Monitor Amazon Web Services with CloudWatch metrics

  • How-to guide
  • 23-min read

Follow this guide to start ingesting data remotely from Amazon CloudWatch.

Its main focus is on infrastructure monitoring of AWS services: Dynatrace monitoring AWS services via CloudWatch.

See What's next? for Full-Stack and Log Monitoring of your AWS services.

After you have established the initial monitoring, you can add, remove, or modify service monitoring using the Dynatrace web UI, at scale, or using the Dynatrace API.

To learn the measurements collected for each of the AWS services, see:

The Amazon Web Services infrastructure monitoring provides metrics from CloudWatch, infrastructure data available via public AWS API, and specific events. The data is collected in five-minute intervals.

Cost of monitoring

  • Each service monitored by Dynatrace through CloudWatch, as well as log processing and analysis, consumes DDUs.

  • Amazon may charge you extra for CloudWatch metric queries. For details on these additional costs, please consult Amazon CloudWatch pricing online documentation.

Monitoring prerequisites

There are three prerequisites for the AWS monitoring setup:

To manage AWS monitoring configuration, you need permissions to read and modify the builtin:cloud.aws schema.

  • Both settings:objects:read and settings:objects:write are required.
  • They are included in the Change monitoring settings permissions.
  • Read-only access is not supported.

See Manage user permissions with roles for details on how to manage and set permissions.

To monitor Amazon Web services, Dynatrace needs to be able to connect to the Amazon CloudWatch API and query it periodically. At least one ActiveGate needs to be able to connect to Amazon CloudWatch to perform the monitoring tasks. Your ActiveGate needs to be deployed on an EC2 instance and be able to connect to the endpoints listed below.

From Dynatrace version 1.267+, only role-based access can be used. Key-based authorization is no longer available for new credentials. For existing key-based credentials, you can keep using keys indefinitely. We recommend switching to role-based authentication using the dedicated button on the configuration page. Dynatrace automatically checks the configuration to ensure the correct configuration of roles.

Key-based authentication is allowed only for AWS GovCloud and China partitions.

Allow ActiveGate to access AWS URLs

The integration accesses the following AWS API endpoints, so they must be accessible from your ActiveGate:

  • AWS Security Token Service (AWS STS)

    https://sts.amazonaws.com/

    AWS STS is a global endpoint by default. When using a regional endpoint, sts.<REGION>.amazonaws.com needs to be accessible.

    See AWS STS Regionalized endpoints in AWS official documentation for the recommended regional STS endpoint configuration.

    recommended Use the AWS config file to configure regional STS endpoint.

  • AWS Resource Groups Tagging

    https://tagging.<REGION>.amazonaws.com/

  • Amazon CloudWatch

    https://monitoring.<REGION>.amazonaws.com/

  • Amazon EC2

    ec2.<REGION>.amazonaws.com

Other endpoints may be required depending on the services you need to monitor.

Consult the tables below for endpoints specific to each service you might want to monitor and for AWS Regions supported by Dynatrace AWS Monitoring.

