AWS Custom Monitoring

AWS - Generic CloudWatch Opspack

Amazon Web Services (AWS) is a secure cloud services platform, offering compute power, database storage, content delivery and other functionality to help businesses scale and grow. Millions of customers are currently leveraging AWS cloud products and solutions to build sophisticated applications with increased flexibility, scalability and reliability.

What Can You Monitor

Opsview Monitor's AWS Generic Cloudwatch Opspack provides an easy way to monitor AWS and all of your custom Cloudwatch metrics. You can easily tie these custom service checks into the larger picture of your infrastructure for a complete view of your AWS environment.

Note: This Opspack knows when it was last run, so when testing the results in the troubleshoot section, you will need to wait a couple minutes each time you recheck the results. The time frame that is searched for is based around the last time the Opspack ran, so running it too quickly will result in no data being found and the service check going into an unknown

Service Checks

Service Check	Description
AWSCloudWatch/Generic.CPUReservation	The percentage of CPU units that are reserved by running tasks in the cluster.
AWSCloudWatch/Generic.CPUUtilization	The percentage of CPU utilization.
AWSCloudWatch/Generic.MemoryReservation	The percentage of memory that is reserved by running tasks in the cluster.

Prerequisites

To be able to monitor AWS CloudWatch services, you need to add your AWS credentials to your Opsview Monitor server.
Create a temporary aws_credentials.cfg file with the following contents:

[default]
aws_access_key_id = "Your Access Key Id"
aws_secret_access_key = "Your Secret Key Id"

Then run the following command as the opsview user to import this file:

/opt/opsview/orchestrator/bin/orchestratorimportscripts etc-plugins cloud-aws /path/to/aws_credentials.cfg

After an Apply Changes has been run, this will be distributed to the live location on all Opsview collectors.

The default live location for this file is /opt/opsview/monitoringscripts/etc/plugins/cloud-aws/aws_credentials.cfg. If you are not using the default location, you will need to assign your full path to the variable: AWS_CLOUDWATCH_AUTHENTICATION.

Setup and Configuration

To configure and utilize this Opspack, you need to add the 'Cloud - AWS - CloudWatch' Opspack to your Opsview Monitor system.

Step 1: Add the host template

Add the Cloud - AWS - CloudWatch Host Template to your Opsview Monitor host. Add the Primary Hostname/IP. This can be the Public DNS (IPV4) or IPV4 Public IP from the Description tab of an EC2 instance in the EC2 Console in AWS.

For more information, refer to Opsview Knowledge Center - Adding Host Templates to Hosts.

Step 2: Add and configure variables required for this host

Variable	Description
AWS_CLOUDWATCH_AUTHENTICATION	Authentication details for CloudWatch. The Value is not used and therefore can be set to anything. Either override the File Path with the location of your credentials file, or override the Access Key and Secret Key arguments (this approach is recommended as the values will be encrypted). Optionally, override the Region (default: eu-west-1) with the location of your instance if you are not using the default region.
AWS_CLOUDWATCH_ROLE_ARN	This optional variable is the Amazon Resource Name (ARN) of the role to be used for the service checks. Override the Access ARN with the ARN of the role. The account should have AssumeRole(STS) for this ARN.
AWS_CLOUDWATCH_GENERIC_SEARCH	Specify the AWS CloudWatch metric you want to monitor (e.g. CPUUtilization, CPUReservation, MemoryReservation).