AWS ELB Monitoring

About AWS ELB Monitoring

Elastic Load Balancing automatically distributes incoming application traffic across multiple Amazon EC2 instances. It enables you to achieve fault tolerance in your applications, seamlessly providing the required amount of load balancing capacity needed to route application traffic. Monitoring ELB is part of Opsview Monitor's continuing support for AWS Monitoring.

What You Can Monitor

With our Opsview AWS ELB monitoring, you can easily and affordably look after your Amazon Web Services ELB (Elastic Load Balancing) instances. Our Opspack provides detailed monitoring with various metrics across your AWS cloud, including; latency, healthy hosts counts and backend connection errors.

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 of 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
AWS/ELB.BackendConnectionErrors	The number of connections that were not successfully established
AWS/ELB.HealthyHostCount	The number of healthy instances registered with your load balancer
AWS/ELB.HTTPCode_Backend	The number of HTTP response codes generated by registered instances
AWS/ELB.HTTPCode_ELB	The number of HTTP response codes of each code from the load balancer
AWS/ELB.Latency	The time elapsed, in seconds, after the request leaves the load balancer until the headers of the response are received
AWS/ELB.RequestCount	The number of requests completed or connections made during the specified interval
AWS/ELB.SpilloverCount	The total number of requests that were rejected because the surge queue is full
AWS/ELB.SurgeQueueLength	The total number of requests that are pending routing
AWS/ELB.UnHealthyHostCount	The number of unhealthy instances registered with your load balancer

Prerequisites

To be able to monitor AWS CloudWatch services you need to add your AWS credentials to your Opsview Monitor server.

We recommend adding your AWS Access Key ID and AWS Secret Key ID to the default location /opt/opsview/monitoringscripts/etc/plugins/cloud-aws/aws_credentials.cfg`using the following command after creating your `aws_credentials.cfg file:
/opt/opsview/orchestrator/bin/orchestratorimportscripts etc-plugins cloud-aws /path/to/aws_credentials.cfg

This will set up the correct permissions for use. On a multi-cluster system, you can then run sync_monitoringscripts to distribute to all collectors at the same file location.

This credentials file should be in the following format:

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

If you are not using the default path, you will then need to assign your path to the variable: AWS_CLOUDWATCH_AUTHENTICATION.

AWS ELB Monitoring Setup and Configuration

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

Step 1: Add the host template

Add the Cloud - AWS - ELB CloudWatch Host Template to your Opsview Monitor host. If the resource you're monitoring has no hostname or public IP, then open the Advanced settings pane and change Host Check Command to Always assumed to be UP.

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

Step 2: Add and configure the variables for the 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_ELB_LOAD_BALANCER_NAME	Load Balancer name from AWS