EndpointService
autoscaling.<REGION>.amazonaws.comAmazon EC2 Auto Scaling (built-in), Amazon EC2 Auto Scaling
lambda.<REGION>.amazonaws.comAWS Lambda (built-in), AWS Lambda
elasticloadbalancing.<REGION>.amazonaws.comAmazon Application and Network Load Balancer (built-in), Amazon Elastic Load Balancer (ELB) (built-in)
dynamodb.<REGION>.amazonaws.comAmazon DynamoDB (built-in), Amazon DynamoDB
ec2.<REGION>.amazonaws.comAmazon EBS (built-in), Amazon EC2 (built-in), Amazon EBS, Amazon EC2 Spot Fleet, Amazon VPC NAT Gateways, AWS Transit Gateway, AWS Site-to-Site VPN
rds.<REGION>.amazonaws.comAmazon RDS (built-in), Amazon Aurora, Amazon DocumentDB, Amazon Neptune, Amazon RDS
s3.<REGION>.amazonaws.comAmazon S3 (built-in)
acm-pca.<REGION>.amazonaws.comAWS Certificate Manager Private Certificate Authority
apigateway.<REGION>.amazonaws.comAmazon API Gateway
apprunner.<REGION>.amazonaws.comAWS App Runner
appstream2.<REGION>.amazonaws.comAmazon AppStream
appsync.<REGION>.amazonaws.comAWS AppSync
athena.<REGION>.amazonaws.comAmazon Athena
cloudfront.amazonaws.comAmazon CloudFront
cloudhsmv2.<REGION>.amazonaws.comAWS CloudHSM
cloudsearch.<REGION>.amazonaws.comAmazon CloudSearch
codebuild.<REGION>.amazonaws.comAWS CodeBuild
datasync.<REGION>.amazonaws.comAWS DataSync
dax.<REGION>.amazonaws.comAmazon DynamoDB Accelerator (DAX)
dms.<REGION>.amazonaws.comAWS Database Migration Service (AWS DMS)
directconnect.<REGION>.amazonaws.comAWS Direct Connect
ecs.<REGION>.amazonaws.comAmazon Elastic Container Service (ECS), Amazon ECS Container Insights
elasticfilesystem.<REGION>.amazonaws.comAmazon Elastic File System (EFS)
eks.<REGION>.amazonaws.comAmazon Elastic Kubernetes Service (EKS)
elasticache.<REGION>.amazonaws.comAmazon ElastiCache (EC)
elasticbeanstalk.<REGION>.amazonaws.comAWS Elastic Beanstalk
elastictranscoder.<REGION>.amazonaws.comAmazon Elastic Transcoder
es.<REGION>.amazonaws.comAmazon Elasticsearch Service (ES)
events.<REGION>.amazonaws.comAmazon EventBridge
fsx.<REGION>.amazonaws.comAmazon FSx
gamelift.<REGION>.amazonaws.comAmazon GameLift
glue.<REGION>.amazonaws.comAWS Glue
inspector.<REGION>.amazonaws.comAmazon Inspector
kafka.<REGION>.amazonaws.comAmazon Managed Streaming for Kafka
models.lex.<REGION>.amazonaws.comAmazon Lex
logs.<REGION>.amazonaws.comAmazon CloudWatch Logs
api.mediatailor.<REGION>.amazonaws.comAWS Elemental MediaTailor
mediaconnect.<REGION>.amazonaws.comAWS Elemental MediaConnect
mediapackage.<REGION>.amazonaws.comAWS Elemental MediaPackage Live
mediapackage-vod.<REGION>.amazonaws.comAWS Elemental MediaPackage Video on Demand
opsworks.<REGION>.amazonaws.comAWS OpsWorks
qldb.<REGION>.amazonaws.comAmazon QLDB
redshift.<REGION>.amazonaws.comAmazon Redshift
robomaker.<REGION>.amazonaws.comAWS RoboMaker
route53.amazonaws.comAmazon Route 53
route53resolver.<REGION>.amazonaws.comAmazon Route 53 Resolver
api.sagemaker.<REGION>.amazonaws.comAmazon SageMaker Endpoints, Amazon SageMaker Endpoint Instances
sns.<REGION>.amazonaws.comAmazon Simple Notification Service (SNS)
sqs.<REGION>.amazonaws.comAmazon Simple Queue Service (SQS)
storagegateway.<REGION>.amazonaws.comAWS Storage Gateway
swf.<REGION>.amazonaws.comAmazon SWF
transfer.<REGION>.amazonaws.comAWS Transfer Family
workmail.<REGION>.amazonaws.comAmazon WorkMail
workspaces.<REGION>.amazonaws.comAmazon WorkSpaces
RegionRegion name
us-gov-west-1AWS GovCloud (US)
us-gov-east-1AWS GovCloud (US-East)
us-east-1US East (N. Virginia)
us-east-2US East (Ohio)
us-west-1US West (N. California)
us-west-2US West (Oregon)
eu-west-1EU (Ireland)
eu-west-2EU (London)
eu-west-3EU (Paris)
eu-central-1EU (Frankfurt)
eu-central-2EU (Zurich)
eu-north-1EU (Stockholm)
eu-south-1EU (Milan)
eu-south-2EU (Spain)
ap-east-1Asia Pacific (Hong Kong)
ap-south-1Asia Pacific (Mumbai)
ap-south-2Asia Pacific (Hyderabad)
ap-southeast-1Asia Pacific (Singapore)
ap-southeast-2Asia Pacific (Sydney)
ap-southeast-3Asia Pacific (Jakarta)
ap-southeast-4Asia Pacific (Melbourne)
ap-northeast-1Asia Pacific (Tokyo)
ap-northeast-2Asia Pacific (Seoul)
ap-northeast-3Asia Pacific (Osaka)
sa-east-1South America (Sao Paulo)
cn-north-1China (Beijing)
cn-northwest-1China (Ningxia)
ca-central-1Canada (Central)
ca-west-1Canada West (Calgary)
il-central-1Israel (Tel Aviv)
me-central-1Middle East (UAE)
me-south-1Middle East (Bahrain)
af-south-1Africa (Cape Town)
us-iso-east-1US ISO East
us-isob-east-1US ISOB East (Ohio)
us-iso-west-1US ISO West
Proxy

