Configuring Amazon EC2 monitoring

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The Amazon EC2 agent provides you with a central point of monitoring for the health, availability, and performance of your Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) Instances. The agent displays a comprehensive set of metrics to help you make informed decisions about your EC2 environment. These metrics include CPU usage, Elastic Block Store (EBS) usage, network usage, Amazon Web Services (AWS) maintenance updates, and disk performance.

Before you begin

  • Read the entire Configuring Amazon EC2 monitoring topic to determine what is needed to complete the configuration.
  • The product version and the agent version often differ. The directions here are for the most current release of this agent. For more information about how to check the version of an agent in your environment, see Agent version command. To access the documentation for earlier agent releases, see the Table 1 table.
    Table 1. Agent versions
    Agent version Documentation
    8.1.3.1, 8.1.3.2, 8.1.3.3, 8.1.3.4 Cloud APM 8.1.4
  • Make sure that the system requirements for the Amazon EC2 agent are met in your environment. For the up-to-date system requirement information, see the Software Product Compatibility Reports (SPCR) for the Amazon EC2 agent.
  • Ensure that the following information is available:
    • A list of the AWS region names that contain EC2 instances to monitor.
    • The AWS security credentials (Access Key ID and Secret Access Key) with permission to access each AWS region.
  • Ensure that the AWS security credentials that are used for each AWS region are a member of a group that includes at least the AmazonEC2ReadOnlyAccess policy.

About this task

The Amazon EC2 agent is both a multiple instance agent and also a subnode agent. You can create one agent instance with multiple subnodes – one for each Amazon EC2 region, or you can create an agent instance for each Amazon EC2 region with one subnode for that region. Or you can create a combination of each type of configuration. After you configure agent instances, you must start each agent instance manually. If you have more than 50 resources per Amazon EC2 region, it is suggested that you create an agent instance per region or use tagging on your EC2 instances and filter agent instances by the tags you create by using the agent's filtering condition parameter.

Procedure

  1. Configure the agent on Windows systems with the IBM Performance Management window or the silent response file.
  2. Configure the agent on Linux® systems with the script that prompts for responses or the silent response file.

What to do next

In the Cloud APM console, go to your Application Performance Dashboard to view the data that was collected. For more information about using the Cloud APM console, see Starting the Cloud APM console.

If you are unable to view the data in the agent dashboards, first check the server connection logs and then the data provider logs. The default paths to these logs are listed here:
  • Linux/opt/ibm/apm/agent/logs
  • WindowsC:\IBM\APM\TMAITM6_x64\logs
For help with troubleshooting, see the Cloud Application Performance Management Forum.