Monitoring memory usage in AWS CloudWatch for Windows instance

Question

By default, memory usage isn’t monitored by CloudWatch. So I tried to add it to my Windows instance in AWS using these instructions.

This is what I did:

Answer 1

First, you need to add an IAM role to your instance:

{
    "Version": "2012-10-17",
    "Statement": [
        {
            "Sid": "AllowAccessToSSM",
            "Effect": "Allow",
            "Action": [
                "cloudwatch:PutMetricData",
                "logs:CreateLogGroup",
                "logs:CreateLogStream",
                "logs:DescribeLogGroups",
                "logs:DescribeLogStreams",
                "logs:PutLogEvents"
            ],
            "Resource": [
                "*"
            ]
        }
    ]
}

Note that you cannot add a role to an existing instance. So do it before launching. Then you need to configure the EC2Config file (normally) accessible via the following path:

C:\Program Files\Amazon\Ec2ConfigService\Settings.AWS.EC2.Windows.CloudWatch.json

You should add the following block to the JSON file:

...

{
    "Id": "PerformanceCounter",
    "FullName": "AWS.EC2.Windows.CloudWatch.PerformanceCounterComponent.PerformanceCounterInputComponent,AWS.EC2.Windows.CloudWatch",
    "Parameters": {
        "CategoryName": "Memory",
        "CounterName": "Available MBytes",
        "InstanceName": "",
        "MetricName": "Memory",
        "Unit": "Megabytes",
        "DimensionName": "InstanceId",
        "DimensionValue": "{instance_id}"
    }
}

...

{
    "Id": "CloudWatch",
    "FullName": "AWS.EC2.Windows.CloudWatch.CloudWatch.CloudWatchOutputComponent,AWS.EC2.Windows.CloudWatch",
    "Parameters": 
    {
        "AccessKey": "",
        "SecretKey": "",
        "Region": "eu-west-1",
        "NameSpace": "PerformanceMonitor"
    }
}

Do not forget to restart the EC2Config service on your server after changing the config file. You should be able to get the memory metrics after a couple of minutes in your CloudWatch console. The level of CloudWatch monitoring on your instance should also be set to detailed:

Update:

According to the documentation, you can now attach or modify an IAM role to your existing instance.