Cloud Monitoring Service (CMS)

EPAM Orchestrator provides the users with a set of monitoring tools that allow to get information on different aspects of the service performance:
- Default Gnocchi/collectd-based monitoring (EPAM monitoring)
- Telemetry as a Service, based on Gnocchi/collectd
- Zabbix monitoring service.

The default Gnocchi/collectd-based monitoring service collects instance performance information for resources hosted in OpenStack.The monitoring is performed on hardware level, so some inaccuracies in metrics for specific instances can occur. This service is also provided for free and does not need activation.

Telemetry as a service is activated by users and uses Gnocchi/collectd to gather instances statistics. Unlike the default EPAM telemetry, it needs its own server and collects data directly from VMs.

Zabbix monitoring service allows the user to get Zabbix statistics on their infrastructure. The service needs to be activated by the user. This is the recommended monitoring tool.

This topic contains the following sections:

Have a Question?

The current page gives the general information on the service and the main workflows. However, while working with the services, our users encounter new questions they need assistance with. The most frequently asked questions on EPAM Cloud Services are gathered on the Cloud Services FAQ page.
Visit the page to check whether we have a ready answer for your question.

Related CLI Commands

The table below provides the list of service-related commands and their descriptions:

Command Short Command Description
or2-manage-service ...
-s monitoring -a		 or2ms ... -s monitoring -a Starts the service in the specified project and region
or2-start-monitoring or2mon Adds an instance to the monitoring list
or2-describe-monitoring or2dmon Retrieves information about the instances monitored by Zabbix server, Zabbix monitoring templates and Zabbix agent availability
or2-stop-monitoring or2stopmon Removes an instance from the monitoring list

Further on this page, you can find the examples of the commands usage for Monitoring Service manipulation.

Service Activation

Zabbix Monitoring service is based on EPAM Cloud auto-configuration service, and you can deploy it in few Maestro CLI commands.

To start Zabbix monitoring service, run or2-manage-service (or2ms) command with the following parameters:

or2ms -p project -r region -s monitoring --activate

Here, the -s parameter specifies the name of the service to manage (monitoring), and the --activate parameter indicates that the service should be activated (to stop the service, use --deactivate).

Each project can have only one Zabbix server activated for it. If the server is already activated, you will get the respective error message.

If there is no Zabbix server activated for your project, a special stack will be run to launch a VM with all the corresponding Zabbix Server settings. The command response will give the ID of the executed stack.

Service Manipulations

EPAM Orchestrator supports the following commands for Zabbix monitoring service manipulations:

  • To add an instance to Zabbix Monitoring list, run:
or2mon -p project -r region -i instance_id

For the correct Zabbix Monitoring service performance, it is recommended to add the custom image based instances to the monitoring list only after they come to the running state. Otherwise, the custom image can be indicated incorrectly and will be monitored as a Linux image (regardless of its real type).

  • To retrieve the information about the instances monitored by Zabbix server, Zabbix monitoring templates and Zabbix agent availability, use the or2-describe-monitoring (or2dmon) command:
or2dmon -p project -r region
  • To remove the instance from the Monitoring list, use the or2-stop-monitoring (or2stopmon) command:
or2stopmon -p project -r region -i instance_id
  • To stop the Zabbix Monitoring Service and remove the Server VM, run the following command:
or2ms -p project -r region -s monitoring --deactivate

Viewing the Results

When the Monitoring Service is set up, you can see the details about the server performance on the UI Monitoring page.

Web UI

It is possible to connect to Zabbix server via HTTP connection and to get the detailed information about the server.

To get the URL to be used for connection, use the or2-describe-services --full command that returns the list of the services activated for the project, their IP and DNS names and the web UI URL addresses. Copy the WebUiUrl value and paste it to the address line of your browser.

To login, use the following credentials:

  • Login: user
  • Password: zabbix

When you log in, you will get access to Zabbix monitoring data:

Please remember that Zabbix statistics for an instance is shown only after the or2-start-monitoring command adds this instance to the monitoring list.

Pricing

The service usage price is defined by the price of the Zabbix Server VM.

The default parameters of a Zabbix Server VM are:

  • Shape: MEDIUM
  • Image: Ubuntu16.04_64-bit

Therefore, the approximate monthly cost of a Zabbix Server usage in case of 100% and 24/7 load is about $42.2 in EPAM-BY2 region (as to 05/12/2017). The price can vary depending on the region.
To get more detailed estimations, please, use our Cost Estimator tool.

References

More information on the Cloud Monitoring Service can be found in the EPAM Cloud Services Guide. For detailed description of the Maestro CLI commands used to manage the Cloud Monitoring Service, refer to the Maestro CLI User Guide.

The information on this and other analytics capabilities of EPAM Cloud Analytics is given on the Cloud Analytics page.