Standing Up an Apache Web Server EC2 Instance and Sending Logs to Amazon CloudWatch

During this hands-on lab you will learn how to leverage the AWS Secrets Manager to securely create and rotate an administrator password for an Amazon Aurora deployment

1Install and Configure the Amazon CloudWatch Agent

Connect to the ApacheWebServer EC2 instance using Session Manager.

Once connected, use the commands listed in the lab GitHub repo to install the Amazon CloudWatch agent and create the agent configuration file.

Copy and paste the JSON configuration code into the new file then start the agent with the new config file using the command listed on GitHub.

2Create a Metric Filter for 404 Status Codes

Within the Amazon CloudWatch Apache-Access-Logs Log Group, create a new metric filter looking for 404 status codes within the log entries.

For the Filter pattern enter the following text to create a metric filter that matches for any 404 status codes.

    %\b404\b%

Metric Filter Settings:

• Filter Name: 404

• Metric namespace: Apache

• Metric name: 404

• Metric value: 1

• Default value: blank

• Unit: Count

For testing, open the public IP of the ApacheWebServer instance in your browser, change the URL to http and append a fake page on the end (Example: http://YOUR_PUBLIC_IP/fake.html).

3Create SNS Topic and CloudWatch Alarm

Now, we can put it all together and set up a new CloudWatch Alarm to send a message through Amazon SNS to notify us whenever a 404 is detected in our Log Group.

Create a new alarm via the CloudWatch Alarms dashboard for the newly created Apache namespace.

Hint: There is a shortcut from within the graphed metric section.

Alarm Metric Settings:

• Metric namespace: Apache

• Metric name: 404

• Statistic: Sum

Alarm Conditions Settings:

• Threshold type: Static

• Whenever 404 is...: Greater/Equal

• than: 0

• Alarm state trigger: In alarm

• Alarm name: 404-Detections

Then, create a new SNS topic named 404-Alerts and confirm subscription to it. Refresh the fake ApacheWebServer page to generate 404 errors and test the alarm.