Day 25.Setting Up an EC2 Instance and CloudWatch Alarm

Lab Information

The Nautilus DevOps team has been tasked with setting up an EC2 instance for their application. To ensure the application performs optimally, they also need to create a CloudWatch alarm to monitor the instance's CPU utilization. The alarm should trigger if the CPU utilization exceeds 90% for one consecutive 5-minute period. To send notifications, use the SNS topic named datacenter-sns-topic which is already created.

Launch EC2 Instance: Create an EC2 instance named datacenter-ec2 using any appropriate Ubuntu AMI.



Create CloudWatch Alarm: Create a CloudWatch alarm named datacenter-alarm with the following specifications:


    Statistic: Average


    Metric: CPU Utilization


    Threshold: >= 90% for 1 consecutive 5-minute period.


    Alarm Actions: Send a notification to datacenter-sns-topic.

Lab Solutions

🔹 STEP 1: Launch the EC2 Instance

1️⃣ Open EC2

AWS Console → EC2 → Launch instance

2️⃣ Configure instance

Name: datacenter-ec2

AMI: Ubuntu Server (20.04 LTS or 22.04 LTS)

Instance type: t2.micro (or any allowed type)

Key pair: Select or create one (lab choice)

Network:

Default VPC

Default subnet

Security group:

Allow SSH (port 22)

3️⃣ Launch

Click Launch instance

Wait until:

State: Running

Status checks: 2/2 passed

🔹 STEP 2: Create the CloudWatch Alarm

1️⃣ Open CloudWatch

AWS Console → CloudWatch

Left menu → Alarms

Click Create alarm

2️⃣ Select the Metric

Click Select metric

Navigate:

EC2 → Per-Instance Metrics → CPUUtilization

Select the metric for datacenter-ec2

Click Select metric

3️⃣ Configure Alarm Conditions

Set the following exactly:

Setting Value

Statistic Average

Period 5 minutes

Threshold type Static

Condition Greater than or equal to

Threshold value 90

Datapoints to alarm 1 out of 1

4️⃣ Configure Alarm Actions

Alarm state trigger: In alarm

Send notification to:

Select Existing SNS topic

Choose datacenter-sns-topic

5️⃣ Name the Alarm

Alarm name: datacenter-alarm

Description (optional):

Alarm when CPU exceeds 90% for 5 minutes

Click Create alarm

🔹 STEP 3: Verify Configuration

✔ CloudWatch Alarm

State initially: OK (normal)

Metric: CPUUtilization

Threshold: ≥ 90%

Period: 5 minutes

✔ SNS Action

Alarm action shows datacenter-sns-topic

Resources & Next Steps

📦 Full Code Repository: KodeKloud Learning Labs

📖 More Deep Dives: Whispering Cloud Insights - Read other technical articles

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Credits

• All labs are from: KodeKloud

• I sincerely appreciate your provision of these valuable resources.