Help Amazon Web Services CloudWatch Agent Integration with Amazon EC2 Servers

CloudWatch Agent Integration with Amazon EC2 Servers

The Site24x7 CloudWatch agent can fetch detailed metrics from Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) instances.

Table of contents

Prerequisites for monitoring using the CloudWatch agent

CloudWatch agent namespace

Site24x7 follows the default namespace CWAgent to collect metrics from Amazon CloudWatch. If you have a custom namespace, you must modify it to the default standards so Site24x7 can fetch data.

CloudWatch agent namespace

Adding dimensions to the CloudWatch agent configuration wizard

Site24x7 captures metrics using the following dimensions:

  • ImageId
  • InstanceId
  • InstanceType
    CloudWatch agent dimensions

Enable these dimensions in order for Site24x7 to collect metrics from CloudWatch.


Policies and permissions

Site24x7 requires you to enable ReadOnly permissions for the following so the CloudWatch agent works seamlessly in your AWS environment:

CloudWatch agent policies
  • CloudWatchAgentAdminPolicy
  • CloudWatchAgentServerPolicy
EC2 permissions
  • "ec2:DescribeInstances"
  • "ec2:DescribeImages"
CloudWatch permissions
  • "cloudwatch:GetMetricData"
  • "cloudwatch:GetMetricStatistics"
  • "cloudwatch:ListMetrics"

Enabling the CloudWatch agent in Site24x7

  1. From the Site24x7 web client, go to Cloud > AWS > your AWS Account > Advanced Configurations.
  2. Enable EC2 CloudWatch Agent into EC2: Toggle to Yes.
    By default, this option will be set to No for existing Site24x7 users and to Yes for new users.

Criteria

  • If you already integrated the Site24x7 Server Monitoring agent with your EC2 server, you cannot integrate a CloudWatch agent with that EC2 monitor.
  • If a CloudWatch agent is integrated with your EC2 server, you cannot integrate a Site24x7 Server Monitoring agent with that EC2 monitor.

Supported metrics

CloudWatch agent for Windows

Metric Description Unit
Memory % Committed Bytes In Use The percent of memory currently committed and in use Percentage
Logical Disk % Free Space The percent of free memory remaining on the logical disk Percentage
Paging File % Usage  The percent of free memory remaining on the paging file  Percentage 
Processor % Idle Time  The unused free processor or CPU capacity  Percentage 
Processor % Interrupt Time  The time the processor spent receiving and servicing hardware interrupts during sample intervals  Percentage 
Processor % User Time  The percent of time the processor spent executing in user mode  Percentage 
Physical Disk % Disk Time  The percent of time the selected disk drive was busy servicing read or write requests  Percentage
Physical Disk Write  Disk write throughput per second  Bytes/sec
Physical Disk Read   Disk read throughput per second  Bytes/sec
Physical Disk Writes/sec  Disk write operations per second (IOPS that are write operations)  Writes/sec 
Physical Disk Reads/sec  Disk read operations per second (IOPS that are read operations)  Reads/sec 
TCPv4 Connections Established  The total number of TCP v4 connections established   Count
TCPv6 Connections Established  The total number of TCP v6 connections established   Count 
Number of processes in Available status The number of processes in Available status. Count
Number of processes in Down status The number of processes in Down status. Count
Number of processes in Trouble status The number of processes in Trouble status. Count
Number of processes in Critical status The number of processes in Critical status. Count
Number of processes in Suspended status The number of processes in Suspended status. Count
Number of processes in Maintenance The number of processes in Maintenance status. Count

CloudWatch agent for Linux or Unix

Metric Description Unit
Memory Used The percent of memory currently in use  Percentage
Swap Space Used The percent of swap space currently in use Percentage 
Free Disk Inodes The number of available index nodes on the disk Count 
Used Disk The percent of total disk space in use Percentage 
Disk I/O Time The amount of time the disk has had I/O requests queued Milliseconds
Disk I/O Write in Bytes The number of bytes written to the disk Bytes 
Disk I/O Read in Bytes The number of bytes read from the disk Bytes 
Disk I/O Write Count The number of disk write operations Count 
Disk I/O Read Count The number of disk read operations  Count 
CPU Usage Idle The percent of time the CPU is idle  Percentage 
CPU Usage I/O Wait The percent of time the CPU is waiting for I/O operations to complete  Percentage 
CPU Usage User The percent of time the CPU is in user mode  Percentage 
CPU Usage System The percent of time the CPU is in system mode  Percentage 
Netstat TCP Established  The number of TCP connections established  Count 
Netstat TCP Time Wait The number of TCP connections currently waiting to ensure that the client received the acknowledgement of its connection termination request  Count 
Number of processes in Available status The number of processes in Available status. Count
Number of processes in Down status The number of processes in Down status. Count
Number of processes in Trouble status The number of processes in Trouble status. Count
Number of processes in Critical status The number of processes in Critical status. Count
Number of processes in Suspended status The number of processes in Suspended status. Count
Number of processes in Maintenance The number of processes in Maintenance status. Count

Threshold configuration

To configure thresholds for your integrated monitor:

  1. Navigate to Admin > Configuration Profiles > Threshold and Availability.
  2. Click Add Threshold Profile.
  3. Select CloudWatch Agent from the Monitor Type drop-down menu.
  4. Provide an appropriate name in the Display Name field. The supported metrics are displayed in the Threshold Configuration section. You can set threshold values for all the metrics listed above.
  5. After you set the threshold values for the applicable metrics, click Save.

Notify for Procstat status changes

The Notify for Procstat Changes option is set to No by default. Toggle this option to Yes, to get notified when the Procstat monitor is in Available, Down, Trouble, Critical, Suspended, or Maintenance status.

Licensing

The CloudWatch agent integration with EC2 servers can be used for free in Site24x7.

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Help Amazon Web Services CloudWatch Agent Integration with Amazon EC2 Servers