See my last post about creating an Oracle database on Amazon
– you can have a free one up and running in about 30 minutes.
Once set up, it's also very easy to implement monitoring and
alerting.
So, assuming you've signed into the AWS console and are
looking at your Instance(s):
Click on the 'Show Monitoring' button and you will see
something like this:
Pretty impressive.
Note there are several pages, click on the number at the top
right or select 'Show All'.
Below the charts is a section called 'CloudWatch Alarms'.
To
create an alarm, just click on the 'Create Alarm' button.
If you haven't set up an alarm before, click on 'Create
Topic':
Enter a topic name – I made a mistake and called this the
name I wanted to call the alarm - better
name would be the instance name and Amazon.
Enter your email address and
specify the metric and threshold – it might be worth setting one what will
alarm so you can test that it works (it does).
So here I've asked it to monitor the disk space and alert me
if the free space is more than 7000MB
-which it is, so I should get an alert.
Click on 'Create Alarm'.
Check your email, you will have a confirmation link to
check. Click on the link and the alarm will be enabled and a confirmation will
pop up:
Within a short time, you should receive an email alert:
How cool is that?
If you go back to the AWS console web page and refresh it,
all sorts of things are happening:
You can click on the links to drill-down for more
information.
Now that you know it's working, click on the alarm name to
edit it and change the >= to <= .
This will alert you if your 10GB of
free space drops below 7GB – or set it to what you want. Save the changes.
On page 2 there are 2 charts called 'CPU Credit Usage' and
'CPU Credit Balance'.
To make sure you don't get your credit card charged, you
can set up billing alerts.
Although it's after the event, if you set the
threshold low it should give you time to log on and shut it down or delete it
before it goes mad (it would be nice if you could set a limit, if there is I
haven't found it yet).
Click on the 'View All CloudWatch Alarms' link, it will open
a new page.
To the left of the page, click on 'Billing'
If your instance is not set to US East as the region, you
will see this:
Click on the 'US East' link.
The page will refresh, click on the 'Create a billing alarm'
link under 'Alarm Summary':
A window will open. Set the threshold (I set 0), create a
new list and enter a name and email address, then click on 'Create Alarm'
You will be sent a confirmation to the email address, click
on the link to confirm.
If you have accrued any charges you will be sent a mail
immediately. I somehow ran up 40c worth of charges.
You can now close the window.
There is also an App for the phone (of course there is).
Go to Google Play or Apple App store depending on your phone
and search for 'AWS console'.
Download
and install it, select 'root account' and enter your username / password and
sign in
Make sure the region is the one you created the database in
(top right) and scroll down to 'RDS Instances' and you should see yours there.
It also shows alarm status.
Next time I'll look at how to upload data to the database, which is what you will need to do if someone wants to migrate an existing database to the cloud.
