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CloudWatch an AWS service provides rich set of tools to monitor health and resource utilization of various services on AWS. These metrics can be used to trigger an alarm, send notifications, even trigger actions based on these alarms.

One main metric that is missing from default CloudWatch metrics is Memory utilization of EC2 instances. Since AWS does not have access to EC2 instance at the Operating System level, only CPU, Network utilization, IO and other metrics that can be monitored through Hypervisor layer are available by default in AWS Console.

AWS provides a set of scripts that utilize CloudWatch API to send Memory Utilization info and make use of CloudWatch features to monitor and take action if alarms are raised.

The process of sending these custom metrics are different for Linux and Windows Instances. Even the process of installing pre-requisites on different Linux distributions is slightly different.

In this post we will see the process of installing and configuring CloudWatch Custom Metrics for Redhat derived Linux Distros, mainly RHEL, Amazon Linux and CentOS along with Windows to monitor Memory Utilization of the EC2 instance

Updated (27-March-2016) – Added Commands for Ubuntu Linux

List of all commands run on Linux are also available at the end of the post for easy

reference.

Step –1

Create an IAM user with access key. We do not need password or console access to this user.

Copy and keep the Access key handy as we would need this every time we configure custom metrics to be sent to CloudWatch

Mark Richard Shuttleworth, entrepreneur, founder of Canonical Ubuntu, the famous Open Source Linux Distribution and second self funded space tourist and first from Africa has recently announced Ubuntu for Phone, with a vision of building ONE OS to run on all devices ranging from Smartphone, PCs, Televisions, Tablets to super computers and cloud.

As per the announcement by Mark, phones based on Ubuntu for Phone should be available in the market somewhere during last quarter of 2013 or first quarter of 2014

The latest release of Ubuntu 12.04 LTS (Long Term Support) code named Precise Pangolin from Canonical has many new features as in with any new release improving stability and speed. The interesting addition that will excite Microsoft shops and fans is built in support for Hyper-V eliminating the need to install Microsoft Linux Integration Components inside Ubuntu 12.04 when deployed as a VM

As you can see in the above screenshots the kernel version is 3.2 which has Hyper-V IC modules and detects all Hyper-V synthetic devices like NIC, SCSI storage, has mouse integration and supports multiple vCPUs out of the box.

Hope to see other Linux distributions do the same soon.

Useful links

Click here to know more about Ubuntu new release and download links

Ubuntu home page

Click here to download 32 bit Desktop ISO image (701 MB)

Click here to download 64 bit Desktop ISO image (698 MB)

Click here for my earlier post on Linux IC and Hyper-V

Click here to know more about Pangolin