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CloudWatch solution: Amazon EC2 health

This solution helps you configure out-of-the-box metric collection using CloudWatch agents for workloads running on EC2 instances. Additionally, it helps you set up a pre-configured CloudWatch dashboard.

Requirements

This solution is relevant for the following conditions:

Benefits

The solution delivers EC2 server monitoring using the CloudWatch Agent, providing additional system-level metrics on top of the standard EC2 namespace metrics for the following use cases:

Below are the key advantages of the solution:

The following image is an example of the dashboard for this solution.

Costs

This solution creates and uses resources in your account. You are charged for standard usage, including the following:

For more information about CloudWatch pricing, see Amazon CloudWatch Pricing.

The pricing calculator can help you estimate approximate monthly costs for using this solution.

CloudWatch agent configuration for this solution

The CloudWatch agent is software that runs continuously and autonomously on your servers and in containerized environments. It collects metrics, logs, and traces from your infrastructure and applications and sends them to CloudWatch and X-Ray.

For more information about the CloudWatch agent, see Collect metrics, logs, and traces with the CloudWatch agent.

The agent configuration in this solution collects a set of metrics to help you get started monitoring and observing your EC2 instances. The CloudWatch agent can be configured to collect more EC2 metrics than the dashboard displays by default. For a list of Amazon EC2 metrics, see Metrics collected by the CloudWatch agent on Linux and macOS instances. For information about metrics collected on Windows instances, see Metrics collected by the CloudWatch agent on Windows Server instances.

Agent configuration for EC2 Health solution

The metrics collected by the agent are defined in the agent configuration. The solution provides agent configurations to collect the recommended metrics with suitable dimensions for the solution's dashboard.

The steps for deploying the solution are described later in Deploy the agent for your solution. The following information is intended to help you understand how to customize the agent configuration for your environment.

If you wish to make any modifications to the agent configuration, you must apply the same changes to the solution's accompanying dashboard. For example, if you decide to omit the ImageId dimension, the same dimension must be removed from the metric search expression used in the dashboard widgets.

Agent configuration for EC2 Instances

Use the following CloudWatch agent configuration on Amazon EC2 instances where your workloads are deployed.

{
    "agent": {
      "metrics_collection_interval": 60,
      "run_as_user": "cwagent"
    },
    "metrics": {
      "append_dimensions": {
        "InstanceId": "${aws:InstanceId}",
        "InstanceType": "${aws:InstanceType}",
        "ImageId": "${aws:ImageId}",
        "AutoScalingGroupName": "${aws:AutoScalingGroupName}"
      },
      "metrics_collected": {
        "cpu": {
          "measurement": [
            "cpu_usage_idle",
             "cpu_usage_iowait",
             "cpu_usage_user",
             "cpu_usage_system"
          ],
          "totalcpu": true
        },
        "disk": {
          "measurement": [
            "used_percent",
            "inodes_free"
          ],
          "resources": [
            "*"
          ],
          "dimensions": [
            ["device", "fstype", "path"]
          ]
        },
        "diskio": {
           "measurement": [
             "io_time"
           ],
           "resources": [
             "*"
           ]
          },
        "mem": {
          "measurement": [
            "used_percent"
          ]
        },
        "swap": {
          "measurement": [
            "used_percent"
          ]
        }
      }
    }
  }

Deploy the agent for your solution

There are several approaches for installing the CloudWatch agent, depending on the use case. We recommend using Systems Manager for this solution. It provides a console experience and makes it simpler to manage a fleet of managed servers within a single Amazon account. The instructions in this section use Systems Manager and are intended for when you don't have the CloudWatch agent running with existing configurations. You can check whether the CloudWatch agent is running by following the steps in Verify that the CloudWatch agent is running.

If you are already running the CloudWatch agent on the EC2 hosts and managing the agent configurations, you can skip the instructions in this section and follow your existing deployment mechanism to update the configuration. Be sure to merge the EC2 Health agent configuration with your existing agent configuration, and then deploy the merged configuration. If you are using Systems Manager to store and manage the configuration for the CloudWatch agent, you can merge the configuration to the existing parameter value. For more information, see Managing CloudWatch agent configuration files.

The deployment process includes the following steps:

Step 1: Ensure the target EC2 instances have the required IAM permissions

You must grant permission for Systems Manager to install and configure the CloudWatch agent. You must also grant permission for the CloudWatch agent to publish telemetry from your EC2 instance to CloudWatch. Make sure that the IAM role attached to the instance has the CloudWatchAgentServerPolicy and AmazonSSMManagedInstanceCore IAM policies attached.

Step 2: Store the recommended CloudWatch agent configuration file in Systems Manager Parameter Store

Parameter Store simplifies the installation of the CloudWatch agent on an EC2 instance by securely storing and managing configuration parameters, eliminating the need for hard-coded values. This ensures a more secure and flexible deployment process, enabling centralized management and easier updates to configurations across multiple instances.

Use the following steps to store the recommended CloudWatch agent configuration file as a parameter in Parameter Store.

Step 3: Install the CloudWatch agent and apply the configuration using an Amazon CloudFormation template

You can use Amazon CloudFormation to install the agent and configure it to use the CloudWatch agent configuration that you created in the previous steps.

If you want to edit the template file first to customize it, choose the Upload a template file option under Create Stack Wizard to upload the edited template. For more information, see Creating a stack on Amazon CloudFormation console. You can use the following link to download the template: https://aws-observability-solutions-prod-us-east-1.s3.us-east-1.amazonaws.com/CloudWatchAgent/CFN/v1.0.0/cw-agent-installation-template-1.0.0.json .

Step 4: Verify the agent setup is configured properly

You can verify whether the CloudWatch agent is installed by following the steps in Verify that the CloudWatch agent is running. If the CloudWatch agent is not installed and running, make sure you have set up everything correctly.

Create the EC2 Health solution dashboard

This dashboard displays the newly emitted metrics, showing the EC2 Health metrics. This dashboard provides a top contributor view for the health of your EC2 instances in a single region. The top contributor view displays the top 10 per metric widget. This allows you to identify outliers at a glance.

To create the dashboard, you can use the following options:

By using the CloudWatch console to create a dashboard, you can preview the dashboard before actually creating and being charged.

If you want to edit the template file to customize it for any purpose, you can use the Upload a template file option under Create Stack Wizard to upload the edited template. For more information, see Creating a stack on Amazon CloudFormation console. You can use this link to download the template: https://aws-observability-solutions-prod-us-east-1.s3.us-east-1.amazonaws.com/EC2_Health/CloudWatch/CFN/v1.0.0/dashboard-template-linux-macos-1.0.0.json

Get started with the EC2 Health solution dashboard

Here are a few tasks that you can try out with the new EC2 monitoring dashboard. These tasks allow you to validate that the dashboard is working correctly and provide you some hands-on experience using it to monitor EC2 instances. As you try these out, you'll get familiar with navigating the dashboard and interpreting the visualized metrics.