Initialize Network Flow Monitor for single account monitoring - Amazon CloudWatch
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Initialize Network Flow Monitor for single account monitoring

To initialize Network Flow Monitor to monitor network performance metrics, you must grant permissions and Network Flow Monitor must create the initial topology for your account. When you monitor resources in just one account, Network Flow Monitor sets your account as the scope for network monitoring and creates a topology for that scope.

Initializing Network Flow Monitor does the following:

  • Grants permissions for Network Flow Monitor to use required service-linked roles with your account. Network Flow Monitor requires you to grant it specific permissions so that the feature can send metrics to Amazon CloudWatch on your behalf, as well as create topologies of network flows. For more information, see Service-linked roles for Network Flow Monitor.

  • Sets your monitoring scope for Network Flow Monitor to the Amazon account that you're signed in with. For more information, see Scope in Components and features of Network Flow Monitor.

  • Creates an initial topology for your scope.

To initialize Network Flow Monitor by setting up the service-linked roles that provide the required permissions, setting the scope to your account, and creating a topology for network flow performance monitoring, follow these steps.

To initialize Network Flow Monitor

  1. Open the CloudWatch console at https://console.amazonaws.cn/cloudwatch/.

  2. In the left navigation pane, under Network Monitoring, choose Flow monitors.

  3. In the Getting started with Network Flow Monitor section, under Step 1, choose Start initialization.

  4. On the Configure Network Flow Monitor page, scroll down, and then choose Initialize Network Flow Monitor.

Completing the initialization can take 20-30 minutes.

After you initialize Network Flow Monitor for your account, before you can view network flow performance metrics, you must also install Network Flow Monitor agents for your resources that send performance metrics to the Network Flow Monitor backed ingestion server. For more information, see Install Network Flow Monitor agents on instances.