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Kevin_Foley's avatar
Kevin_Foley
5 years ago

Use AWS Unified Cloudwatch Agent to replace Logic Monitor Collector in multiple AWS accounts

Is there any way to use the AWS Unified CloudWatch Agent and Cloudwatch Logs load EC2 metrics into LogicMonitor similar to what is pulled from the LogicMonitor collector?

A little background.

We currently use two LogicMonitor collectors to gather Windows metrics from AWS EC2 instances and physical and virtual servers in our on-prem datacenter.
This has worked well for the 100 Windows servers and network devices we are monitoring.

We are moving all of our on-prem Windows applications to AWS, which requires we change the way we use AWS.  Take a look at AWS Control Tower for more details

Instead of one AWS account and one VPC ( network ) , we are moving every application and environment ( PROD, UAT, DEV, STAGE  ) into different AWS account.
No shared networking, so VPC peering or using a TGW isn't an option. 

This will result in about 20 new AWS accounts and up to 100 by the end of the year.
Each of these accounts will have 2 to 20 EC2 Windows instances for web/application along with one EC2 or RDS based Microsoft SQL Server instance.

I have no desire to pay for EC2 Windows instances for every account ( possibly hundreds ) just to run the LogicMonitor collector.

The most important Windows server monitoring features we rely on in LogicMonitor boil down to
- server is down ( ping loss ) 
- low disk space
- high CPU utilization 
- the ability to alert on Windows Event log entries
- Windows service X is not running

Then tack on monitoring of an EC2 and RDS Microsoft SQL Server performance data 

Does LogicMonitor have any recommendations or examples on this type of configuration?

Thanks in advance,

Kevin Foley

aws
cloudwatch
collectors

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  • Joe_Tran's avatar
    Joe_Tran
    Icon for Advisor rankAdvisor
    5 years ago

    What's your appetite for increasing your CloudWatch costs and some DIY scripting? You would just need to configure the CloudWatch agent to submit system metrics and DIY something to submit anything it doesn't do out-of-box as a custom metric.  With LM Cloud, an add-on module, the cloud collector can fetch any CloudWatch metric, custom or otherwise, as long as the Datapoint metric path can be constructed without much logic. 

    As for RDS MS SQL Server instances, with LM Cloud, you do have access to the CloudWatch metrics. You can install a collector on an existing app server (one that already talks to the database) to perform custom queries/assign custom datasources. 

    The last option is to deploy the collector like an agent (e.g. nano or small sized). I wouldn't recommend it though. This was a management nightmare for us but granted this for an on-premises customer and they were very strict as to what we were allowed to do. YMMV.