AWS CloudWatch Custom Metrics Cookbook

Install and configure AWS CloudWatch Monitoring Scripts. These are AWS provided Perl scripts for Linux that monitor memory and disk metrics which are pushed to CloudWatch.

Requirements

Platforms

• Amazon Linux
• CentOS 7.x/RHEL 7.x
• Ubuntu 14.04, 16.04

Chef

• Chef 12.11+

Dependent Cookbooks

• cron

Attributes

See attributes/default.rb for the current default values as the listing below may not be current:

• node['cwmon']['user'] - The user to run the script and own files. Created if necessary. Defaults to cwmon.
• node['cwmon']['group'] - The user's group. Defaults to cwmon.
• node['cwmon']['base'] - The base directory which will own the installation and files. Defaults to /opt/aws/cloudwatch.
• node['cwmon']['version'] - The version of the scripts to install. Defaults to 1.2.1.
• node['cwmon']['interval'] - Frequency with which to run script via cron job. Defaults to 5 minutes.
• node['cwmon']['options'] - The list of options to pass to the script. The following options are included by default:
  • --auto-scaling
  • --disk-space-avail
  • --disk-space-used
  • --disk-space-util
  • --disk-path=/
  • --mem-avail
  • --mem-used
  • --mem-used-incl-cache-buff
  • --mem-util
  • --swap-used
  • --swap-util

Note: It is not necessary to include the --from-cron option as it is appended to any options specified.

Usage

Put recipe[cloudwatch-monitor] in a run list, or include_recipe 'cloudwatch-monitor' to ensure that the CloudWatch monitoring script is installed and cron'ed on your systems.

AWS authentication

You instance must use an IAM Role for the script to properly work in pushing metrics to CloudWatch. Using IAM instance profiles is a best practice and as such I intentionally did not make provisions for the alternative. An example IAM Profile is:

{
  "Version": "2012-10-17",
  "Statement": [
    {
      "Sid": "CustomCloudWatchMetricsAccess",
      "Action": [
        "cloudwatch:PutMetricData",
        "cloudwatch:GetMetricStatistics",
        "cloudwatch:ListMetrics",        
        "ec2:DescribeTags"
      ],
      "Effect": "Allow",
      "Resource": [
        "*"
      ]
    }
  ]
}

Changes

See CHANGELOG.md for more details.

License and Author

See LICENSE for more details.

Trademark

Amazon Web Services and AWS are trademarks of Amazon.com, Inc. or its affiliates in the United States and/or other countries.