Amazon CloudWatch provides monitoring for the AWS cloud resources and the applications customers run on AWS. Developers and system administrators can use it to collect and track metrics, gain insights, and give immediate responses for the smooth functioning of the applications and businesses.

The Amazon CloudWatch Monitoring Scripts for Linux are sample Perl scripts that demonstrate how to produce and consume the Amazon CloudWatch custom metrics. This guide demonstrates how to setup and use the CloudWatch Monitoring Scripts for the user’s Linux instance.

1. Launch a Linux instance and connect to the instance.

2. Before installing the monitoring tool, it is necessary to  perform certain additional steps.  Based on the version of Linux the below mentioned steps may be different.  The steps for AWS Linux are described below.

3. Go to the root directory with the command “cd\”. Update the Perl version of Linux with the command “perl -vsudo yum update”.

4. Some versions of Linux require additional dependencies. Install the dependencies with the following command:

sudo yum install perl-Time-HiRes

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5. Further, also install the other dependencies with the following commands:

sudo yum install -y perl-CPAN

sudo yum install -y make

sudo yum install -y perl-XML-Parser

sudo yum install -y mod_perl

6. Run the command “perl -MCPAN -e shell” to install the CPAN packages.

7. Install the bundle CPANXXL with the command “install Bundle::CPANxxl “[The command may take about 10-15 minutes].

8. Install the prerequisite package for CloudWatch monitoring with the command “install Bundle::LWP5_837 LWP”.

9. Exit from CPAN and run the commands to download the script.

10. Create a directory to store the monitoring script.

sudo mkdir aws-scripts-mon

cd aws-scripts-mon

11. Download the monitoring scripts from the URL http://ec2-downloads.s3.amazonaws.com/cloudwatch-samples/CloudWatchMonitoringScripts.zip using the command:

sudo wget http://ec2-downloads.s3.amazonaws.com/cloudwatch-samples/CloudWatchMonitoringScripts.zip

Unzip the file with the following command:

sudo unzip CloudWatchMonitoringScripts.zip

12. The directory will contain the monitoring scripts as well as the file to set the AWS credentials.  Edit the file awscreds.conf with the user’s AWS account Access and Secret Access key.

13. Test your setup with the following command:

./mon-put-instance-data.pl --mem-util --verify –verbose

14. To send the instance data to the AWS CloudWatch, use the following command:

./mon-put-instance-data.pl --mem-util --mem-used --mem-avail

15. To view the data sent to CloudWatch, go to the AWS CloudWatch dashboard and select to view the specific instance metrics.

16. Select “System/Linux:InstanceId” from the viewing.

17. Select from the available metrics, which will demonstrate the data sent from the Linux instance.

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Keywords: Amazon web services, Amazon AWS console, Amazon AWS instances, EC2 Service, Amazon cloud computing, EC2 EBS, EC2 CPU Utilization, Amazon EC2 capacity, Cloud Monitoring, CloudWatch, API, CLI tools, CloudWatch Alarm, CloudWatch Custom Metrics