The most frequent cause of certificate issues with the TLS interception proxy is a missing proxy's CA certificate in the ActiveGate truststore.

If you're still having proxy issues, see:

"Communication error."

Make sure that the URLs are whitelisted. Otherwise, you might get communication or timeout errors.

To perform these steps, you need to have AWS admin privileges.

The AWS monitoring policy defines the minimal scope of permissions you need to give to Dynatrace to monitor the services running in your AWS account. Create it once and use it any time when enabling Dynatrace access to your AWS account. If you don't want to add permissions to all services, and just select permissions for certain services, consult the table below. The table contains a set of permissions that are required for all AWS cloud services, a list of optional permissions specific to that service.

Permissions required for AWS monitoring integration:
  • "cloudwatch:GetMetricData"
  • "cloudwatch:GetMetricStatistics"
  • "cloudwatch:ListMetrics"
  • "sts:GetCallerIdentity"
  • "tag:GetResources"
  • "tag:GetTagKeys"
  • "ec2:DescribeAvailabilityZones"
NamePermissions
All monitored Amazon services requiredcloudwatch:GetMetricData,
cloudwatch:GetMetricStatistics,
cloudwatch:ListMetrics,
sts:GetCallerIdentity,
tag:GetResources,
tag:GetTagKeys,
ec2:DescribeAvailabilityZones
AWS Certificate Manager Private Certificate Authorityacm-pca:ListCertificateAuthorities
Amazon MQ
Amazon API Gatewayapigateway:GET
AWS App Runnerapprunner:ListServices
Amazon AppStreamappstream:DescribeFleets
AWS AppSyncappsync:ListGraphqlApis
Amazon Athenaathena:ListWorkGroups
Amazon Aurorards:DescribeDBClusters
Amazon EC2 Auto Scalingautoscaling:DescribeAutoScalingGroups
Amazon EC2 Auto Scaling (built-in)autoscaling:DescribeAutoScalingGroups
AWS Billing
Amazon Keyspaces
AWS Chatbot
Amazon CloudFrontcloudfront:ListDistributions
AWS CloudHSMcloudhsm:DescribeClusters
Amazon CloudSearchcloudsearch:DescribeDomains
AWS CodeBuildcodebuild:ListProjects
Amazon Cognito
Amazon Connect
Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service (EKS)eks:ListClusters
AWS DataSyncdatasync:ListTasks
Amazon DynamoDB Accelerator (DAX)dax:DescribeClusters
AWS Database Migration Service (AWS DMS)dms:DescribeReplicationInstances
Amazon DocumentDBrds:DescribeDBClusters
AWS Direct Connectdirectconnect:DescribeConnections
Amazon DynamoDBdynamodb:ListTables
Amazon DynamoDB (built-in)dynamodb:ListTables,
dynamodb:ListTagsOfResource
Amazon EBSec2:DescribeVolumes
Amazon EBS (built-in)ec2:DescribeVolumes
Amazon EC2 API
Amazon EC2 (built-in)ec2:DescribeInstances
Amazon EC2 Spot Fleetec2:DescribeSpotFleetRequests
Amazon Elastic Container Service (ECS)ecs:ListClusters
Amazon ECS Container Insightsecs:ListClusters
Amazon ElastiCache (EC)elasticache:DescribeCacheClusters
AWS Elastic Beanstalkelasticbeanstalk:DescribeEnvironments
Amazon Elastic File System (EFS)elasticfilesystem:DescribeFileSystems
Amazon Elastic Inference
Amazon Elastic Map Reduce (EMR)elasticmapreduce:ListClusters
Amazon Elasticsearch Service (ES)es:ListDomainNames
Amazon Elastic Transcoderelastictranscoder:ListPipelines
Amazon Elastic Load Balancer (ELB) (built-in)elasticloadbalancing:DescribeInstanceHealth,
