Posted on 8 January 2020, updated on 6 August 2021.
Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) is a web service that provides secure, resizable compute capacity in the cloud. It is designed to make web-scale cloud computing easier for developers. It provides you with complete control of your computing resources and lets you run on Amazon’s proven computing environment but it’s needed to handling it quite well.
How can you monitor your EC2 instances and with which metrics and what is the best EC2 type for my application?
AWS EC2 Instance Type- Overview
All the EC2 instance types have to come up with various combinations like CPU, Storage, Memory and other networking capacities. It also gives flexibility in selecting the right mix of resources for respective applications.
- “General purpose instances provide a balance of compute, memory and networking resources, and can be used for a variety of diverse workloads”.
|
|
General Purpose |
|
| Type |
t2 (tiny or turbo) |
m5 (medium) |
| Description |
High frequency Intel Xeon processors CPU Burstable Performance Lowest-cost general purpose instance type Optimized for changing workloads |
High frequency Intel Xeon processors Balanced Optimized for consistent workloads |
- “Compute optimized instances are ideal for compute bound applications that benefit from high performance processors”
| Compute Optimized |
|
| Type |
c5 (compute) |
| Description |
High ratio of compute to memory Optimized for compute-intensive workloads Deliver cost-effective high performance at a low price per compute ratio |
- “Memory optimized instances are designed to deliver fast performance for workloads that process large data sets in memory”
|
|
Memory Optimized | |
| Type |
r4 (RAM) |
x1e (xtreme) |
| Description |
High Frequency Intel Xeon processor Optimized for memory-intensive applications Support for Enhanced Networking |
High Frequency Intel Xeon processor Optimized for high-performance databases, memory-intensive databases, and other memory-intensive applications |
- “Accelerated computing instances use hardware accelerators, or co-processors, to perform functions [...], graphics processing, or data pattern matching more efficiently than is possible in software running on CPUs.”
| Accelerated Computing |
|
| Type |
p3 (pictures) |
| Description |
High frequency Intel Xeon and GPU Optimized for functions, graphics processing, and other GPU uses Supports NVLink for peer-to-peer GPU communication |
- “Storage optimized instances are designed for workloads that require high, sequential read and write access to very large data sets on local storage. They are optimized to deliver tens of thousands of low-latency, random I/O operations per second to applications”
|
|
Storage Optimized | ||
| Types |
h1 (HDD) |
i3 (IOPS) |
d2 (dense) |
| Description |
HDD storage High disk throughput High frequency Intel Xeon processors v4 Enhanced Networking up to 25Gbps |
SSD storage High Random I/O performance and High Sequential Read throughput High frequency Intel Xeon processors v4 Enhanced Networking up to 25Gbps |
HDD storage Highest disk throughput High frequency Intel Xeon processors v3 |
Enable Available CloudWatch Metrics
By default, some metrics are unavailable through CloudWatch so we need to enable them.
For Ubuntu EC2, execute the following lines:
More information about the installation on Amazon Linux and Red Hat Enterprise Linux here.
Then download, install and configure the monitoring scripts:
Inside the package, we’ll be interested in mon-put-instance-data.pl script. It will collect memory, swap and disk space utilization data on the current system and then send it to CloudWatch. We’ll principally use MemoryUtilization and DiskSpaceUtilization.
Let’s set up a cronjob sending our metrics periodically. Add the following line in your crontab –e
Then access your metrics in CloudWatch with the prefix System/Linux.
Monitor your EC2 with CloudWatch
EC2 instances allow users to increase or decrease resource capacity on demand. It can also be integrated into AWS components and features such as Auto Scaling Group which automatically increase and decrease your EC2 instances number inside your ASG (Auto Scaling Group). It can also be grouped inside clusters and managed by either ECS (Amazon EC2 Container Service) or Kubernetes (EKS).
EC2 key metrics are generally into three types :
- CPU
- Network
- Disk I/O
Let’s dig into it...
CPU CloudWatch Metrics
For your EC2 instance :
| Name |
Description |
Unit |
CloudWatch Metric Access |
| CPUUtilization |
Percentage of allocated EC2 compute units that are currently in use on the instance |
Percent |
AWS/EC2 |
For your EC2 burstable performance instances :
| Name |
Description |
Units |
CloudWatch Metric Access |
| CPUCreditUsage ( T2 Instances) |
Number of CPU credits spent by the instance for CPU utilization |
Credits (vCPU-minutes) |
AWS/EC2 |
| CPUCreditBalance ( T2 Instances) |
Number of earned CPU credits that an instance has accrued since it was launched or started |
Credits (vCPU-minutes) |
AWS/EC2 |
| CPUSurplusCreditBalance (T2 Unlimited only) |
Number of surplus credits that have been spent |
Credits (vCPU-minutes) |
AWS/EC2 |
| CPUSurplusCreditsCharged (T2 Unlimited only) |
Number of spent surplus credits that are not paid down by earned CPU credits. |
Credits (vCPU-minutes) |
AWS/EC2 |
Network CloudWatch Metrics
| Name |
Description |
Units |
CloudWatch Namespace |
| NetworkIn |
Number of bytes received on all network interfaces by the instance |
Bytes |
AWS/EC2 |
| NetworkOut |
Number of bytes sent out on all network interfaces by the instance. |
Bytes |
AWS/EC2 |
| NetworkPacketsIn |
Number of packets received on all network interfaces by the instance. |
Count |
AWS/EC2 |
| NetworkPacketsOut |
Number of packets sent out on all network interfaces by the instance. |
Count |
AWS/EC2 |
Disk I/O CloudWatch Metrics
| Name |
Description |
Units |
CloudWatch Namespace |
| DiskReadOps/DiskWriteOps |
Completed read/write operations from all instance store volumes available to the instance in a specified period of time |
Count |
AWS/EC2 |
| DiskReadBytes/DiskWriteBytes |
Bytes read from/written to all instance store volumes available to the instance |
Bytes |
AWS/EC2 |
You also can go deeper by checking what is the best CloudWatch metrics to watch for your EBS, the Amazon Elastic Block Store alongside your EC2.
Now that you understand better EC2 types, and which metrics are important to monitor, you may check what is best for your workflow.