How to Monitor Alibaba Cloud ECS Instances with CloudMonitor

By Alain Francois

Cloud providers offer some solutions to help you implement a method of reviewing, observing, and managing the operational workflow in your cloud-based IT infrastructure. Alibaba Cloud offers CloudMonitor, the monitoring solution that can help you monitor databases, web servers, networks, and other services hosted on Alibaba Cloud.

What Is Alibaba CloudMonitor? Why Should You Use It?

CloudMonitor is a service that monitors Alibaba Cloud resources and Internet applications with a one-stop, out-of-the-box, enterprise-class monitoring solution, featuring services such as cloud service monitoring, site monitoring, and custom monitoring to safeguard your products and business. The monitoring services are efficient, comprehensive, and cost-effective, allowing you to monitor your IT infrastructure and services qualities based on events, custom metrics, alerts, and logs.

CloudMonitor allows you to monitor the metrics of Alibaba Cloud services, detect the availability of websites hosted on Elastic Compute Service (ECS) instances or carrier servers, and configure alert rules for specified metrics.

It provides application groups and alert templates to monitor your resources and offers the features on the chart below:

Creating ECS Instances

Create an ECS instance if you don't already have one. Log into your Alibaba Cloud account and go to the Elastic Compute Service:

On the left panel, scroll to Instances & Images and select Instances to create a new ECS instance:

We will choose Pay-As-You-Go instances:

Select the operating system and the disk size:

You need to select the VPC where your instance will be located:

Select the access method (password or a public key):

Select the default resource group:

Review your configuration and order:

You can see your new instance:

Installing a Service to Monitor

CloudMonitor can monitor the material resources of your servers and applications. Follow our guide to install some services you will try to monitor:

Install a LEMP Server with Let's Encrypt on an Ubuntu 20.04 ECS Instance

You can continue with CloudMonitor after installing those services.

Configuring CloudMonitor for Monitoring

If you want to monitor a service like ECS or AsparaDB RDS instances with features like email alerts, you need to use CloudMonitor:

You will see the CloudMonitor homepage:

First, we need to create the contacts that will receive the alerts. The owner of the Alibaba Cloud account will receive the alerts by default:

However, you can create a new contact even if the account was not created on Alibaba Cloud. Fill in the name and email to receive an email link activation for the account:

After activating their account, the status will change. You will also need to create an alert group that will contain the different contacts that have been created. Those alerts groups can help you organize your strategy:

Now that the contacts have been created, we need to add our ECS instance to CloudMonitor. You can activate initiative alerts for ECS instances:

CloudMonitor helps you monitor CPU utilization, Memory usage, Disk usage, and Outbound bandwidth over the Internet of the ECS instance by default. Go to Cloud Service Monitoring on the panel and choose your ECS:

Alternatively, you can go to Host Monitor:

Click to install the agent on the host. You will receive the confirmation and then see the status change to running. Click on the server you just added to see the default alerts. You can also see the OS monitoring (the consumption of CPU, memory, etc.):