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AWS Health

Overview​

AWS Health provides personalized information about events that can affect your AWS infrastructure, guides you through scheduled changes, and accelerates the troubleshooting of issues that affect your AWS resources and accounts.

The AWS Health Centreon Plugin uses the Amazon Health API to collect the related metrics and details about events.

Monitoring Connector assets​

Monitored objects​

  • Events related to AWS accounts and resources

Monitored metrics​

Metric nameDescription
events.total.countTotal number of events
events.open.countNumber of open events
events.closed.countNumber of closed events
events.upcoming.countNumber of upcoming events

Prerequisites​

AWS Configuration​

Configure a service account (access/secret keys combo) for which the following privileges have to be granted:

AWS PrivilegeDescription
health:DescribeEventsReturns information about events that meet the specified filter criteria.

Plugin dependencies​

To interact with Amazon APIs, you can use either use the awscli binary provided by Amazon or paws, a Perl AWS SDK (recommended). You must install it on every Centreon poller expected to monitor AWS Health: 

yum install perl-Paws

For now, it is not possible to use paws in the following situations:

  • if you are using a proxy to reach AWS Cloudwatch APIs.
  • to automatically add Hosts in Centreon using the Host Discovery feature

Setup​

  1. Install the Centreon package on every Centreon poller expected to monitor AWS Health:
yum install centreon-plugin-Cloud-Aws-Health-Api
  1. On the Centreon Web interface, install the AWS Health Centreon Monitoring Connector on the Configuration > Monitoring Connector Manager page

Configuration​

  • Log into Centreon and add a new Host through "Configuration > Hosts".
  • Select the Cloud-Aws-Health template to apply to the Host.
  • Once the template applied, some Macros marked as 'Mandatory' hereafter have to be configured:
MandatoryNomDescription
XAWSSECRETKEYAWS Secret key of your IAM role. Password checkbox must be checked
XAWSACESSKEYAWS Access key of your IAM role. Password checkbox must be checked
XAWSREGIONRegion where the instance is running
XAWSCUSTOMMODECustom mode to get metrics, 'awscli' is the default, you can also use 'paws' perl library
PROXYURLConfigure proxy URL
EXTRAOPTIONSAny extra option you may want to add to every command_line (eg. a --verbose flag)
DUMMYSTATUSHost state. Default is OK, do not modify it unless you know what you are doing
DUMMYOUTPUTHost check output. Default is 'This is a dummy check'. Customize it with your own if needed

FAQ​

How to check in the CLI that the configuration is OK and what are the main options for ?​

Once the plugin installed, log into your Centreon Poller CLI using the centreon-engine user account and test the Plugin by running the following command (Some of the parameters such as proxyurl have to be adjusted):

/usr/lib/centreon/plugins/centreon_aws_health_api.pl \
    --plugin=cloud::aws::health::plugin \
    --mode=events \
    --custommode='awscli' \
    --aws-secret-key='****' \
    --aws-access-key='****' \
    --proxyurl='http://myproxy.mycompany.org:8080' \
    --filter-service='' \
    --filter-region='' \
    --filter-entity-value='' \
    --filter-event-category='issue' \
    --filter-event-status='open' \
    --warning-total='0' \
    --critical-total='1' \
    --display-affected-entities \
    --verbose

Expected command output is shown below: 

CRITICAL: Events total: 1 | 'events.total.count'=1;;0:0;0; 'events.open.count'=1;;;0; 'events.closed.count'=0;;;0; 'events.upcoming.count'=0;;;0;
[service: RDS][region: eu-west-1][status: open][type: AWS_RDS_HARDWARE_MAINTENANCE_SCHEDULED][start: Wed Jul 15 13:00:00 2020][affected entity: doh-sfetoto3]

The command above monitors the events (--mode=events) of an AWS account identified by the usage of API credentials (--aws-secret-key='****' --aws-access-key='****'). By default, all types of events will be collected by the Plugin; it's possible though to use a set of specific filters to customize the types of results that will be returned by the command. In the example above, only the events categorized as issues (--filter-event-category='issue') and having an open status (--filter-event-status='open') will be displayed. The --display-affected-entities option is used to include the reference of the resource to which the event is related.

This command would trigger a WARNING alert if the number of events is more than 0 (--warning-total='0') and a CRITICAL alert for more than 1 event (--critical-total='1').

All the filters that can be used as well as all the available thresholds parameters can be displayed by adding the --help parameter to the command:

/usr/lib/centreon/plugins/centreon_aws_health_api.pl --plugin=cloud::aws::health::plugin --mode=events --help

Why do I get the following result:​

UNKNOWN: No metrics. Check your options or use --zeroed option to set 0 on undefined values ?​

This command result means that Amazon Cloudwatch does not have any value for the requested period.

This result can be overriden by adding the --zeroed option in the command. This will force a value of 0 when no metric has been collected and will prevent the UNKNOWN error message.

UNKNOWN: Command error: - An error occurred (AuthFailure) [...] ?​

This command result means that the credentials provided don't have enough privileges to perform the underlying AWS Operation.

UNKNOWN: 500 Can't connect to health.us-east-1.amazonaws.com:443 |​

This error message means that the Centreon Plugin couldn't successfully connect to the AWS Health API. Check that no third party device (such as a firewall) is blocking the request. A proxy connection may also be necessary to connect to the API. This can be done by using this option in the command: --proxyurl='http://proxy.mycompany:8080'.