Help with a basic webserver monitoring ssh & nginx

Question

Greetings AWS Support,

I've set up monitoring for my webserver to see if it's up or down then send the alert email but this is not really what I want.

I'm pretty sure I have this set up incorrectly and I couldn't find any documentation on setting up basic helthchecks.  The monitoring options are very extensive.  WAY overkill for my needs.

Here's all I want to do.

Problem = webserver keeps hanging then I have to restart the instance to reach ssh again.  Not sure that problem.  Let's just focus on the monitoring for now

Goal = To get an email if ssh port 22, http, https ports 80,443 are irresponsive.

I don't know why I have to go through some extensive advanced monitoring configurations when all I want to do is set up very basic monitoring

I'm sure somebody has asked before how to set up monitoring for http and ssh and send an email if not responding

Can somebody direct me to such a post or please answer here.

Thanks

ju3t1nz

Answer

Hello.  
What about using CloudWatch Agent?  
This setting can be used to register the number of processes and other information in CloudWatch metrics.  
Alarms can be set up based on these metrics and email notifications can be sent out.  
https://docs.aws.amazon.com/AmazonCloudWatch/latest/monitoring/CloudWatch-Agent-procstat-process-metrics.html

Another solution would be to use Lambda or similar to create code to perform a telnet and if it fails, to execute SNS or similar.

Answer

Hi, you may want to use CloudWatch Synthetics for your purpose:

```
You can use Amazon CloudWatch Synthetics to create canaries, configurable 
scripts that run on a schedule, to monitor your endpoints and APIs. Canaries 
follow the same routes and perform the same actions as a customer, which 
$makes it possible for you to continually verify your customer experience even 
when you don't have any customer traffic on your applications. By using canaries, 
you can discover issues before your customers do.
```

You can develop small scripts for testing your http(s) and ssh endpoints and get all form of notifications (email, sms, etc.) that you prefer via creation of CloudWatch alarms and corresponding SNS notifications on your issues.

All details at https://docs.aws.amazon.com/AmazonCloudWatch/latest/monitoring/CloudWatch_Synthetics_Canaries.html

Best,

Didier

Help with a basic webserver monitoring ssh & nginx

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