Monitoring Jump Start: EFS File System

Many applications depend on a shared file system to exchange state. An EFS file system can be mounted to multiple EC2 instances to share files between the instances. But the EFS file system is a finite resource that can be exhausted. That’s why you need to add monitoring to be alerted if the file system gets a bottleneck. We created a CloudFormation template that you can use to monitor any EFS file system in a minute.

What do I have to monitor?

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

• BurstCreditBalance
• PercentIOLimit

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

Set up instructions

1. Create the CloudFormation stack with a single click
   1. Ensure that you selected the AWS region of your file system 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 FileSystemId parameter to the ID of your EFS file system.
   4. Review the threshold parameters
   5. Save by clicking the Create button.
      

Published on 27 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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