How can I be alerted when an EBS instance is running out of space?

amazon-web-services monitoring amazon-ebs amazon-cloudwatch
diogeneshamilton picture diogeneshamilton · Aug 7, 2012 · Viewed 14.4k times · Source

I'm running a wordpress off of AWS, and I can't figure out how to monitor if the volume is running out of capacity. There are many options for monitoring other things, but I just want to know when we run low on space.

Answer

Frederick Cheung picture Frederick Cheung · Aug 7, 2012

There are no built in metrics for disk space - Because Amazon is looking at this 'from the outside', they don't know what you've done with an EBS volume: it could be part of a raid set, formatted in some exotic format etc.

Amazon has a system called CloudWatch that can be used to monitor AWS systems and resources. Luckily, CloudWatch supports custom metrics: you can use the CloudWatch APIs to add any data you want (and then create alerts off them).

Amazon provides some sample scripts that will publish (among other things) disk space utilisation to Cloudwatch. Do be aware that there is a small charge associated with using custom metrics - $0.50 per metric per month.

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