AWS – EC2 Monitoring

An important part of APM for Cloud solutions, especially when you’re running applications in Amazon Web Services, is a complete EC2 Monitoring solution. Amazon Web Services (AWS) Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) is a central part of Amazon’s cloud computing platform, providing Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS). Different virtual private server specifications may be customized by the user and billed by the hour, minute, or second, providing a highly-elastic infrastructure framework. Monitoring EC2 instances is both difficult (since it is not technically controlled by the user) and easy (since there are several Amazon API’s designed to help get some information).

The Instana agent will automatically detect that it is running on an EC2 instance and install the AWS EC2 Monitoring Sensor.

EC2 monitoring of cloud-based application performance and availability isn’t as straight-forward as monitoring an on-premise (or hosted) server since EC2 instances tend to be temporary. Furthermore, the platforms installed on any EC2 instance should be the center of application monitoring activity. For that reason, Instana’s EC2 monitoring focuses on EC2 configuration data for each instance. Since each virtual machine is essentially a blank slate that customers can instantiate, start, and stop.

Instana’s EC2 Monitoring includes the following configuration data:

• Availability zone
• AMI ID
• Type
• Security Groups

All captured metadata is indexed by Instana and is available to Instna’s Dynamic Focus search engine, allowing queries such as: entity.ec2.type:m4.xlarge AND entity.selfType:mongodb

This metadata is useful for users to see the exact state of all entities involved in any way with EC2, like focusing in on all Mongodb instances running on an m4.xlarge type like the example above.

A key part of Instana’s EC2 monitoring is the real-time identification and alerting to changes within the EC2 configuration. Instana will track configuration changes such as:

• Availability zone
• AMI ID
• Security Groups

For more details, check out Instana’s official EC2 Sensor documentation.

Instana will track any and all of these changes on the timeline, an example of which is captured in the screenshot below: