Monitoring AWS EBS

The AWS EBS sensor is automatically deployed and installed after you install the Instana agent.

Learn about the other supported AWS services with AWS documentation.

This sensor monitors Amazon EBS (Elastic Block Store) devices that are attached to EC2 instances. Links to Amazon EBS dashboards are located in EC2 section of host dashboard.

Metrics collection

To view the metrics, select Infrastructure in the sidebar of the Instana User interface, click a specific monitored host, and then you can see a host dashboard with all the collected metrics and monitored processes.

Configuration data

  • Volume ID
  • Volume Created at
  • Volume State
  • Volume Size
  • Volume Type
  • Volume IOPS
  • Volume Encrypted
  • Mounted EC2 Instance ID
  • Volume Mounted Path
  • Grouping zone (region)

Performance metrics

Name Description
Read Bytes Read operations in a specified period.
Write Bytes Write operations in a specified period.
Read Ops Total number of read operations in a specified period.
Write Ops Total number of write operations in a specified period.
Total Read Time Total number of seconds spend on read operations in a specified period.
Total Write Time Total number of seconds spend on write operations in a specified period.
Idle Time Total number of seconds spend in a specified period when no read or write operations were submitted.
Queue Length Number of read and write operations requests waiting to be completed in a specified period.
Burst Balance Percentage of IO (gp2) or throughput credits (st1, sc1) remaining in the burst bucket.

Required permissions

  • cloudwatch:GetMetricStatistics
  • cloudwatch:GetMetricData
  • ec2:DescribeVolumes

Configuration

Metrics for EBS volumes are pulled every 5 minutes, which can be changed through agent configuration in <agent_install_dir>/etc/instana/configuration.yml:

com.instana.plugin.aws.ebs:
  cloudwatch_period: 300

To disable monitoring of EBS instances, use the following configuration:

com.instana.plugin.aws.ebs:
  enabled: false

Proxy configuration

To configure the specific AWS Sensor to use proxy configuration, add the following agent configuration settings:

com.instana.plugin.aws.ebs:
  proxy_host: 'example.com' # proxy host name or ip address
  proxy_port: 3128 # proxy port
  proxy_protocol: 'HTTP' # proxy protocol: HTTP or HTTPS
  proxy_username: 'username' # OPTIONAL: proxy username
  proxy_password: 'password' # OPTIONAL: proxy password

Monitoring multiple AWS accounts

Refer to the Monitoring multiple AWS accounts documentation to set up monitoring of multiple AWS accounts with one AWS agent in the same region.

AWS named profiles approach

To override which profiles can be used to monitor EBS, use the following configuration:

com.instana.plugin.aws.ebs:
  profile_names:
    - 'profile2'
    - 'profile3'

Defining profiles on service level overrides the global AWS profiles configuration.

AWS STS approach

To override which IAM Roles can be used to monitor EBS, use the following configuration:

com.instana.plugin.aws.ebs:
  role_arns:
    - 'arn:aws:iam::<account_1_id>:role/<role_2_name>'
    - 'arn:aws:iam::<account_2_id>:role/<role_3_name>'

Defining IAM roles on service level overrides the global AWS IAM roles configuration.

Filtering

Tags are only available with the AWS Agent.

Users are able to specify how often sensors poll the AWS tagged resources that use the tagged-services-poll-rate configuration property (default 300 seconds).

Multiple tags can be defined, separated by a comma. Tags are provided as a key-value pair separated by a : character. To make configuration better, it is possible to define which tags you want to include in discovery or exclude from discovery. If tags defined in both lists (include and exclude), exclude list has higher priority. If there is no need for filtering services, the configuration is not defined. It is not mandatory to define all values to enable filtering.

To define how often sensors poll the tagged resources use following configuration:

com.instana.plugin.aws:
  tagged-services-poll-rate: 60 #default 300

To include services by tags into discovery, use following configuration,

com.instana.plugin.aws.ebs:
  include_tags: # Comma separated list of tags in key:value format (e.g. env:prod,env:staging)

To exclude services by tags from discovery, use the configuration,

com.instana.plugin.aws.ebs:
  exclude_tags: # Comma separated list of tags in key:value format (e.g. env:dev,env:test)

AWS services without tags are monitored by default but can be excluded by setting the include_untagged field to false:

com.instana.plugin.aws.ebs:
  include_untagged: false # True value by default

Poll Rate

Users are able to specify how often sensors poll the AWS tagged resources that use the tagged-services-poll-rate configuration property (default 300 seconds).

To define how often sensors poll the tagged resources use following configuration:

com.instana.plugin.aws:
  tagged-services-poll-rate: 60 #default 300