CloudWatch Agent Installation on Ubuntu Bionic

Installing and Configuring AWS CloudWatch agent on Ubuntu 18.04 LTS

Using CloudWatch for EC2 instances get you a lot of insight before trying to use third party monitoring solutions. Since it is an integrated service, setting up and make it available is a breeze. Lets see how to do that step by step.

Prerequisites:

1. IAM Role attached to the instance with required permissions
2. "collectd" - A system information collection tool that collects and organize metrics of your instance

To make aws cloudwatch agent to push data from the instance, you need to attach an IAM role. AWS provides a role by default called

CloudWatchAgentServerRole

But, if, you have an IAM role attached to the instance already, make sure you attach  the following policy to the role.

CloudWatchAgentServerPolicy

First thing first, update your ubuntu apt repository,

sudo apt-get update

I would always prefer to go into tmp directory to download materials, so,

cd /tmp

Now, lets download the aws cloudwatch agent package

sudo wget https://s3.amazonaws.com/amazoncloudwatch-agent/ubuntu/amd64/latest/amazon-cloudwatch-agent.deb

Installation is just a command away

sudo dpkg -i -E ./amazon-cloudwatch-agent.deb

As part of installation, a service account called `cwagent` will be created for the agent to use. We need to grant the read permission to this user to read logs from various locations

sudo usermod -aG adm cwagent

At this time, the aws cloudwatch agent is just installed and it is neither started nor configured.

We need to install "collectd" as specified in the prerequisites section. Believe me, this is easy.

sudo apt-get install collectd collectd-utils

Once the installation is completed, you can enable / disable plugins in "collectd" to collect metrics of your requirement.

sudo nano /etc/collectd/collectd.conf

Hostname "app_host"

If you have a real domain name configured, you can skip this and just leave `FQDNLookup` so that the server will use the DNS system to get the proper domain.

LoadPlugin apache
LoadPlugin cpu
LoadPlugin df
LoadPlugin entropy
LoadPlugin interface
LoadPlugin load
LoadPlugin memory
LoadPlugin processes
LoadPlugin rrdtool
LoadPlugin users

We have completed all the steps for the agent to collect metrics. Now we need to configure the agent to complete the whole process. Surprisingly, this is made super easy by just calling the wizard.

sudo /opt/aws/amazon-cloudwatch-agent/bin/amazon-cloudwatch-agent-config-wizard

Once the wizard is completed, a config file is created automatically for you and stored in,

/opt/aws/amazon-cloudwatch-agent/bin/config.json by default and you have to copy it to,

/opt/aws/amazon-cloudwatch-agent/etc/amazon-cloudwatch-agent.json

I would do it simply by

sudo cp /opt/aws/amazon-cloudwatch-agent/bin/config.json /opt/aws/amazon-cloudwatch-agent/etc/amazon-cloudwatch-agent.json

Now, lets start the cloudwatch agent by specifying its config file

sudo /opt/aws/amazon-cloudwatch-agent/bin/amazon-cloudwatch-agent-ctl -a fetch-config -m ec2 -c file:/opt/aws/amazon-cloudwatch-agent/etc/amazon-cloudwatch-agent.json -s

Let us also make sure the agent is enabled to start during boot,

sudo systemctl enable amazon-cloudwatch-agent.service

Check the status of the service, it should say active running

sudo service amazon-cloudwatch-agent status

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