CloudWatch Agent Manual Install

1. On the left bar in the EC2 console, click on Instances and select the EC2 Instance with the CloudWatchAgentServerRole IAM role.

2. Connect into the EC2 Instance using the browser-based SSH connection tool.

3. Download the Amazon Cloudwatch agent package, the instructions below are for Amazon Linux, for other OS please check here

wget https://s3.amazonaws.com/amazoncloudwatch-agent/linux/amd64/latest/AmazonCloudWatchAgent.zip

4. Unzip and Install the package

unzip AmazonCloudWatchAgent.zip
sudo ./install.sh

5. Configure the AmazonCloudWatchAgent profile

Before running the CloudWatch agent on any servers, you must create a CloudWatch agent configuration file, which is a JSON file that specifies the metrics and logs that the agent is to collect, including custom metrics. You can create it by using the wizard or by writting it yourself from scratch. Any time you change the agent configuration file, you must then restart the agent to have the changes take effect.

The wizard can autodetect the credentials and AWS Region to use if you have the AWS credentials and configuration files in place. For more information about these files, see Configuration and Credential Files in the AWS Systems Manager User Guide and the AWS documentation page.

For now, let’s start the CloudWatch agent configuration file wizard executing the command below at the selected EC2 instance.

sudo /opt/aws/amazon-cloudwatch-agent/bin/amazon-cloudwatch-agent-config-wizard

For this lab we want to keep the following structure:

The CloudWatch Agent config file should look like the following:

{
	"agent": {
			"metrics_collection_interval": 60,
			"run_as_user": "cwagent"
	},
	"metrics": {
			"append_dimensions": {
				"AutoScalingGroupName": "${aws:AutoScalingGroupName}",
				"ImageId": "${aws:ImageId}",
				"InstanceId": "${aws:InstanceId}",
				"InstanceType": "${aws:InstanceType}"
			},
			"metrics_collected": {
				"disk": {
					"measurement": [
						"used_percent"
				],
				"metrics_collection_interval": 60,
					"resources": [
							"*"
				]
			},
			"mem": {
					"measurement": [
						"mem_used_percent"
					],
					"metrics_collection_interval": 60
			}
		}
	}
}

6. Start the CloudWatch Agent

sudo /opt/aws/amazon-cloudwatch-agent/bin/amazon-cloudwatch-agent-ctl -a fetch-config -m ec2 -c file:/opt/aws/amazon-cloudwatch-agent/bin/config.json -s

7. It may take up to 5 minutes for the metrics to become available, go back to the Amazon CloudWatch console page, under the Metrics session to validate that you are getting Memory information.

8. Click CWAgent:

9. Click ImageID,InstanceID,InstanceType:

10. Select the Instance from the list below:

You have now completed the CloudWatch agent installation and will be able to monitor on Amazon CloudWatch the memory utilization of that instance.

Automation Option

If you have to install and start the CloudWatch agent on several instances at once doing it manually might not be a scalable option. Consider using AWS Systems Manager or a pre-configured AWS CloudFormation template to automatically install the CloudWatch agent by default on all your stacks.

AWS Systems Manager Steps:

• Create IAM Roles and Users for Use with CloudWatch Agent
• Download and Configure the CloudWatch Agent
• Install the CloudWatch Agent on EC2 Instances Using Your Agent Configuration
• Install the CloudWatch Agent on On-Premises Servers

CloudFormation Steps:

• Right-click and save link as: here to download the AWS Cloudformation template
• Go to the AWS CloudFormation console
• Click to Create Stack and select Upload a template file and point to the downloaded file
• Enter a Stack Name and select a KeyName
• Enter the tag Key: Event | Value: myStackforWACostLab
• Click Next and Create stack