Contributed by Sunil Kunisetty and Daniel Chan

Introduction and Architecture

As more and more enterprises deploy some of their non-critical workload on Amazon Web Services (AWS), it’s becoming critical to monitor those public AWS resources along side with their on-premise resources.

Oracle recently announced Oracle Enterprise Manager Plug-in for Amazon Web Services (AWS) allows you to achieve that goal. The on-premise Oracle Enterprise Manager (EM12c) acts as a single tool to get a comprehensive view of your public AWS resources as well as your private cloud resources.  By deploying the plug-in within your Cloud Control environment, you gain the following management features:

• Monitor EBS, EC2 and RDS instances on Amazon Web Services
• Gather performance metrics and configuration details for AWS instances
• Raise alerts and violations based on thresholds set on monitoring
• Generate reports based on the gathered data

Users of this Plug-in can leverage the rich Enterprise Manager features such as system promotion, incident generation based on thresholds, integration with 3rd party ticketing applications etc. AWS Monitoring via this Plug-in is enabled via Amazon CloudWatch API and the users of this Plug-in are responsible for supplying credentials for accessing AWS and the CloudWatch API.

This Plug-in can only be deployed on an EM12C R2 platform and agent version should be at minimum 12c R2.Here is a pictorial view of the overall architecture:

• Amazon Elastic Block Store (EBS)
• Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2)
• Amazon Relational Database Service (RDS)

Here are a few key features:

• Rich and exhaustive list of metrics. Metrics can be gathered from an Agent running outside AWS.
• Critical configuration information.
• Custom Home Pages with charts and AWS configuration information.
• Generate incidents based on thresholds set on monitoring data.

Discovery and Monitoring

AWS instances can be added to EM12C either via the EM12c User Interface (UI) or the EM12c Command Line Interface ( EMCLI)  by providing the AWS credentials (Secret Key and Access Key Id) as well as resource specific properties as target properties. Here is a quick mapping of target types and properties for each AWS resources

AWS Resource Type	Target Type	Resource specific properties
EBS Resource	Amazon EBS Service	CloudWatch base URI, EC2 Base URI, Period, Volume Id, Proxy Server and Port
EC2 Resource	Amazon EC2 Service	CloudWatch base URI, EC2 Base URI, Period, Instance  Id, Proxy Server and Port
RDS Resource	Amazon RDS Service	CloudWatch base URI, RDS Base URI, Period, Instance  Id, Proxy Server and Port

Proxy server and port are optional and are only needed if the agent is within the firewall.

Here is an emcli example to add an EC2 target. Please read the Installation and Readme guide for more details and step-by-step instructions to deploy  the plugin and adding the AWS the instances.

./emcli add_target \

      -name="<target name>" \

      -type="AmazonEC2Service" \

      -host="<host>" \

      -properties="ProxyHost=<proxy server>;ProxyPort=<proxy port>;EC2_BaseURI=http://ec2.<region>.amazonaws.com;BaseURI=http://monitoring.<region>.amazonaws.com;InstanceId=<EC2 instance Id>;Period=<data point periond>"  \

    -subseparator=properties="="

./emcli set_monitoring_credential \

                -set_name="AWSKeyCredentialSet"  \

                -target_name="<target name>"  \

                -target_type="AmazonEC2Service" \

                -cred_type="AWSKeyCredential"  \

                -attributes="AccessKeyId:<access key id>;SecretKey:<secret key>"

Emcli utility is found under the ORACLE_HOME of EM12C install. Once the instance is discovered, the target will show up under the ‘All Targets’ list under “Amazon EC2 Service’.

Once the instances are added, one can navigate to the custom homepages for these resource types. The custom home pages not only include critical metrics, but also vital configuration parameters and incidents raised for these instances.  By mapping the configuration parameters as instance properties, we can slice-and-dice and group various AWS instance by leveraging the EM12C Config search feature. The following configuration properties and metrics are collected for these Resource types.

Resource Type	Configuration Properties	Metrics
EBS Resource	Volume Id, Volume Type, Device Name, Size, Availability Zone	Response: Status Utilization: QueueLength, IdleTime Volume Statistics: ReadBrandwith, WriteBandwidth, ReadThroughput, WriteThroughput Operation Statistics: ReadSize, WriteSize, ReadLatency, WriteLatency
EC2 Resource	Instance ID, Owner Id, Root Device type, Instance Type. Availability Zone	Response: Status CPU Utilization: CPU Utilization Disk I/O:  DiskReadBytes, DiskWriteBytes, DiskReadOps, DiskWriteOps, DiskReadRate, DiskWriteRate, DiskIOThroughput, DiskReadOpsRate, DiskWriteOpsRate, DiskOperationThroughput Network I/O : NetworkIn, NetworkOut, NetworkInRate, NetworkOutRate, NetworkThroughput
RDS Resource	Instance ID, Database Engine Name, Database Engine Version, Database Instance Class, Allocated Storage Size, Availability Zone	Response: Status Disk I/O:  ReadIOPS, WriteIOPS, ReadLatency, WriteLatency, ReadThroughput, WriteThroughput DB Utilization:  BinLogDiskUsage, CPUUtilization, DatabaseConnections, FreeableMemory, ReplicaLag, SwapUsage

Custom Home Pages

As mentioned above, we have custom home pages for these target types that include basic configuration information,  last 24 hours availability, top metrics and the incidents generated. Here are few snapshots.

EBS Instance Home Page:

EC2 Instance Home Page:

RDS Instance Home Page:

Further Reading:

1)      AWS Plugin download

2)      Installation and  Read Me.

3)      Screenwatch on SlideShare

4)      Extensibility Programmer's Guide

5)      Amazon Web Services