AWS Route 53 Monitoring

Amazon Route 53 is a scalable and highly available Domain Name System (DNS). The name is a reference to TCP or UDP port 53, where DNS server requests are addressed. In addition to being able to route users to various AWS services, including EC2 instances, Route 53 also enables AWS customers to route users to non-AWS infrastructure. Amazon Route 53 supports full, end-to-end DNS resolution over IPv6. Recursive DNS resolvers on IPv6 networks can use either IPv4 or IPv6 transport to send DNS queries to Amazon Route 53. Route 53's servers are distributed throughout the world.

What You Can Monitor

Opsview Monitor's AWS Route 53 monitoring provides detailed monitoring with various metrics across your AWS cloud. Opsview Monitor health checks help you track the percentage of healthy checks, statuses, and connection times to give your team insight into problems that can affect your IT estate.

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
AWS/Route53.ChildHealthCheckHealthyCount	The number of health checks that are healthy.
AWS/Route53.ConnectionTime	The average time in milliseconds that a connection was established.
AWS/Route53.HealthCheckPercentageHealthy	The percentage of healthy health checks.
AWS/Route53.HealthCheckStatus	Health check status data is viewed across all regions.
AWS/Route53.SSLHandshakeTime	The average time, in milliseconds, that it took health checkers to complete the SSL handshake.
AWS/Route53.TimeToFirstByte	The average time, in milliseconds, that it took health checkers to receive the first byte of the response to an HTTP or HTTPS request.

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.

AWS Route 53 Monitoring Setup and Configuration

To configure and utilize this Opspack, you need to add the 'Cloud - AWS - Route53 CloudWatch' Opspack to your Opsview Monitor system

Step 1: Add the host template

Add the Cloud - AWS - Route53 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_ROUTE53_HEALTH_CHECK_ID	Health Check ID taken from AWS.