minutes or two vCPUs running at 25% utilization for two minutes).	-	Credits
AWS/EC2.DiskReadOps	Completed read operations to all disks in Instance Store volume only. If there are no instance store volumes the metric is either 0 or not reported. Instances with EBS as storage will return Unknown.	-	Count
AWS/EC2.DiskWriteOps	Completed Write operations to all the instance store volumes available to the instance. If there are no instance store volumes the metric is either 0 or not reported. Instances with EBS as storage will return Unknown.	-	Count
AWS/EC2.DiskWriteBytes	Bytes written to all instance store volumes available to the instance. If there are no instance store volumes the metric is either 0 or not reported. Instances with EBS as storage will return Unknown.	-	Bytes
AWS/EC2.DiskReadBytes	Bytes Read from all disks in Instance Store volume only. If there are no instance store volumes the metric is either 0 or not reported. Instances with EBS as storage will return Unknown.	-	Bytes
AWS/EC2.NetworkIn	The number of bytes received on all network interfaces by the instance. This metric identifies the volume of incoming network traffic to a single instance.	-	Bytes
AWS/EC2.NetworkOut	The number of bytes sent out on all network interfaces by the instance. This metric identifies the volume of outgoing network traffic from a single instance.	-	Bytes
AWS/EC2.NetworkPacketsIn	The number of packets received on all network interfaces by the instance. This metric identifies the volume of incoming traffic in terms of the number of packets on a single instance. This metric is available for basic monitoring only.	-	Count
AWS/EC2.NetworkPacketsOut	The number of packets sent out on all network interfaces by the instance. This metric identifies the volume of outgoing traffic in terms of the number of packets on a single instance. This metric is available for basic monitoring only.	-	Count
AWS/EC2.StatusCheckFailed	Reports whether the instance has passed both the instance status check and the system status check in the last minute.This metric can be either 0 (passed) or 1 (failed). By default, this metric is available at a 1-minute frequency at no charge.	-	Count

AWS EC2 Monitoring Setup and Configuration

To configure and utilize this Opspack, you need to add the 'Cloud - AWS - EC2 CloudWatch' Opspack to the host running the EC2 software. The steps illustrated below are using a t2.micro with an EBS backed storage EC2 instance so the following rules apply.

The Credit Balance and Credit Usage service checks will execute as per the Service Checks table above.
As this is a EBS storage type the Disk Read Bytes, Disk Read Ops, Disk Write Bytes and Disk Write Ops service checks will return unknown correctly as they are not available with an EBS backed storage type.

Known Issues

This Opspack will write over the variable 'AWS_CLOUDWATCH_AUTHENTICATION', so if you have any existing hosts monitoring AWS you may need to make changes to those hosts.

Setup and Configuration

To configure and utilize this Opspack, you simply need to add the 'Cloud - AWS - EC2 CloudWatch' Opspack to your Opsview system.

Step 1: Add the Host Template

Add the Cloud - AWS - EC2 CloudWatch Host Template to your Opsview host. Add the Primary Hostname/IP. This can be the Public DNS (IPV4) or IPV4 Public IP from the Description tab of an EC2 instance in the EC2 Console in AWS.

For more information, refer to Opsview Knowledge Center - Adding Host Templates to Hosts.

Step 2: Add and configure variables required for this host

Variable	Description
AWS_CLOUDWATCH_AUTHENTICATION	Authentication details for CloudWatch. The Value is not used and therefore can be set to anything. Either override the File Path with the location of your credentials file, or override the Access Key and Secret Key arguments (this approach is recommended as the values will be encrypted). Optionally, override the Region (default: eu-west-1) with the location of your instance if you are not using the default region.
AWS_CLOUDWATCH_ROLE_ARN	This optional variable is the Amazon Resource Name (ARN) of the role to be used for the service checks. Override the Access ARN with the ARN of the role. The account should have AssumeRole(STS) for this ARN.
AWS_EC2_INSTANCE_ID	The Instance ID of your EC2 instance. Override the Value with the Instance ID of your EC2 instance.