Managing Services - Monitoring

Task 2: Check the Status of the httpd Service

Httpd is the service for the Apache http server that was installed on my host. This is a lightweight web server like the ones that run your favorite websites (think let's ... say amazon.com). In this exercise I checked the status of the httpd service, and started it using the systemctl command and verified the service was working.

Helpful Hint

I had to use sudo to complete this exercise since I was not root.

I checked the status of the httpd service by using the systemctl commands as shown below:

The command prompt showed the output after entering sudo systemctl status httpd.service.

The command sudo systemctl status httpd.service and the output said that the httpd service section was inactive (dead).

This indicated that the httpd service was loaded, which means it was installed and ready to work but was inactive.

So the next step was to start it. I checked the status of the httpd service by using the systemctl commands as shown below:

I checked again the status of the httpd service by using the systemctl commands as shown below:

The command prompt showed the output after entering sudo systemctl status httpd.service.

The command sudo systemctl status httpd.service and the output said that the httpd service section was active (running).

Now that the httpd was running, I checked it worked correctly. I opened a new tab on my browser and entered: http://<publicip>. I replaced <publicip> with the public ip that I retrieved at the beginning.

When httpd was successfully running, an Apache Test page appeared with general information about the proper operation of the Apache HTTP server.

I then stopped the service by entering the command below:

Task 3: Monitoring a Linux EC2 instance

In this exercise I used Linux commands to monitor the Amazon Linux2 EC2 instance. I also opened the AWS Console and logged into CloudWatch to see how this service could provide me with data to monitor my instance.

Helpful Hint

I had to use sudo to complete this exercise since I was not root.

I displayed the list of running processes by entering the command below:

When running the command top, the output showed the current running processes and resource usages.

Top displayed the processes currently running as well as the resource usage like CPU usage and memory usage. I hit Q to exit and return to the shell.

In the next step I ran a script that simulated a workload on the CPU. I ran the stress.sh script that simulated a heavy workload on the EC2 instance by entering the following command:

As in step 1, I displayed the list of running processes by entering the top command.

I could see that the process I just ran had a high CPU usage. The script was designed to run for 6 minutes, before stopping.

In the next steps I opened the AWS Management Console and started the AWS CloudWatch application that gave me better insight into my EC2 instance.

On the top right of my screen I selected the AWS button. This displayed the AWS Management Console in a new tab.

In the Search bar on the top of the screen, I entered CloudWatch and pressed ENTER.

The AWS console includes a search bar that you can use to search for services.

On the left section of the navigation pane, I selected Dashboard, then selected Automatic dashboards. In the Automatic dashboards list, I selected EC2.

I could see that by default the EC2 CloudWatch dashboard displayed several metrics such as the CPU utilization, Disk reads and writes...

I could see a spike in the CPU utilization that matched the time when I started the stress script earlier.

I waited 5 minutes and went back to the AWS CloudWatch dashboard. I saw that the CPU utilization dropped.