Linux Amazon CloudWatch Agent install and configure guide

README.md

Amazon CloudWatch Agent for Linux

1. Attach needed IAM permissions to the EC2 instance profile IAM role:
   • CloudWatchAgentServerPolicy AWS managed IAM policy
   • Additional permissions likely needed (to download config from SSM parameter and to set CW Logs retention):

     {
       "Effect": "Allow",
       "Action": [
         "ssm:GetParameter"
       ],
       "Resource": [
         "arn:aws:ssm:*:*:parameter/*CloudWatch*",
         "arn:aws:ssm:*:*:parameter/*cloudwatch*",
       ]
     },
     {
       "Effect": "Allow",
       "Action": [
         "logs:PutRetentionPolicy"
       ],
       "Resource": "*"
     }

2. Install the agent:
   • Amazon Linux 2: sudo yum install amazon-cloudwatch-agent
   • Other distributions:
     • Download and install the package. Ubuntu example:

       curl -LO https://s3.amazonaws.com/amazoncloudwatch-agent/ubuntu/amd64/latest/amazon-cloudwatch-agent.deb
       sudo dpkg -i -E ./amazon-cloudwatch-agent.deb

3. Create /opt/aws/amazon-cloudwatch-agent/etc/amazon-cloudwatch-agent.json. The included example is a reasonable default, all available config can be found here.
4. Apply the config and start the agent:

   sudo /opt/aws/amazon-cloudwatch-agent/bin/amazon-cloudwatch-agent-ctl -a fetch-config -m ec2 -s -c file:/opt/aws/amazon-cloudwatch-agent/etc/amazon-cloudwatch-agent.json

amazon-cloudwatch-agent.json

{
  "metrics": {
    "append_dimensions": {
      "ImageId": "${aws:ImageId}",
      "InstanceId": "${aws:InstanceId}",
      "InstanceType": "${aws:InstanceType}",
      "AutoScalingGroupName": "${aws:AutoScalingGroupName}"
    },
    "metrics_collected": {
      "disk": {
        "measurement": [ "used_percent" ],
        "ignore_file_system_types": [
          "devtmpfs",
          "overlay",
          "squashfs",
          "sysfs",
          "tmpfs"
        ]
      },
      "mem": {
        "measurement": [ "used_percent" ]
      },
      "processes": {
        "measurement": [
          "total",
          "total_threads"
        ]
      }
    }
  },
  "logs": {
    "logs_collected": {
      "files": {
        "collect_list": [
          {
            "file_path": "/opt/aws/amazon-cloudwatch-agent/logs/amazon-cloudwatch-agent.log",
            "log_group_name": "/amazon-cloudwatch-agent/amazon-cloudwatch-agent.log",
            "retention_in_days": 14
          }
        ]
      }
    }
  }
}