Monitoring Amazon EC2 instances and other Cloud Resources with Hyperic HQ (and other monitoring platforms)

I’ve had to tackle this task recently and could not find a write-up. Nice folks from Hyperic, and others on Twitter, suggested OpenVPN or an SSH tunnel. I opted for the second option, and after setting up two tunnels and properly configuring the agent, I now have an Amazon EC2 Windows instance show up as a platform in my Dashboard. Note that those instructions will work for other software (Zabbix comes to mind). Here’s how you can have yours too:

1. Install an SSH server on the to-be-monitored cloud instance. For Linux, OpenSSH is easy to install and setup, and usually already comes with most distributions. All you have to do is create a user and a password, or keys. On Windows, CopSSH will do the trick – you just have to add a new user and configure it through the CopSSH control panel. Make sure the SSH server runs, and the login credentials work.

2. Install an SSH client on your Hyperic HQ server. For Linux, again, OpenSSH will do the trick and is most likely already there. For Windows, try CygWIN or PUTTY.

3. Designate a unique name for localhost in the hosts file of both the Hyperic server and the cloud instance. In Linux, it would be under /etc/hosts. In windows, it moves between versions but is usually under C:\Windows\system32\drivers\etc\hosts . Call it cloudagent1. The line should look like this:

127.0.0.1     localhost cloudagent1

4. From the Hyperic server, initiate an SSH tunnel which forwards two ports. First from the cloud instance to the Hyperic server (usually on port 7443). Second from the Hyperic server to the cloud instance, to the port on which the Hyperic agent runs. If you already have a Hyperic agent on your Hyperic server, you MUST use a different port. As the local agent usually runs on port 2144, you may want to pick something like port 22144. With OpenSSH on CygWin and Linux you can create the tunnels like this (assuming your username is “user” and your cloud instance is “cloud-instance.com”):

$ ssh user@cloud-instance.com -R 7443:cloudagent1:7443 -L 22144:cloudagent1:22144 -N -f

5. Configure the Hyperic agent on your cloud instance to use port 22144. The rest of the settings can be copied from your locally monitored agents. You can use “cloudagent1” (or whichever name you have assigned to the localhost) in the configuration.

Hope this helped!