CEO's Blog

Blog Entry of Thursday, August 20 2009 in PRTG 7

New Features in PRTG 7.2: Support for Amazon CloudWatch

During the beta test of version 7.2 of PRTG Network Monitor I will write a few posts about new features that we have built into this new version. If you are using Amazon EC2 (Elastic Comput Cloud) to host one or more servers then this new sensor is for you. Amazon offers the CloudWatch service for EC2 instances since May this year and it provides performance data for individual instances on EC2. Usage of the service costs $0.015 per hour for each Amazon EC2 instance you choose to monitor. Via the CloudWatch service PRTG will be able to display the following information for each of your EC2 instances:

• CPU Utilization
• DiskRead
• DiskRead Ops
• DiskWrite
• DiskWrite Ops
• Network In
• Network Out

Yes, you could also monitor the values "from the inside" by monitoring from the "guest operating system" itself. But using CloudWatch has two advantages:

• Operating system independence: You can monitor the vital system parameters regardless of the OS running on the instance
• More security: You don't need to open any ports for monitoring requests to the instance

Step 1: Enable CloudWatch on Your Instance

Using the Javascript Scratchpad is the quickest way to do this. You can use the Amazon tools as well and, eventually, the AWS management console should support this in the future as well. [Edit Sep 1st 2009: Amazon AWS Console now supports CloudWatch, see the AWS blog] Download and unzip the Javascript Scratchpad for Amazon EC2. After unzipping the file find the index.html page and open it in a browser. Enter your "AWS Access Key ID" and "AWS Secret Access Key" at the top left and choose "Monitor Instances" from the "Explore API" dropdown on the right. For each instance enter the "Instace Id" of the desired EC2 instance and click "Invoke Request" once. You will see an XML file in your browser that says "<state>pending</state>". If you reload the URL a little later it will say "enabled". That's it. CloudWatch is running.

Step 2: Create a CloudWatch Sensor in PRTG

In PRTG's user interface create a new device for your EC2 instance (if you don't have one already) and then add a new CloudWatch sensor to it (you can find the sensor in the "Virtual Servers" section of the sensor type selection). All you need to enter are your "AWS Access Key ID", "AWS Secret Access Key" and the "Instance Id". Click OK and your sensor will start automatically. Here is a sample graph created by PRTG: In the graph you will notice peaks for CPU and disk access every 15 minutes. These are created by the short load tests that we run on this EC2 instance for our www.CloudClimate.com website which displays live performance data of various cloud hosting vendors. Note: CloudWatch is currently only available in the US availability zones of Amazon EC2