Using AWS Observability Accelerator

AWS provides observability tools, including monitoring, logging, alerting, and dashboards, for your Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service (Amazon EKS) projects. This includes Amazon Managed Service for Prometheus, Amazon Managed Grafana, AWS Distro for OpenTelemetry, and other tools. To help you use these tools together, AWS provides Terraform modules that configure observability with these services, called the AWS Observability Accelerator.

AWS Observability Accelerator provides examples for monitoring infrastructure, NGINX deployements, and other scenarios. This section gives an example of monitoring infrastructure within your Amazon EKS cluster.

The Terraform templates and detailed instructions can be found on the AWS Observability Accelerator for Terraform GitHub page. You can also read the blog post announcing AWS Observability Accelerator.

Prerequisites

To use AWS Observability Accelerator, you must have an existing Amazon EKS cluster, and the following prerequisites:

• AWS CLI – used to call AWS functionality from the command line.

• kubectl – used to control your EKS cluster from the command line.

• Terraform – used to automate creation of the resources for this solution. You must have the AWS provider setup with an IAM role that has access to create and manage Amazon Managed Service for Prometheus, Amazon Managed Grafana, and IAM within your AWS account. For more information about how to configure the AWS provider for Terraform, see AWS provider in the Terraform documentation.

Using the infrastructure monitoring example

AWS Observability Accelerator provides example templates that use the included Terraform modules to set up and configure observability for your Amazon EKS cluster. This example demonstrates using AWS Observability Accelerator to set up infrastructure monitoring. For more details about using this template and additional capabilities that it includes, see Existing Cluster with the AWS Observability Accelerator base and Infrastructure monitoring page on GitHub.

To use the infrastructure monitoring Terraform module

1. From the folder you want to create your project in, clone the repo using the following command.

   git clone https://github.com/aws-observability/terraform-aws-observability-accelerator.git

2. Initialize Terraform with the following commands.

   cd examples/existing-cluster-with-base-and-infra
   
   terraform init

3. Create a new terraform.tfvars file, as in the following example. Use the AWS Region and cluster ID for your Amazon EKS cluster.

   # (mandatory) AWS Region where your resources will be located
   aws_region = "eu-west-1"
   
   # (mandatory) EKS Cluster name
   eks_cluster_id = "my-eks-cluster"

4. Create an Amazon Managed Grafana workspace, if you don't already have one that you want to use. For information about how to create a new workspace, see Create your first workspace in the Amazon Managed Grafana User Guide.

5. Create two variables for Terraform to use your Grafana workspace by running the following commands at the command line. You will need to replace the grafana-workspace-id with the ID from your Grafana workspace.

   export TF_VAR_managed_grafana_workspace_id=grafana-workspace-id
   export TF_VAR_grafana_api_key=`aws grafana create-workspace-api-key --key-name "observability-accelerator-$(date +%s)" --key-role ADMIN --seconds-to-live 1200 --workspace-id $TF_VAR_managed_grafana_workspace_id --query key --output text`

6. [Optional] To use an existing Amazon Managed Service for Prometheus workspace, add the ID to the terraform.tfvars file, as in the following example, replacing the prometheus-workspace-id with your Prometheus workspace ID. If you do not specify an existing workspace, then a new Prometheus workspace will be created for you.

   # (optional) Leave it empty for a new workspace to be created
   managed_prometheus_workspace_id = "prometheus-workspace-id"

7. Deploy the solution with the following command.

   terraform apply -var-file=terraform.tfvars

This will create resources in your AWS account, including the following:

• A new Amazon Managed Service for Prometheus workspace (unless you opted to use an existing workspace).

• Alert manager configuration, alerts, and rules in your Prometheus workspace.

• New Amazon Managed Grafana data source and dashboards in your current workspace. The data source will be called aws-observability-accelerator. The dashboards will be listed under Observability Accelerator Dashboards.

• An AWS Distro for OpenTelemetry operator set up in the provided Amazon EKS cluster, to send metrics to your Amazon Managed Service for Prometheus workspace.

To view your new dashboards, open the specific dashboard in your Amazon Managed Grafana workspace. For more information about using Amazon Managed Grafana, see Working in your Grafana workspace, in the Amazon Managed Grafana User Guide.