Important
Enable the AWS CloudWatch Metric Streams integration to monitor all CloudWatch metrics from your AWS services, including custom namespaces. Individual integrations are no longer our recommended option.
New Relic infrastructure monitoring integrations include an Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) integration for reporting your EC2 metadata to New Relic. This document explains the integration's features, how to activate it, and what data can be reported.
Features
Amazon's EC2 is a central part of Amazon's cloud-computing platform. All New Relic infrastructure monitoring users, regardless of https://newrelic.com/pricing), can use the New Relic infrastructure agent to get a comprehensive, real-time view of their host's performance and status. New Relic's EC2 integration uses the ec2Describe* policy to add data about your EC2 instances to your standard infrastructure monitoring data. We also import Amazon EC2 custom tags and add it to your data.
You can also create custom attributes to be analyzed in New Relic.
Activate EC2 integration
To enable this integration follow standard procedures to Connect AWS services to New Relic.
Important
You must install the infrastructure agent on each EC2 host to see metrics from that host. Connecting your EC2 account allows New Relic to access EC2 metadata, such as region, type, and tags.
Configuration and polling
You can change the polling frequency and filter data using configuration options.
Default polling information for the Amazon EC2 integration:
- New Relic polling interval: 5 minutes
- Amazon CloudWatch data interval: 1 minute or 5 minutes, depending on CloudWatch plan
Note about legacy tag format
Starting October 27, 2021, EC2 instances that start being monitored by New Relic have only the following metadata tag formats:
- Tag format in UI:
tag.tagName - Tag format as attribute:
provider.attributeName. Examples:provider.ec2InstanceId,provider.ec2State,provider.ec2AmiId.
For your EC2 instances monitored by New Relic before that date, you have the option to keep our legacy tag formats. To keep these formats, go into the New Relic configuration UI for your EC2 host and select Keep legacy metadata format. This allows you to access tags that have both current and legacy formats. Disabling the legacy format means you can only use the current format. If you disable the legacy format, consider checking to see if you have dashboards or alert conditions using that format.
The legacy metadata tag format:
- Legacy tag format in UI:
provider.ec2Tag_tagNameec2Tag_tagName
- Legacy tag format as attribute:
attributeName. Examples:ec2InstanceId,ec2State,ec2AmiId.
Use data in New Relic UI
This table describes the locations where you can find and use your EC2 data:
UI page | You can... |
|---|---|
Examine overall resource usage by CPU, load, and memory. | |
Monitor CPU, memory, and I/O read or write processes. | |
View bandwidth and error data to examine saturation levels, compare load balances, and identify other potential performance problems. | |
Monitor the capacity and efficiency of overall utilization, disk usage, or I/O operations. | |
Find links to several product locations where you can find and use EC2 integration data, including links to alert condition creation and viewing your data in New Relic. |
Infrastructure also imports your Amazon EC2 custom tags, typically prefaced by label.<tag_key>.
For more on how to find and use integration data, see Understand integration data.
View and use data
You can query and explore your data using the ComputeSample event type, with a provider value of Ec2Instance.
The EC2 integration collects the following subset of instance metrics from AWS CloudWatch.
Name | Description |
|---|---|
| Reports whether the instance has passed the instance status check in a one minute period. The check result can be either |
| Reports whether the instance has passed the system status check in a one minute period. The check result can be either |
| Reports whether the instance has passed both the instance status check and the system status check in a one minute period. The check result can be either |
For more about the specific data that can be reported, see EC2 integration attributes. For complete descriptions, see the Amazon EC2 documentation.