Amazon EC2

Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) provides scalable computing in the AWS Cloud. Launch as many or as few virtual servers as you need, and scale up or down as capacity needs change on your network.

Observe helps you monitor the health and activity of your EC2 instances with these features:

  • A dataset containing the details of individual EC2 instances, allowing you to investigate their status and attributes over time.

  • A board with at-a-glance insights, such as CPU utilization, status check failures, and network throughput.

  • Additional datasets for AWS resources related to your EC2 instances, such as security groups or attached EBS volumes.

  • Sample Monitor configurations to enable proactive alerting on changes in instance health.

Observe provides these tools as part of the Observe AWS Integration app. To use them in your workspace, install the AWS Integration app with EC2 selected. This creates a data stream and adds the Monitor templates for EC2.

Note

To monitor the operating system or processes running on an EC2 instance rather than the AWS information about that instance, see the Linux host monitoring Integration. The Linux Integration includes OS-level metrics such as memory usage and free disk space.

When you install AWS EC2 using the AWS app, the app adds the following datasets:

Event Datasets

  • EC2 Instance Metrics

  • EC2 Volume Metrics

Resource Datasets

  • EC2 EBS Volume

  • EC2 Instance

  • EC2 Network Interface

  • EC2 Network Interface Security Groups

  • EC2 Security Group

  • EC2 VPC

Viewing EC2 activity in Observe

The EC2 dashboard

To see details of your EC2 instances, go to the EC2 Instance dataset in Observe. The dashboard displays an overview of the activity and health of your EC2 instances.

Monitoring board for the EC2 Instance resource dataset. Visualizations include summaries of instance types, charts of the number of instances in each availability zone, how many failed status checks occurred, and CPU utilization per instance.

Figure 1 - The Dashboard for EC2

To investigate a specific instance or set of instances, use the InstanceID filter to view that instance.

The Metrics section contains visualizations useful for performance and health monitoring, including the following:

  • State - How many instances are running or stopped?

  • Instance type - How many instances of each type?

  • Status check failed - How many instances have failed status checks?

  • CPU utilization

  • EBS read and write throughput

  • Network throughput

Additional visualization cards on the EC2 Monitoring board. CPU utilization, EBS Read Bytes, EBS Write Bytes, Network In, Network Out. A popup shows details of a spike in EBS Read Bytes, available by hovering over a point in the chart.

Figure 2 - Additional dashboard cards

EC2 Monitors

The EC2 integration includes the following Monitor templates:

  • EC2 EBS Volume Status

  • EC2 Health Alert

To use a template, go to the list of templates on the Monitors page and select the one you wish to use. Make any desired configuration changes on the Create a Monitor page and save it.

Setup

Install the Observe AWS Integration app and enable EC2, and then create datasets and customize Monitors.