Monitoring Jump Start: EC2 instance

Virtual machines are a critical component of each system that needs monitoring. You can start a single EC2 instance or a fleet of EC2 instances managed by an Auto Scaling Group. We created a CloudFormation template that you can use to monitor any EC2 instance (Windows and Linux) in a minute.

What do I have to monitor?

Each EC2 instance sends metrics to CloudWatch that we can observe with CloudWatch Alarms. We recommend to create alarms for the following metrics:

• CPU
  • CPUUtilization
  • CPUCreditBalance
• Status checks
  • StatusCheckFailed

If a metric crosses the alarm’s threshold, you receive an alert in Slack.

Set up instructions

Single EC2 instance

1. Create the CloudFormation stack with a single click
   1. Ensure that you selected the AWS region of your EC2 instance monitoring target
   2. Set the EndpointId parameter to the ID of your endpoint. You can get this value by asking @marbot for it on your Slack channel.
   3. Set the InstanceId parameter to the ID of your EC2 instance.
   4. Review the threshold parameters
   5. Save by clicking the Create button.
      

Fleet of EC2 instances managed by Auto Scaling Group

1. Create the CloudFormation stack with a single click
   1. Ensure that you selected the AWS region of your Auto Scaling Group monitoring target
   2. Set the EndpointId parameter to the ID of your endpoint. You can get this value by asking @marbot for it on your Slack channel.
   3. Set the AutoScalingGroupName parameter to the name of your Auto Scaling Group
   4. Review the threshold parameters
   5. Save by clicking the Create button.
      

Published on 09 Mar 2018

Michael Wittig

I’m the author of Amazon Web Services in Action. I work as a software engineer, and independent consultant focused on AWS and DevOps.

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