Monitoring Memory Usage for multiple EC2 instances

Question

I am able to monitor a Windows instance's memory usage using custom metrics in CloudWatch.

I have followed the following blog to achieve that :

http://blog.krishnachaitanya.ch/2016/03/monitor-ec2-memory-usage-using-aws.html

Using that, I am able to monitor only one instance. I am now doing the process in every instance launched.

Can I do it at once for all instances instead of changing .json file and enabling cloud watch integration in every instance?

Answer 1

If the instances are already launched, you have to do it for each instance. Else you can take an AMI of the first instance, then launch other instances from that AMI and you do not have to do it for each instance.

If you have to do it manually, consider something like Ansible to do it for you. There is a bit of learning but not difficult.

BTW, adding custom metrics is straightforward for Linux instances. Monitoring Memory and Disk Metrics for Amazon EC2 Linux Instances

For Windows instance: Sending Performance Counters to CloudWatch and Logs to CloudWatch Logs Using Amazon EC2 Simple Systems Manager

Answer 2

If your instances have the appropriate instance profile and are running the SSM agent (which they probably are if you launched from an Amazon provided AMI), you can use SSM run command to run arbitrary powershell against an instance or a set of instances (using tags). There is even a Amazon managed SSM document called AWS-ConfigureCloudWatch that is built specifically for this use case.

See http://docs.aws.amazon.com/systems-manager/latest/userguide/run-command.html