Book Image

AWS for System Administrators

By : Prashant Lakhera
Book Image

AWS for System Administrators

By: Prashant Lakhera

Overview of this book

Amazon Web Services (AWS) is one of the most popular and efficient cloud platforms for administering and deploying your applications to make them resilient and robust. AWS for System Administrators will help you to learn several advanced cloud administration concepts for deploying, managing, and operating highly available systems on AWS. Starting with the fundamentals of identity and access management (IAM) for securing your environment, this book will gradually take you through AWS networking and monitoring tools. As you make your way through the chapters, you’ll get to grips with VPC, EC2, load balancer, Auto Scaling, RDS database, and data management. The book will also show you how to initiate AWS automated backups and store and keep track of log files. Later, you’ll work with AWS APIs and understand how to use them along with CloudFormation, Python Boto3 Script, and Terraform to automate infrastructure. By the end of this AWS book, you’ll be ready to build your two-tier startup with all the necessary infrastructure, monitoring, and logging components in place.
Table of Contents (18 chapters)
1
Section 1: AWS Services and Tools
4
Section 2: Building the Infrastructure
7
Section 3: Adding Scalability and Elasticity to the Infrastructure
11
Section 4: The Monitoring, Metrics, and Backup Layers

Monitoring custom metrics using CloudWatch

This section will show how to install the CloudWatch agent to monitor custom metrics (memory and disk utilization). To achieve this, we need to follow a series of steps.

Downloading and installing the CloudWatch agent

Firstly, we need to download and install the CloudWatch agent package. To do so, we perform the following steps:

  1. Log in to the EC2 instance by running the following command with your details filled in:
    ssh -i vpc-prod.pem ec2-user@<server public ip>
  2. Download the CloudWatch agent with the following command:
    wget https://s3.amazonaws.com/amazoncloudwatch-agent/amazon_linux/amd64/latest/amazon-cloudwatch-agent.rpm
  3. Install the CloudWatch agent using the following command:
    sudo rpm -ivh amazon-cloudwatch-agent.rpm 
    Preparing...                          #########################...