Amazon EC2 monitoring integration

Amazon EC2 provides resizable compute capacity to help you run and scale business applications in the cloud. With Site24x7's monitoring capabilities, you can monitor your EC2 instances both at the hypervisor level(CloudWatch) and at the system level(Agent).

Overview

Site24x7 supports the below modes of monitoring for Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) instances:

• CloudWatch EC2 integration: Monitor basic infrastructure measures like CPU usage, disk I/O stats for instance store volumes, network traffic metrics, and CPU credits usage.
• Enhanced EC2 monitoring (CloudWatch integration + Agent based approach): Monitor deep system level metrics like memory utilization, EBS disk usage, CPU steal, process level information and application metrics by deploying our lightweight agent on your EC2 instance.
• Monitor Capacity Reservations: Monitor the on-demand capacity reservations of EC2 instances.
• CloudWatch agent and Amazon EC2 server integration

Setup and configuration

• If you haven't done it already, enable access to your AWS resource by creating Site24x7 as an IAM user or by creating a cross-account IAM role between your account and Site24x7's AWS account. Learn more.
• Next, In the Integrate AWS Account page, please make sure the EC2 Instance checkbox is selected in the Services to be discovered field. Learn more.

Policies and permissions

Please ensure the following read level actions are present in the policy document assigned to the Site24x7 IAM entity. Learn more.

• "ec2:DescribeAddresses",
• "ec2:DescribeInstances",
• "ec2:DescribeSnapshotAttribute",
• "ec2:DescribeInstanceAttribute",
• "ec2:DescribeSnapshots",
• "ec2:DescribeInstanceCreditSpecifications",
• "ec2:GetConsoleOutput",
• "ec2:DescribeImages",
• "ec2:DescribeVolumeStatus",
• "ec2:DescribeAvailabilityZones",
• "ec2:DescribeVolumes",
• "ec2:DescribeAccountAttributes",
• "ec2:DescribeElasticGpus",
• "ec2:DescribeInstanceStatus",
• "ec2:DescribeVpcs",
• "ec2:DescribeFlowLogs",
• "ec2:DescribeNatGateways",
• "ec2:DescribeSubnets",
• "ec2:DescribeVpcEndpoints",
• "ec2:DescribeVpnConnections",
• "ec2:DescribeVpcPeeringConnections",
• "ec2:DescribeRouteTables",
• "ec2:DescribeNetworkAcls",
• "autoscaling:DescribeAutoScalingInstances",
• "autoscaling:DescribeAutoScalingGroups"

For capacity reservation,

Polling frequency

Basic infrastructure measures are collected as per the poll frequency set (1 minute to one day), by querying the CloudWatch API. learn more.

Supported configuration tags

Configuration tags are labels, typically consisting of key-value pairs, that are used to identify, categorize, and manage configuration details of EC2 resources. They can significantly enhance the IT automation and maintenance scheduling by enabling targeted, efficient, and flexible workflows.

The supported configuration tags for EC2 monitoring are given below:

• aws_instance_id: EC2 Instance ID 
• aws_region: Resource region
• aws_ipaddress: Public IP Address of EC2 Instance 
• aws_instance_type: Instance type of EC2

IT automations

You can add automations for the AWS services supported by Site24x7. Log in to Site24x7 and go to Admin > IT Automation Templates (+) > Add Automation Templates. Once automations are added, you can schedule them to be executed one after the other.

You can now start, stop, stop with hibernate, and reboot EC2 instances using Amazon EC2 automations.

Security findings

Fortify your Amazon EC2 instances against cyber attacks by integrating Amazon Inspector and EC2; and Amazon GuardDuty and EC2 in a single console. Inspector and GuardDuty findings for Amazon EC2 can be grouped according to its severity level. The group by feature lets you sort the severity categories and lists the corresponding Rules Package Name and comments if any.

In addition to adding these threshold configurations for your monitored EC2 instance, you can also choose to set thresholds and get notified for:

• Security findings based on the severity level like high, low, medium, informational, or total count under the Inspector/GuardDuty threshold configuration.
• Accelerator configurations like GPU memory utilization, accelerator memory usage, and accelerator utilization.

Supported metrics for CloudWatch EC2 integration

CPU credit metrics

Resource usage metrics

EBS metrics for Nitro-based instances

Volume metrics

The supported volume metrics for EC2 instance are provided here.

Accelerator metrics

Elastic Inference metrics

Amazon Elastic Inference (EI) is a resource you can attach to your Amazon EC2 instances to accelerate your deep learning (DL) inference workloads. Monitor the connectivity and performance of your Elastic Inference connected to your EC2 Instance.

Elastic Graphic metrics

Amazon Elastic Graphics provides flexible, low-cost, and high performance graphics acceleration for your Windows instances. Monitor the connectivity and performance of your Elastic Graphics accelerator connected to your EC2 Instance.

Instance status checks

Configuration details:

Enhanced EC2 monitoring (EC2 CloudWatch and agent integration)

You can also deploy the agent on your EC2 instance to gain more granularity into its performance. Once deployed, you can view system attributes (memory/swap usage), Process attributes (thread/handle count), disk attributes (free/used disk space) and network attributes (errors/dropped packets) side by side with the basic instance level EC2 attributes (mentioned above) obtained from cloudWatch.

If you want to learn more about on how you can enable this EC2 CloudWatch and agent integration for your EC2 instances, refer our product documentation. The documentation will also detail about the prerequisites, added benefits, UI features and agent deployment steps.

You can also get notified for integrated server alert groups. Learn more.

The additional attributes you'll be gaining with the integration are listed below.

Poll frequency

The system level metrics are collected every minute or every 5 minutes.

System level attributes

Process level attributes

Network attributes

Additional configuration details

Disintegrating a Server monitor from an EC2 monitor

To disintegrate a Server monitor from an EC2 monitor, follow the below steps:

1. Navigate to Cloud > AWS > EC2 instance.
2. Click the hamburger icon next to the EC2 monitor name that you wish to disintegrate.
   
3. Click Disintegrate.

Monitoring Capacity Reservations

You can now monitor the usage of the reserved capacity of AWS EC2 instances in specific availability zones and identify the used/unused capacity when there is a breach in the threshold. View the associated EC2 instances with their status under Monitored Resources tab and set thresholds to be notified when any of these instances fail.

Performance metrics for Capacity Reservations

Use-cases

• While running a batch workload at a particular time, monitoring the unused capacity can help avoid accruing additional charges.
• Monitor and set thresholds for the used instance count at the account level to identify the capacity used.

Forecast

Estimate future values of the following performance metrics and make informed decisions about adding capacity or scaling your AWS infrastructure.

• CPU Utilization
• Network In
• Network out
• CPU Credit Usage
• CPU Credit Balance
• CPU Surplus Credit Balance

Similarly, you can also view the forecast for the following metrics of EC2 Monitor Capacity Reservations:

• Instance Utilization

CloudWatch agent and Amazon EC2 server integration

Integrate your EC2 server with the CloudWatch agent and obtain detailed performance metrics.