Prerequisites to configure an application for monitoring - Amazon CloudWatch
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Prerequisites to configure an application for monitoring

You must complete the following prerequisites to configure an application with CloudWatch Application Insights:

  • Amazon Systems Manager enablement – Install Systems Manager Agent (SSM Agent) on your Amazon EC2 instances, and enable the instances for SSM. For information about how to install the SSM Agent, see Setting up Amazon Systems Manager in the Amazon Systems Manager User Guide.

  • EC2 instance role – You must attach the following Amazon EC2 instance roles to enable Systems Manager

  • Amazon resource groups – To onboard your applications to CloudWatch Application Insights, create a resource group that includes all of the associated Amazon resources used by your application stack. This includes application load balancers, Amazon EC2 instances running IIS and web front‐end, .NET worker tiers, and SQL Server databases. For more information about application components and technology stacks supported by Application Insights, see Supported application components. CloudWatch Application Insights automatically includes Auto Scaling groups using the same tags or CloudFormation stacks as your resource group, because Auto Scaling groups are not supported by CloudFormation resource groups. For more information, see Getting Started with Amazon Resource Groups.

  • IAM permissions – For users who don't have administrative access, you must create an Amazon Identity and Access Management (IAM) policy that allows Application Insights to create a service-linked role and attach it to the user's identity. For more information about how to create the IAM policy, see IAM policy for CloudWatch Application Insights.

  • Service-linked role – Application Insights uses Amazon Identity and Access Management (IAM) service-linked roles. A service-linked role is created for you when you create your first Application Insights application in the Application Insights console. For more information, see Using service-linked roles for CloudWatch Application Insights.

  • Performance Counter metrics support for EC2 Windows instances – To monitor Performance Counter metrics on your Amazon EC2 Windows instances, Performance Counters must be installed on the instances. For Performance Counter metrics and corresponding Performance Counter set names, see Performance Counter metrics. For more information about Performance Counters, see Performance Counters.

  • Amazon CloudWatch agent – Application Insights installs and configures the CloudWatch agent. If you have CloudWatch agent installed, Application Insights retains your configuration. To avoid a merge conflict, remove the configuration of resources that you want to use in Application Insights from the existing CloudWatch agent configuration file. For more information, see Manually create or edit the CloudWatch agent configuration file.