CloudWatch Logs
CloudWatch is used to collate and collect metrics on resources, monitor their performance, and respond to alerts
Allows you to collect logs of your applications and a number of different AWS services
Provides the ability to monitor log streams in real-time and set up metric filters to search for specific events
Unified CloudWatch Agent — allows the collection of logs from EC2 instances as well from on-premise servers
CloudWatch Agent Installation
- Create a role and attach it to the instance with permission to collect data from the instances in addition to interacting with SSM
- Download and install the agent onto the EC2 instance
- Configure and start the CloudWatch agent
Creating Roles
You will need to create two roles:
- Used to install the agent and also to send the additional metrics gathered to CloudWatch
- Used to communicate with the Parameter store within SSM, to store a configuration information file of the Agent
Configuration of the role with the additional permission for SSM:
- Select the type of trusted identity — AWS Service
- Choose the service that will use this role — EC2 allows EC2 instances to call AWS services on your behalf
- Attach Permission Policies — CloudWatchAgentAdminPolicy & AmazonEC2RoleforSSM
The role used to install the agent and send data to CloudWatch:
- Select the type of trusted identity — AWS Service
- Choose the service that will use this role — EC2 Allows EC2 instances to call AWS services on your behalf
- Attach Permission Policies — CloudWatchAgentServerPolicy & AmazonEC2RoleforSSM
Downloading the Agent
From the EC2 instance with additional permissions, you then install the agent
Prerequisites
- Verify that your EC2 instance has access to the internet
- You must also have the SSM agent installed
- It’s already installed for Linux AMIs date 2017.09 and later, Windows Server 2016 instances, Instances created from Windows Server 2003–2012 R2 AMIs published in November 2016 or later
Configuring the Agent
On your first instance, you need to create the CloudWatch Agent Configuration File
- This file stores configuration parameters that specify which metrics and logs to capture on the instance
- It can be created manually or by using a wizard
