To start using EC2 monitoring you can either sign up for a trial plan, which includes 2 EC2 instance monitoring possibility for 15 days, sign up for Plus plan in case you will need only 1 EC2 instance monitoring or build your plan yourself in order to have some flexibility in case the number of your instances is increasing or decreasing. After you have finished with the above mentioned steps, just login using your credentials and follow these steps to add EC2 monitor:

Step1: In this step you’re providing your Amazon account credentials. Please make sure that your private key name is exactly the same as the one you started your instance with. 

Step 2: In this step you’re going to add your contact(e-mail, IM or SMS) in order to be able to receive alerts related to your EC2 instances. You can skip timezone, send weekly reports, and contact group fields for now and change them later.

Step 3: In this step you will setup notification rules for your currently running instances, more clearly you will specify the max number of running instances allowed, your contact which we’ve added in the previous step, so you will get alert when the number of your currently running instances reaches your specify threshold.

Step 4: In this step you will setup policies(different monitors) you want each of your instances be monitored for. Please make sure to provide correctly your private key in Step 1, in order our agent can be automatically installed on your instance.

Step 4 is finalizing EC2 monitor setup process. The following module will be added automatically to your dashboard.

Drive, CPU, Load Average, Memory columns are related to internal policies selection and in case you’ve selected any of these during Step 4,  but you still see “Activate” values for them that means that something is wrong with agent installation(most probably related to your provided private key). HTTP, PING, SSH are checking your instance(s) from our monitoring locations and don’t require anything to be installed on your instance. Other configuration related columns like Instance ID, Image ID, Public DNS, Launch Time, Availability Zones and Key Name are gathered and shown automatically.

That’s it, your EC2 instance monitoring is up and running.