A full list of available Cloudwatch metrics for the RDS is available here.

Additional labels can be applied to all the metrics from this plugin via the INSTANCE_LABELS plugin variable.

In order for this integration to run, you must create an IAM role and access keys for the plugin to connect to your AWS EC2 APIs and AWS Cloudwatch metrics:

1. To get started, open the AWS Management Console
2. Click the IAM tab.
3. Click the Create a New Group of Users button.
4. Enter a Group Name called Outlyer.
5. Select the Read Only Access Policy Template then click Continue.
6. Click the Create New Users tab.
7. Enter a new User Name called Outlyer and click Continue and then Finish.
8. Click Show User Security Credentials.
9. Copy and paste your Access Key Id and the Secret Access Key somewhere safe.

Plugins

There are two plugins:

• ec2-discovery.py uses the Outlyer agent’s instance discovery mechanism to automatically discover all the EC2 instances in a specified region
• aws-ec2.py is deployed as a standard check runs against each EC2 instance discovered in the discovery plugin

The discovery plugin must be currently deployed manually to disk on an agent. The plugin must be put in the agent’s plugins folder and a discovery check YAML file must be configured in the agent’s conf.d folder. An example of the YAML configuration file is shown below:

discovers:
  ec2-discovery:
    command: '/opt/outlyer/embedded/bin/python3 /etc/outlyer/plugins/ec2-discovery.py'
    interval: 300
    disabled: false
    timeout: 120

    #labels:
    # environment: 'prod'

    #metric_labels:
    #  - 'environment'

    #check_command: 
    check_interval: 30

    env:
      AWS_ACCESS_KEY_ID: <AWS_ACCESS_KEY_ID>
      AWS_SECRET_ACCESS_KEY: <AWS_SECRET_ACCESS_KEY>
      AWS_REGION: <AWS_REGION>

Once running you should see almost immediately all your EC2 instances in the host view of the Outlyer UI. After that you can then deploy the aws-ec2.py monitoring check to monitor all of the instances via Cloudwatch. It is recommended that you use the check selector cloud.service=aws.ec2 to ensure the check runs against all your EC2 instances.

It is recommended that both plugins run at 5 minute intervals to avoid significant charges on your AWS account bills

Both plugins must set the following variables to run:

• AWS_ACCESS_KEY_ID: The AWS Access Key copied above
• AWS_SECRET_ACCESS_KEY: The AWS Secret Key copied above
• AWS_REGION: The AWS Region your RDS instnces are running in

In addition the following variables can be set to override the default values:

• INSTANCE_LABELS: A comma seperated list of any labels applied to the EC2 instance from the discovery script to add to all the metrics from the aws-ec2.py plugin.
• time_range: The time range in minutes to query your metrics over. By default this is set to the last 10 minutes but if you run your functions rarely this can be set to longer for testing purposes.