Amazon Management Pack for Microsoft System Center
Amazon offers a complete set of infrastructure and application services for running almost anything in the cloud—from enterprise applications and big data projects to social games and mobile apps. The Amazon Management Pack for Microsoft System Center provides availability and performance monitoring capabilities for your applications running in Amazon.
The Amazon Management Pack allows Microsoft System Center Operations Manager to access your Amazon resources (such as instances and volumes), so that it can collect performance data and monitor your Amazon resources. The Amazon Management Pack is an extension to System Center Operations Manager. There are two versions of the Amazon Management Pack: one for System Center 2012 — Operations Manager and another for System Center Operations Manager 2007 R2.
The Amazon Management Pack uses Amazon CloudWatch metrics and alarms to monitor your Amazon resources. Amazon CloudWatch metrics appear in Microsoft System Center as performance counters and Amazon CloudWatch alarms appear as alerts.
You can monitor the following resources:
-
EC2 instances
-
EBS volumes
-
Classic Load Balancers
-
Amazon EC2 Auto Scaling groups and Availability Zones
-
Elastic Beanstalk applications
-
CloudFormation stacks
-
CloudWatch Alarms
-
CloudWatch Custom Metrics
Contents
- Overview of Amazon Management Pack for System Center 2012
- Overview of Amazon Management Pack for System Center 2007 R2
- Download the Amazon Management Pack
- Deploy the Amazon Management Pack
- Use the Amazon Management Pack
- Upgrade the Amazon Management Pack
- Uninstall the Amazon Management Pack
- Troubleshoot the Amazon Management Pack
Overview of Amazon Management Pack for System Center 2012
The Amazon Management Pack for System Center 2012 — Operations Manager uses a resource pool that contains one or more management servers to discover and monitor your Amazon resources. You can add management servers to the pool as you increase the number of Amazon resources that you use.
The following diagram shows the main components of Amazon Management Pack.
| Item | Component | Description |
|---|---|---|
|
Operations Manager infrastructure |
One or more management servers and their dependencies, such as Microsoft SQL Server and a Microsoft Active Directory domain. These servers can either be deployed on-premises or in the Amazon cloud; both scenarios are supported. |
|
Resource pool |
One or more management servers used for communicating with Amazon using the Amazon SDK for .NET. These servers must have Internet connectivity. |
|
Amazon credentials. |
An access key ID and a secret access key used by the management servers to make Amazon API calls. You must specify these credentials while you configure the Amazon Management Pack. You can use an IAM role to manage temporary credentials for applications that are running on an EC2 instance and making Amazon CLI or Amazon API requests. This is preferable to storing access keys within the EC2 instance. To assign an Amazon role to an EC2 instance and make it available to all of its applications, you create an instance profile that is attached to the instance. An instance profile contains the role and enables programs that are running on the EC2 instance to get temporary credentials. For more information, see Using an IAM role to grant permissions to applications running on Amazon EC2 instances in the IAM User Guide. . |
|
EC2 instances |
Virtual computers running in the Amazon Cloud. Some instances might have the Operations Manager Agent installed, others might not. When you install Operations Manager Agent you can see the operating system and application health apart from the instance health. |
Overview of Amazon Management Pack for System Center 2007 R2
The Amazon Management Pack for System Center Operations Manager 2007 R2 uses a designated computer that connects to your System Center environment and has Internet access, called a watcher node, to call Amazon APIs to remotely discover and collect information about your Amazon resources.
The following diagram shows the main components of Amazon Management Pack.
| Item | Component | Description |
|---|---|---|
|
|
Operations Manager infrastructure |
One or more management servers and their dependencies, such as Microsoft SQL Server and a Microsoft Active Directory domain. These servers can either be deployed on-premises or in the Amazon Cloud; both scenarios are supported. |
|
|
Watcher node |
A designated agent-managed computer used for communicating with
Amazon using the Amazon SDK for .NET. It can either be deployed
on-premises or in the Amazon Cloud, but it must be an agent-managed
computer, and it must have Internet connectivity. You can use
exactly one watcher node to monitor an Amazon Web Services account. However, one
watcher node can monitor multiple Amazon Web Services accounts. For more information
about setting up a watcher node, see Deploying Windows Agents |
|
|
Amazon credentials |
An access key ID and a secret access key used by the watcher node to make Amazon API calls. You must specify these credentials while you configure the Amazon Management Pack. You can use an IAM role to manage temporary credentials for applications that are running on an EC2 instance and making Amazon CLI or Amazon API requests. This is preferable to storing access keys within the EC2 instance. To assign an Amazon role to an EC2 instance and make it available to all of its applications, you create an instance profile that is attached to the instance. An instance profile contains the role and enables programs that are running on the EC2 instance to get temporary credentials. For more information, see Using an IAM role to grant permissions to applications running on Amazon EC2 instances in the IAM User Guide. |
|
|
EC2 instances |
Virtual computers running in the Amazon Cloud. Some instances might have the Operations Manager Agent installed, others might not. When you install the Operations Manager Agent you can see the operating system and application health apart from the instance health. |