Monitoring AWS Systems Manager

Monitoring is an important part of maintaining the reliability, availability, and performance of AWS Systems Manager and your AWS solutions. You should collect monitoring data from all parts of your AWS solution so that you can debug a multipoint failure if one occurs. But before you start monitoring Systems Manager, create a monitoring plan that includes answers to the following questions:

• What are your monitoring goals?

• What resources will you monitor?

• How often will you monitor these resources?

• What monitoring tools will you use?

• Who performs the monitoring tasks?

• Who should be notified when something goes wrong?

After you have defined your monitoring goals and have created your monitoring plan, the next step is to establish a baseline for normal Systems Manager performance in your environment. You should measure Systems Manager performance at various times and under different load conditions. As you monitor Systems Manager, you should store a history of monitoring data that you've collected. You can compare current Systems Manager performance to this historical data to help you to identify normal performance patterns and performance anomalies, and create methods to address them.

For example, you can monitor the success or failure of operations such as Automation workflows, the application of patch baselines, maintenance window events, and configuration compliance. Automation is a capability of AWS Systems Manager.

You can also monitor CPU utilization, disk I/O, and network utilization of your managed nodes. When performance falls outside your established baseline, you might need to reconfigure or optimize the node to reduce CPU utilization, improve disk I/O, or reduce network traffic. For more information about monitoring EC2 instances, see Monitor Amazon EC2 in the Amazon EC2 User Guide for Linux Instances.

Topics

• Monitoring tools
• Sending node logs to unified CloudWatch Logs (CloudWatch agent)
• Sending SSM Agent logs to CloudWatch Logs
• Monitoring your change request events
• Monitoring your automations
• Monitoring Run Command metrics using Amazon CloudWatch
• Logging AWS Systems Manager API calls with AWS CloudTrail
• Logging Automation action output with CloudWatch Logs
• Configuring Amazon CloudWatch Logs for Run Command
• Monitoring Systems Manager events with Amazon EventBridge
• Monitoring Systems Manager status changes using Amazon SNS notifications

Monitoring tools

The content in this chapter provides information for using tools available for monitoring your Systems Manager and other AWS resources. For a more complete list of tools, see Logging and monitoring in AWS Systems Manager.