elasticloadbalancing:DescribeListeners,
elasticloadbalancing:DescribeLoadBalancers,
elasticloadbalancing:DescribeRules,
elasticloadbalancing:DescribeTags,
elasticloadbalancing:DescribeTargetHealth
Amazon EventBridgeevents:ListEventBuses
Amazon FSxfsx:DescribeFileSystems
Amazon GameLiftgamelift:ListFleets
AWS Glueglue:GetJobs
Amazon Inspectorinspector:ListAssessmentTemplates
AWS Internet of Things (IoT)
AWS IoT Analytics
Amazon Managed Streaming for Kafkakafka:ListClusters
Amazon Kinesis Data Analyticskinesisanalytics:ListApplications
Amazon Data Firehosefirehose:ListDeliveryStreams
Amazon Kinesis Data Streamskinesis:ListStreams
Amazon Kinesis Video Streamskinesisvideo:ListStreams
AWS Lambdalambda:ListFunctions
AWS Lambda (built-in)lambda:ListFunctions,
lambda:ListTags
Amazon Lexlex:GetBots
Amazon Application and Network Load Balancer (built-in)elasticloadbalancing:DescribeInstanceHealth,
elasticloadbalancing:DescribeListeners,
elasticloadbalancing:DescribeLoadBalancers,
elasticloadbalancing:DescribeRules,
elasticloadbalancing:DescribeTags,
elasticloadbalancing:DescribeTargetHealth
Amazon CloudWatch Logslogs:DescribeLogGroups
AWS Elemental MediaConnectmediaconnect:ListFlows
AWS Elemental MediaConvertmediaconvert:DescribeEndpoints
AWS Elemental MediaPackage Livemediapackage:ListChannels
AWS Elemental MediaPackage Video on Demandmediapackage-vod:ListPackagingConfigurations
AWS Elemental MediaTailormediatailor:ListPlaybackConfigurations
Amazon VPC NAT Gatewaysec2:DescribeNatGateways
Amazon Neptunerds:DescribeDBClusters
AWS OpsWorksopsworks:DescribeStacks
Amazon Polly
Amazon QLDBqldb:ListLedgers
Amazon RDSrds:DescribeDBInstances
Amazon RDS (built-in)rds:DescribeDBInstances,
rds:DescribeEvents,
rds:ListTagsForResource
Amazon Redshiftredshift:DescribeClusters
Amazon Rekognition
AWS RoboMakerrobomaker:ListSimulationJobs
Amazon Route 53route53:ListHostedZones
Amazon Route 53 Resolverroute53resolver:ListResolverEndpoints
Amazon S3s3:ListAllMyBuckets
Amazon S3 (built-in)s3:ListAllMyBuckets
Amazon SageMaker Batch Transform Jobs
Amazon SageMaker Endpoint Instancessagemaker:ListEndpoints
Amazon SageMaker Endpointssagemaker:ListEndpoints
Amazon SageMaker Ground Truth
Amazon SageMaker Processing Jobs
Amazon SageMaker Training Jobs
AWS Service Catalog
Amazon Simple Email Service (SES)
Amazon Simple Notification Service (SNS)sns:ListTopics
Amazon Simple Queue Service (SQS)sqs:ListQueues
AWS Systems Manager - Run Command
AWS Step Functions
AWS Storage Gatewaystoragegateway:ListGateways
Amazon SWFswf:ListDomains
Amazon Textract
AWS IoT Things Graph
AWS Transfer Familytransfer:ListServers
AWS Transit Gatewayec2:DescribeTransitGateways
Amazon Translate
AWS Trusted Advisor
AWS API Usage
AWS Site-to-Site VPNec2:DescribeVpnConnections
AWS WAF Classic
AWS WAF
Amazon WorkMailworkmail:ListOrganizations
Amazon WorkSpacesworkspaces:DescribeWorkspaces

To get the information required for comprehensive AWS cloud-computing monitoring, you have to authorize Dynatrace to access your Amazon metrics. Dynatrace will identify all the virtualized infrastructure components in your AWS environment and collect performance metrics related to those components.

