AWS ELB Monitoring

About AWS ELB Monitoring

Elastic Load Balancing automatically distributes incoming application traffic across multiple Amazon EC2 instances. It enables you to achieve fault tolerance in your applications, seamlessly providing the required amount of load balancing capacity needed to route application traffic. Monitoring ELB is part of Opsview Monitor's continuing support for AWS Monitoring.

What You Can Monitor

With our Opsview AWS ELB monitoring, you can easily and affordably look after your Amazon Web Services ELB (Elastic Load Balancing) instances. Our Opspack provides detailed monitoring with various metrics across your AWS cloud, including; latency, healthy hosts counts and backend connection errors.

Note: This Opspack knows when it was last run, so when testing the results in the troubleshoot section, you will need to wait a couple of minutes each time you recheck the results. The time frame that is searched for is based around the last time the Opspack ran, so running it too quickly will result in no data being found and the service check going into an unknown

Service Checks

Service Check	Description
AWS/ELB.BackendConnectionErrors	The number of connections that were not successfully established.
AWS/ELB.HealthyHostCount	The number of healthy instances registered with your load balancer.
AWS/ELB.HTTPCode_Backend	The number of HTTP response codes generated by registered instances.
AWS/ELB.HTTPCode_ELB	The number of HTTP response codes of each code from the load balancer.
AWS/ELB.Latency	The time elapsed, in seconds, after the request leaves the load balancer until the headers of the response are received.
AWS/ELB.RequestCount	The number of requests completed or connections made during the specified interval.
AWS/ELB.SpilloverCount	The total number of requests that were rejected because the surge queue is full.
AWS/ELB.SurgeQueueLength	The total number of requests that are pending routing.
AWS/ELB.UnHealthyHostCount	The number of unhealthy instances registered with your load balancer.

Prerequisites

Create a temporary aws_credentials.cfg file with the following contents:

[default]
aws_access_key_id = "Your Access Key Id"
aws_secret_access_key = "Your Secret Key Id"

Then run the following command as the opsview user to import this file:

/opt/opsview/orchestrator/bin/orchestratorimportscripts etc-plugins cloud-aws /path/to/aws_credentials.cfg

After an Apply Changes has been run, this will be distributed to the live location on all Opsview collectors.

The default live location for this file is /opt/opsview/monitoringscripts/etc/plugins/cloud-aws/aws_credentials.cfg. If you are not using the default location, you will need to assign your full path to the variable: AWS_CLOUDWATCH_AUTHENTICATION.

AWS ELB Monitoring Setup and Configuration

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

Step 1: Add the host template

Add the Cloud - AWS - ELB CloudWatch Host Template to your Opsview Monitor host. If the resource you're monitoring has no hostname or public IP, then open the Advanced settings pane and change Host Check Command to Always assumed to be UP.

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

Step 2: Add and configure the variables for the 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_ELB_LOAD_BALANCER_NAME	Load Balancer name from AWS.