Instructor: So let's talk about a way for us
to collect metrics and logs
from within our EC2 instances.
And this is the Unified CloudWatch Agent.
So this is for virtual servers,
it could be for your EC2 instances
or your on-premise servers,
and you're going to connect additional system-level metrics,
such as the RAM, processes,
used disk space, et cetera, et cetera.
And you can also send the logs to CloudWatch logs.
Because by default, if you launch an EC2 instance,
there will be no files, no logs,
that will be sent from your EC2 instance
to CloudWatch Logs
without using an agent,
and that agent could be the CloudWatch Unified Agents.
So the idea is that,
if you wanted to get the memory metric
from within your EC2 instances,
the only way you could do it
is using the CloudWatch Unified Agent.
Then, if you wanted to configure your agent,
you can configure it
by using the SSM Parameter Store
and storing the configuration in a central place.
Or you can specify a configuration file, alternatively.
So you have your EC2 instance
with a Unified CloudWatch Agent
and you want to send metrics and logs to CloudWatch.
For this, you would just configure the agents
and make sure you have the right permissions.
This is also true if you wanted to use a server
from within your own corporate data center.
So on-premises, you would still install
the Unified CloudWatch Agent,
you would specify IAM permissions
and then it would be able to push the logs
and push the metrics.
So they're important because you are interacting
with possibly the SSM Parameter Store,
as well as the CloudWatch Logs
and CloudWatch metrics services.
They need to be able to have the correct IAM permissions
attached to your IAM role on your EC2 instance,
or attached to your access keys
that are deployed on your on-premises servers.
Finally, any metrics that is being pushed
by the Unified CloudWatch Agent,
is starting with the prefix CWAgent,
so this is going to be in this namespace.
You can configure and changes this,
but at least this is the default one.
So, something you need to know that comes up in the exam
is that there is a procstat Plugin, sorry,
on the CloudWatch Agent.
And that means that with this procstat Plugin,
you're going to collect metrics
and monitor system utilization
of individual processes
running on your Linux or Windows servers.
For example, you would get some information
around how much time a CPU will be using,
a process will be using the CPU,
or how much memory a process will be using,
or the process that are running
directly on your EC2 instance.
So you can select which processes to monitor by PID file.
So you can get the PID, so the process ID number,
or you can get the name that you have of the process
or the pattern.
If you want it to filter again,
the processes to monitor
and all the metrics related to your statistics
of your processes on your Linux or windows servers,
we'll be starting with a procstat prefix,
so procstat_time, procstat_cpu_usage, and so on.
So again, what we need to remember out of this
is that if you wanted to get some information
around the processes running and their associated metrics,
the only way to do it
would be to use the Unified CloudWatch Agents
deployed on your institute's instances
and configured to use that plugin.
So, that's it for this lecture,
I hope you liked it,
and I will see you in the next lecture.