Next, select the deployment model that best describes your environment and follow the procedure for that model.

Deployment with existing ActiveGate

You won't be able to monitor the AWS cloud services without an AWS-hosted Environment ActiveGate.

The instructions below are applicable whether or not the account hosting your ActiveGate is the same as your monitored account. In a typical setup, you need to create two CloudFormation stacks using CloudFormation templates:

  • A CloudFormation stack from the account hosting your ActiveGate, containing the following resources:
  • A CloudFormation stack from the monitored account, containing the following resources:
    • A dedicated monitoring role for Dynatrace in your AWS account.
    • Its attached policy, defining the Dynatrace authentication permissions to your AWS environment.

To monitor multiple accounts, add all resources to the Resource array in the template in Create a role for ActiveGate on the account that hosts ActiveGate and repeat Create a monitoring role for Dynatrace on your monitored account to create a stack for each monitored account.

You will need:

  • An ActiveGate installed on an Amazon EC2 host. It must be able to assume a role within your AWS account that allows it to read the Dynatrace monitoring data.
  • The ID of the AWS account that hosts the ActiveGate (the account that hosts your Dynatrace components, which in this case is the one hosting the Environment ActiveGate).
  • The Amazon Web Services monitored account ID (the account that you want to monitor).
  • The name of the role with which your Environment ActiveGate was started.
  • The External ID, which you can get as follows.
    1. Go to Settings > Cloud and virtualization > AWS.
    2. Select Connect new instance.
    3. Under Authentication method, select Role-based authentication.
    4. Under Token, select Copy to copy the token (the External ID) to your clipboard.
  1. Download the YAML file with CloudFormation template.
  2. Create the stack in your Amazon Console:
    1. In your Amazon Console, go to CloudFormation.
    2. Go to Stacks and create a new stack with new resources.
    3. Select Template is ready, upload the template you created above, and then select Next.
    4. In Parameters, for Monitored Account ID, enter the ID of the account Dynatrace will monitor. Optionally, adapt other parameters as needed.
    5. Enter a name for your stack, and then select Next twice.
    6. Review your configuration, select I acknowledge that AWS CloudFormation might create IAM resources with custom names, and select Submit.

You can also create a stack via CLI using the command below:

aws cloudformation create-stack \
--capabilities CAPABILITY_NAMED_IAM \
--stack-name <stack_name> \
--template-body <file:///home/user/template_file.yaml> \
--parameters ParameterKey=ActiveGateRoleName,ParameterValue=<role_name> ParameterKey=AssumePolicyName,ParameterValue=<policy_name> ParameterKey=MonitoringRoleName,ParameterValue=<monitoring_role_name> ParameterKey=MonitoredAccountID,ParameterValue=<monitored_account_id>
  1. Go to the Amazon EC2 console, right-click an instance hosting your Environment ActiveGate, and select Security > Modify IAM role.
  2. Select the role you created and select Update IAM role.

After the Dynatrace_ActiveGate_role is created on the account hosting the ActiveGate, create a role for the account to be monitored.

  1. Download a YAML file with CloudFormation template from github role_based_access_AG_account_template.yml.
  2. Create the stack in your Amazon Console:
    1. In your Amazon Console, go to CloudFormation.
    2. Go to Stacks and create a new stack with new resources.
    3. Select Template is ready, upload the template you created above, and select Next.
    4. In Parameters, enter External ID, ActiveGateRoleName and ActiveGateAccountID from the stack you created. Optionally, adapt other parameters if needed.
    5. Enter a name for your stack, and then select Next twice.
    6. Review your configuration, enable I acknowledge that AWS CloudFormation might create IAM resources with custom names, and select Submit.

