nitzanm / boundary-plugin-aws-ec2-python

Boundary.com plugin for AWS EC2 monitoring, written in Python

Boundary AWS EC2 Plugin

The Boundary AWS EC2 plugin collects information on AWS Elastic Compute Cloud using the CloudWatch API.

The plugin requires Python 2.6 or later, as well as the Boto Python library. Click here for Boto installation instructions.

Metrics

The plugin reports all EC2 metrics reported by CloudWatch. For a full list of these metrics and their descriptions, see this AWS documentation article.

Note: CloudWatch will not supply values for metrics that do not have any activity. For example, the NetworkIn metric will not be supplied for periods where there was no network traffic. In this case, you will see holes in the Boundary graph. This is normal and a product of how CloudWatch works.

Note: CloudWatch reports EC2 metrics in either 60 second or 5 minute periods, depending on metric. You will only see data appear in Boundary every period for the preceding period. This is normal and a product of how CloudWatch works.

Adding the EC2 Plugin to Premium Boundary

1. Login into Boundary Premium
2. Display the settings dialog by clicking on the settings icon:
3. Click on the Plugins in the settings dialog.
4. Locate the aws_ec2 plugin item and click on the Install button.
5. A confirmation dialog is displayed indicating the plugin was installed successfully, along with the metrics and the dashboards.
6. Click on the OK button to dismiss the dialog.

Removing the EC2 Plugin from Premium Boundary

1. Login into Boundary Premium
2. Display the settings dialog by clicking on the settings icon:
3. Click on the Plugins in the settings dialog which lists the installed plugins.
4. Locate the aws_ec2 plugin and click on the item, which then displays the uninstall dialog.
5. Click on the Uninstall button which displays a confirmation dialog along with the details on what metrics and dashboards will be removed.
6. Click on the Uninstall button to perfom the actual uninstall and then click on the Close button to dismiss the dialog.

Configuration

Once the EC2 plugin is installed, metric collection requires that a relay is installed on the target system. Instructions on how to install a relay for Linux/Unix can found here, and for Windows here.

Before the plugin will collect metrics, you must provide it with a valid AWS Access Key ID and Secret Access Key. Click here for more information on where to find/generate these keys. The keys you generate should be for a user with access to both CloudWatch and EC2.

General operations for plugins are described in this article.