Monitoring AWS EC2

The AWS EC2 sensor is automatically deployed and installed after you install the Instana agent.

Note: Learn about the other supported AWS services with AWS documentation.

Sensor (Data Collection)

Tracked Configuration

  • EC2 Instance Details
    • Public hostname
    • Instance ID
    • Type
    • Availability Zone
    • Public IP
    • AMI ID
    • Reservation ID
    • Security Groups
    • Public Keys
  • EC2 Availability Zone

Required Permissions

  • ec2:DescribeInstances
  • ec2:DescribeTags

Configuration

Tags for EC2 instances are pulled every 30 seconds, which can be changed through agent configuration in <agent_install_dir>/etc/instana/configuration.yml:

com.instana.plugin.aws.ec2:
  tags-poll-rate: 30

To disable tags retrieval of EC2 instances, use the following configuration:

com.instana.plugin.aws.ec2:
  enabled: false

Proxy configuration

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

com.instana.plugin.aws.ec2:
  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 the profiles that are used to monitor Elastic Compute Cloud, use the configuration,

com.instana.plugin.aws.ec2:
  profile_names:
    - 'profile2'
    - 'profile3'

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

AWS STS approach

To override which IAM Roles are used to monitor Elastic Compute Cloud, use the configuration,

com.instana.plugin.aws.ec2:
  role_arns:
    - 'arn:aws:iam::<account_1_id>:role/<role_2_name>'
    - 'arn:aws:iam::<account_2_id>:role/<role_3_name>'

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

Instana Agent Tags

Note that tags are only available along with the AWS Agent. More details on using tags are described here.