CloudWatch Agent on Lightsail

(Spoiler: It does not work out as expected.)

The AWS Lightsail service is a great entry level VPS similar in form and function as some of the other major VPS vendors such as Digital Ocean, DreamHost, BlueHost, etc. Users can provision instances, configure a load balancer, run dedicated MySQL instances, take snapshots, use static IP addresses, and other basic functionality. All of this from an easy to understand interface that forgoes the sometimes overly complex UI and process involved in administering a typical AWS VPC (virtual private cloud) environment. While the simplicity is a strength of Lightsail, it is also a crux, especially when it comes to logging and monitoring. Herein I attempt to walk through how to setup the AWS CloudWatch Agent for monitoring and metrics on a Lightsail instance.

If you would like to learn about Lightsail a bit more, checkout my earlier post concerning it.

Step 1: Creating a Lightsail Instance

Logging into my AWS console, I start up an Ubuntu 16.04 with a pre-configured LAMP stack installed.

Lightsail Service in the AWS Console
Lightsail landing UI
New instance time!
Easy Peasy LAMPy Cheesy
Lightsail, cheaper than 1980’s plastic toys from China.

That’s it. I then had a running Lightsail instance.

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