Monitoring Amazon EC2 with CloudWatch API

Dartware has developed a set of InterMapper probes that allow you to monitor your Amazon EC2 AMI ("Amazon Machine Instance"). Using these probes, you can see the following statistics for an AMI:

  • CPU
  • Network traffic in/out
  • Disk read/write operations
  • Disk read/write volume

You must enable the CloudWatch monitoring facility on your AMI(s) before these probes will be able to retrieve data.

These probes are written in Python and use the built-in Python interpreter as well as the Boto package to do the majority of communication with the Amazon AMIs.

The InterMapper CloudWatch Probes can be downloaded from http://download.dartware.com/thirdparty/InterMapperCloudWatchProbes.zip

ReadMe.txt file...
 

Code:
ReadMe file for InterMapper CloudWatch API probes
Updated 22 Oct 2012 -reb

This set of probes was created to utilize Amazon Web Services CloudWatch API.
The probes query any one of the CloudWatch statistics such as CPU utilization,
disk I/O, or network I/O.

Each probe calls a command-line script - awscloudwatch.py - to send the query to the AMI and parse the response.

These probes require InterMapper 5.3.2 or newer, as well as boto (http://code.google.com/p/boto/downloads/detail?name=boto-2.6.0.tar.gz or https://github.com/boto/boto) They have been tested with boto 2.6.0 19-Sep-2012, the latest version as of the publication date.

Using these Probes:

1) Move the Amazon-EC2 Probes folder to InterMapper Settings/Probes folder.

2) Download boto (URL above), and unzip it. Copy the boto folder to the InterMapper Settings/Tools folder. You do *not* need to install the boto module; simply placing it in the Tools folder will suffice. NB: You must ensure that the boto folder is named exactly "boto" without any version numbers.

3) Reload Probes (Shift-Ctl-R) to ensure that the new probes are available.

4) Add a device (address should be "localhost" - the AMI is identified solely by its instance ID).

5) Set Probe... (Ctl-T) and find the CloudWatch probes in the Amazon-EC2 category. Enter the instance ID, the Access Key ID, the Secret Access Key, and the desired thresholds.

6) Click OK. The device should turn green and show the current activity.

For more information about these probes, please contact support.intermapper@helpsystems.com.