Logging and Monitoring with GameLift

Question

Hi!

I've read https://docs.aws.amazon.com/gamelift/latest/developerguide/monitoring-overview.html and have a couple of questions. Maybe I've missed something in the documentation (I am a quite newbie in AWS GameLift), so if there is an existing link for the solution - please share it with me :) I am mostly interested in GameLift-managed instances. I hope such things is possible to do with it instead of using custom EC2 + FleetIQ.

1. According to the documentation, game session logs are available only after finishing the session. Is there any existing solution or workaround for getting game session logs in real-time? Via additional configuration of something like that.
2. GameLift provides a set of existing metrics, which are available in CloudWatch. Can I provide anyhow my own custom metrics from my binaries? E.g. via Prometheus-compatible endpoint, which will be regularly pulled by something (or push like Prometheus Push Gateway). I didn't find much information in the documentation. Also configuring alerts based on the metrics is quite important.

I need to mention that I am quite new to CloudWatch and CloudTrail, so I can miss some basic patterns.

Thanks in advance!

P.S. @REDACTEDUSER

Answer

1. Realtime logs (e.g. from GameLift instances directly to CloudWatch) is not officially supported by Amazon GameLift yet, though it is a highly requested feature and is tracked in our worklog. However, you can implement your own realtime logging solution, and the recommended approach is to use [CloudWatch agent](https://docs.aws.amazon.com/AmazonCloudWatch/latest/monitoring/Install-CloudWatch-Agent.html). GameLift Solutions Architect has already provided an example on how to set it up: https://github.com/aws-samples/aws-gamelift-and-serverless-backend-sample/blob/master/LinuxServerBuild/install.sh#L4. Essentially, on each instance startup, you can run a daemon that watches [targeted log files](https://github.com/aws-samples/aws-gamelift-and-serverless-backend-sample/blob/master/LinuxServerBuild/amazon-cloudwatch-agent.json#L29) and periodically pushes logs to [your account's](https://github.com/aws-samples/aws-gamelift-and-serverless-backend-sample/blob/master/LinuxServerBuild/amazon-cloudwatch-agent.json#L6) CloudWatch by providing the IAM role.
2. You should be able achieve that with CloudWatch agent as well (https://aws.amazon.com/about-aws/whats-new/2018/09/amazon-cloudwatch-agent-adds-custom-metrics-support/), or you could potentially include the AWS SDK in your game server and call CloudWatch::putMetricData directly. NOTE: you'll need to pass your IAM role during fleet creation so the EC2 instances can assume your IAM role to put metrics into the CloudWatch on your account. See https://docs.aws.amazon.com/gamelift/latest/developerguide/gamelift-sdk-server-resources.html

No problem! Glad to help

Logging and Monitoring with GameLift

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