How to Monitor Linux EC2 Instance Availability and Log the Data in CSV

AWS EC2 instances are a reliable and scalable way to host your applications and services. However, it’s important to monitor the availability of these instances to ensure that your users can access your applications and services at all times. In this article, we’ll show you how to create a simple Bash script that monitors the availability of a Linux EC2 instance and logs the results to a CSV file.

Why Monitor EC2 Instance Availability?

Monitoring the availability of your EC2 instances is important for several reasons:

• It helps you to quickly detect and diagnose issues with your instances.
• It allows you to identify trends and patterns in the availability of your instances over time.
• It helps you to ensure that your users can access your applications and services at all times.

Prerequisites

Before you begin, you’ll need to have the following:

• An AWS account and access to the AWS Command Line Interface (CLI)
• A Linux EC2 instance that you want to monitor
• The ID of the EC2 instance that you want to monitor (e.g., i-12345678)

The Script

Here’s the script that monitors the availability of a Linux EC2 instance and writes the results to a CSV file:

#!/bin/bash

# Set the path to the CSV file
filepath="./availability.csv"

# Check if the file already exists, and if not, create it with a header row
if [ ! -f $filepath ]; then
    echo "timestamp,availability" > $filepath
fi

while true; do
    # Get the current timestamp
    timestamp=$(date +%s)

    # Check the availability of the EC2 instance
    availability=$(aws ec2 describe-instance-status --instance-ids i-12345678 --query 'InstanceStatuses[*].InstanceStatus.Status' --output text)

    # Write the results to the CSV file
    echo "$timestamp,$availability" >> $filepath

    # Sleep for 60 seconds before checking again
    sleep 60
done

You can run the script by making it executable and running it in your terminal:

chmod +x monitor_availability.sh
./monitor_availability.sh

The script will run indefinitely, checking the availability of the specified EC2 instance every 60 seconds and writing the results to the specified CSV file.

Conclusion

Monitoring the availability of your EC2 instances is an important part of ensuring the reliability and scalability of your applications and services. The script provided in this article is a simple and effective way to monitor the availability of a Linux EC2 instance and log the results to a CSV file. This can help you quickly detect and diagnose issues with your instances, and make data-driven decisions about how to improve the availability of your applications and services.

You can also check other tools that AWS provides for monitoring EC2 instances like CloudWatch, AWS Elastic Beanstalk and more. Also, you can use other monitoring tools like Nagios, Prometheus and more.

In this article, we’ve explained how to create a simple Bash script that monitors the availability of a Linux EC2 instance and logs the results