AWS EC2 monitoring with Topologix

Infrastructure & Networking

Per-instance EC2 health from CloudWatch — CPU utilization, network in/out, disk read/write, and the status-check-failed flag — plus live instance state and metadata from the EC2 API, one card per instance.

Requirements

  • An IAM user with AmazonEC2ReadOnlyAccess + CloudWatchReadOnlyAccess (minimum permissions: ec2:DescribeInstances, cloudwatch:GetMetricData) and an access key.
  • Server-side only — AWS APIs are public endpoints, so no proxy agent is involved. One integration covers one region; add another for other regions.

1 · Set up the integration

  1. Open the Integrations pageClick Integrations in the toolbar and pick AWS EC2 from the catalogue.
  2. Create the IAM userAWS Console → IAM → create a user with AmazonEC2ReadOnlyAccess and CloudWatchReadOnlyAccess, then generate an access key.
  3. Enter credentials and regionAccess Key ID, Secret Access Key, and the Region picker (16 regions, us-east-1 through sa-east-1).
  4. Create, then verifyClick Create, then reopen the integration and click Test — it lists instances and reports how many are visible in the region; bad credentials and missing IAM permissions come back as named errors.
The integration catalogue — AWS EC2 found via search.
The integration catalogue — AWS EC2 found via search.
The AWS EC2 configuration drawer with example values. Every screen in this guide is the real product.
The AWS EC2 configuration drawer with example values. Every screen in this guide is the real product.
Target on a private network? Route it through a proxy agent. Proxy agents run inside your network — behind NAT, on a management VLAN, in an air-gapped segment — and reach targets the Topologix server can't. The agent polls the server every 15 seconds for its assignments, runs the checks locally, and pushes results back every 5 seconds, so no inbound firewall rules are ever needed. Set a default proxy on the integration; every metric source can override it. If a proxy goes offline, its sources are marked stale within ~90 seconds and the last known values stay visible.

2 · Add it to a flow

  1. Select the server nodeClick the node, open Metrics, then + Add and choose the EC2 integration.
  2. Pick instancesThe discovered list shows every instance with name, state, type, and availability zone. Multi-select fans out one source per instance.
  3. Choose the period and savePeriod is the CloudWatch granularity — 1 minute, 5 minutes (the default), 1 hour, or 24 hours. Click Add Source; the card shows CPU %, network and disk throughput, status checks, and the instance’s live state.
Live canvas screenshots for this integration require a real AWS EC2 environment, so this guide shows the configuration screens only — the flow steps above work exactly like every other integration.

Good to know

  • Each poll queries a window of two periods back because CloudWatch datapoints for EC2 arrive with a ~1–3 minute lag — the card always shows the latest completed datapoint, never a partial one.
  • The 1-minute period only returns data for instances with detailed monitoring enabled; basic monitoring publishes at 5-minute granularity.
  • StatusCheckFailed rides along as a 0/1 value (the maximum over the period), so a threshold on it alerts on instance/system check failures directly.

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See it on your own infrastructure

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