One of the new features of Ipswitch WhatsUp Gold 2018 is the ability to monitor cloud resources. This ability allows organizations to monitor cloud resources like AWS and Azure just like they do on-premise. In this snip, we'll go over how to set up an AWS EC2 instance in WhatsUp Gold 2018. Once we've got our host set up, we'll then create a simple monitor to be notified when the EC2 instance is stopped.
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Full Transcript:
Hello, in this step we're going to talk about how to set up and monitor your AWS EC2 instance with WhatsUp Gold 2018. All right, the first thing we have to do is we need to set up credentials for AWS. So WhatsUp doesn't know how to authenticate to your AWS environment, we have to set up those credentials first. So to do that, we go over here to settings, go down to libraries, then go over to the credentials.
So notice that I've already got my credentials set up, but the process is very easy. You hit the plus here, we go to AWS, and then we add in our access key ID and our secret access key. So to do that you would need to go into the IAM users role of your AWS portal and set that up, but since this step is not on AWS IAM roles, feel free to check out the library, see if we already have a step on that or just as simple as going to the AWS documentation to get that done. So once you have the access key and secret access key ID in there then you'll have the...a credential object set up, so I'm calling this one AWSRO because I set up an IAM user which is read-only to my EC2 instance so now I have a AWS credential set up.
So once I have the credential then I'm going to discover the EC2 instance. To do that, I do run a new discovery. I can go up here to discover, and then go to the new scan and then I can uncheck all of these IP options here because we're not going to be scanning by IP, we are going to discover the AWS environment. So to do that, we go to cloud devices, then we choose AWS. And then we can select the region if we know explicitly which region our EC2 instance is in we can select one or more regions but I would just go ahead and just do all regions to make sure that I get out, I don't have to worry about making sure I picked the wrong one. All right, so now that we've set this, we need to set the credentials. So since I've already created the credentials ahead of time, I can select them here in AWSRO. We can set the schedule if you wanted to, and then see a summary screen if you wanted to but yeah we've already done this so yeah no big deal. I would just go ahead and skip past that, hit run. And no just run because we don't want to save it. And then we wait a little bit.
While we're waiting, notice that I have my Azure instances in here too, so that's another snip that you can check out in the library on how WhatsUp Gold can monitor your Azure instances as well. So this will take a little bit. WhatsUp Gold is going out and checking AWS to do that discovery of all the different regions and in the...all of the instances that our IAM user has access to.
All right. It looks like we had some movement here, there we go. There is our AWS cloud portal. For both Azure and AWS, Whats Up Gold creates a portal object that then all of your instances fall underneath that. So it has discovered the portal so that means our IAM user does have the right permissions.
All right, looks like we are updated so now we have our AWS portal, so notice that it is a cloud portal role over here. And then it did discover the one EC2 instance that I had. So right now the node is grey because we're not actually monitoring yet, we've just discovered it. And this is pretty cool here, you can even do some kind of an inventory report as well because it shows you the region here, it was actually in US east, so I could have just chosen US east and it would have found that as well.
All right so to set up monitoring, I simply need to click on monitoring here. And then I will select a group, I don't really care, I'm just gonna put it in the discover devices destination group, and then I'm going to select the device that it just discovered. so it is...here's the IP, the hostname, and the role, the new device, so all looks good. So I click on start to create the default monitor. So WhatsUp Gold will create a set of default monitors for this when it gets first set up but you can always add custom monitors later to it. So notice that it came up and it is red, so it is down. So in the background here I'm going to go ahead and bring this up and I can show you what this looks like whenever it comes up. All right I have initiated the instance to come up and we'll just wait a second here and hopefully that monitor will show us that our instance has came up. All right it is green so we did that so it's very fast. I found that by default as soon as I bring up the instance and it shows as available in the AWS or the Azure console, it shows up green immediately so it's got a very it's kind of very fast poll interval on it.
All right so now, well, what does "up" mean? We can get some more information by clicking on it and we can see some information here that we did before but we want to see what monitors were set up by default. To do that, we can go over here to analyze and one way is to do it is to look at the dashboard, so I always like the device status dashboard if I'm looking for a single device. I can go over here to monitoring and then I can select the device that I want to monitor so it's going to be the AWS node not the Azure one I have. I will click on the AWS one here, hit apply, and then it will go ahead and bring up all of the monitors that you set up. So notice that here are the monitors applied, it's by default, it's set up the virtual machine CPU usage, it's set up the cloud resource monitor, and at this point you can add just about any monitor that you want, WhatsUp Gold billing monitoring so you can actually figure out how much money this EC2 instance has cost you and a whole lot of other different monitors.
That has been how to monitor an AWS EC2 instance in Ipswich WhatsUp Gold 2018.