Docker Cloudwatch Monitoring

This Docker container contains Amazon EC2 scripts to simplify reporting additional EC2 instance information to Cloudwatch. These Perl scripts comprise a fully functional examples that reports memory, swap, and disk space utilization metrics for a Linux instance. You can learn more about the scripts here.

Getting started

1. Create awscreds.template with your IAM credentials. You can jumpstart the process by copying and modifying the example file with cp awscreds.template.example awscreds.template. For more information regarding creating new IAM role or modifying existing IAM role for your EC2 instance go here.

2. Create crontab to specify what metrics and when you would like reported to CloudWatch. Again, you can speed up development with copying and modifying the example file with cp crontab.example crontab. The example cron task reports instance memory and disk usage to CloudWatch every minute. To find the list of all options and what they mean, refer to the official documentation here. While modifying the options per your requirements, make sure to keep the following in mind:

Unless you move the AWS credential file, the following path should remain the same

--aws-credential-file=/aws-scripts-mon/awscreds.template

Correct disk-path is required to successfully report disk usage. For simpler configuration, /etc/hosts should suffice but feel free to double check if you see any issues.

Debugging

If you are encountering any issues with reporting EC2 metrics in production, you may try the included debugging crontab file. Copy and modify the debugging example file with cp crontab.example-debugging crontab. The two key differences is that the output of cron job is verbose and written to /var/log/cron.log file.