AWS::EC2 how to enable custom metrics

Due to shared responsibility and compliance AWS cannot look beyond the hypervisor, so AWS cannot monitor things like memory usage or disk usage. To enable these metrics, you must tweak the OS a bit.

The best reference i found is here: https://docs.aws.amazon.com/AWSEC2/latest/UserGuide/mon-scripts.html

Here’s the short cut (for Linux AMI):

sudo yum install -y perl-Switch perl-DateTime perl-Sys-Syslog perl-LWP-Protocol-https perl-Digest-SHA.x86_64

curl https://aws-cloudwatch.s3.amazonaws.com/downloads/CloudWatchMonitoringScripts-1.2.2.zip -O

unzip CloudWatchMonitoringScripts-1.2.2.zip 

crontab -e

In the crontab-file edit the following:

*/5 * * * * /root/aws-scripts-mon/mon-put-instance-data.pl --mem-used-incl-cache-buff --mem-util --disk-space-util --disk-path=/ --from-cron