Does AWS SSM agent cloudwatch resource:memory event?

Question

Am picking ECS optimised instance(ami-05958d7635caa4d04) in data plane of ECS in ca-central-1 region.

AWS Systems Manager Agent (SSM Agent) is Amazon software that can be installed and configured on an Amazon EC2 instance, an on-premises server, or a virtual machine (VM). SSM Agent makes it possible for Systems Manager to update, manage, and configure these resources.

In my scenario, Launching a ECS task in ECS optimised instance(ami-05958d7635caa4d04), causes resource:memory error. More on this error, here. Monitoring ECS->cluster->service->events will not work for me, because cloudformation roll back the cluster.

My existing ECS optimised instance is launched as shown below:

"EC2Instance":{
            "Type": "AWS::EC2::Instance",
            "Properties":{
                "ImageId": "ami-05958d7635caa4d04",
                "InstanceType": "t2.micro",
                "SubnetId": { "Ref": "SubnetId"},
                "KeyName": { "Ref": "KeyName"},
                "SecurityGroupIds": [ { "Ref": "EC2InstanceSecurityGroup"} ],
                "IamInstanceProfile": { "Ref" : "EC2InstanceProfile"},
                "UserData":{
                    "Fn::Base64": { "Fn::Join": ["", [
                        "#!/bin/bash\n",
                        "echo ECS_CLUSTER=", { "Ref": "EcsCluster" }, " >> /etc/ecs/ecs.config\n",
                        "groupadd -g 1000 jenkins\n",
                        "useradd -u 1000 -g jenkins jenkins\n",
                        "mkdir -p /ecs/jenkins_home\n",
                        "chown -R jenkins:jenkins /ecs/jenkins_home\n"
                    ] ] }
                },
                "Tags": [ { "Key": "Name", "Value": { "Fn::Join": ["", [ { "Ref": "AWS::StackName"}, "-instance" ] ]} }]
            }
        }

1) Does aws ssm agent installation required on ECS instance(ami-05958d7635caa4d04) to retrieve such cloudwatch events(resource:memory) with aws.ssm cloudwatch event rule filter? or Does aws.ec2 cloudwatch event rule filter suffice?

2) If yes, Do I need to explicitly install SSM agent on ECS instance(ami-05958d7635caa4d04)? through CloudFormation...

Matus Dubrava Matus Dubrava · Accepted Answer · 2019-11-30T16:56:19

You don't need to install SSM agent to monitor something such as memory usage of your instance (whether container instance or not). This is domain of CloudWatch, not SSM.

All you need to install is unified cloud watch agent and configure it accordingly. This is where SSM can help but it is not necessary and you can install it manually (or via script if you want).

If you decide to use SSM then you will need to explicitly install it. It comes preinstalled on some OSes but not on Amazon ECS-Optimized AMI - more about this.

Does AWS SSM agent cloudwatch resource:memory event?

1 Answers