You can also create a stack via CLI using the command below:

aws cloudformation create-stack \
--capabilities CAPABILITY_NAMED_IAM \
--stack-name <stack_name> \
--template-body <file:///home/user/template_file.yaml> \
--parameters ParameterKey=ExternalID,ParameterValue=<external_id> ParameterKey=ActiveGateRoleName,ParameterValue=<activegate_role_name> ParameterKey=ActiveGateAccountID,ParameterValue=<activegate_account_id>

Starting with ActiveGate version 1.217, AWS monitoring is enabled by default. For configuration details, see Customize ActiveGate properties. The following configuration settings refer to earlier ActiveGate versions.

  1. Edit the custom.properties file of your Environment ActiveGate.

  2. Make the following property settings:

    [aws_monitoring]
    use_aws_proxy_role = false
    aws_monitoring_enabled = true

    If the ActiveGate is dedicated to AWS monitoring, you also need to set the MSGrouter property as follows:

    [collector]
    MSGrouter = false

  3. Save the file and restart the ActiveGate main service.

Only for AWS GovCloud and China partitions is key-based authentication allowed.

In this scenario you have to create an AWS monitoring policy and generate a key pair with that policy.

AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM) permission boundaries may deny AWS actions required by Dynatrace. If you use IAM permission boundary on your AWS account, make sure that actions from policy are allowed in all AWS Regions within permission boundary.

To create the AWS monitoring policy

  1. In your Amazon Console, go to Identity and Access Management.
  2. Go to Policies and select Create policy.
  3. Select the JSON tab and paste the predefined policy from the box below. 
    {
      "Version": "2012-10-17",
      "Statement": [
        {
          "Sid": "VisualEditor0",
          "Effect": "Allow",
          "Action": [
            "acm-pca:ListCertificateAuthorities",
            "apigateway:GET",
            "apprunner:ListServices",
            "appstream:DescribeFleets",
            "appsync:ListGraphqlApis",
            "athena:ListWorkGroups",
            "autoscaling:DescribeAutoScalingGroups",
            "cloudformation:ListStackResources",
            "cloudfront:ListDistributions",
            "cloudhsm:DescribeClusters",
            "cloudsearch:DescribeDomains",
            "cloudwatch:GetMetricData",
            "cloudwatch:GetMetricStatistics",
            "cloudwatch:ListMetrics",
            "codebuild:ListProjects",
            "datasync:ListTasks",
            "dax:DescribeClusters",
            "directconnect:DescribeConnections",
            "dms:DescribeReplicationInstances",
            "dynamodb:ListTables",
            "dynamodb:ListTagsOfResource",
            "ec2:DescribeAvailabilityZones",
            "ec2:DescribeInstances",
            "ec2:DescribeNatGateways",
            "ec2:DescribeSpotFleetRequests",
            "ec2:DescribeTransitGateways",
            "ec2:DescribeVolumes",
            "ec2:DescribeVpnConnections",
            "ecs:ListClusters",
            "eks:ListClusters",
            "elasticache:DescribeCacheClusters",
            "elasticbeanstalk:DescribeEnvironmentResources",
            "elasticbeanstalk:DescribeEnvironments",
            "elasticfilesystem:DescribeFileSystems",
            "elasticloadbalancing:DescribeInstanceHealth",
            "elasticloadbalancing:DescribeListeners",
            "elasticloadbalancing:DescribeLoadBalancers",
            "elasticloadbalancing:DescribeRules",
            "elasticloadbalancing:DescribeTags",
            "elasticloadbalancing:DescribeTargetHealth",
            "elasticmapreduce:ListClusters",
            "elastictranscoder:ListPipelines",
            "es:ListDomainNames",
            "events:ListEventBuses",
            "firehose:ListDeliveryStreams",
            "fsx:DescribeFileSystems",
            "gamelift:ListFleets",
            "glue:GetJobs",
            "inspector:ListAssessmentTemplates",
            "kafka:ListClusters",
            "kinesis:ListStreams",
            "kinesisanalytics:ListApplications",
            "kinesisvideo:ListStreams",
            "lambda:ListFunctions",
            "lambda:ListTags",
            "lex:GetBots",
            "logs:DescribeLogGroups",
            "mediaconnect:ListFlows",
            "mediaconvert:DescribeEndpoints",
            "mediapackage-vod:ListPackagingConfigurations",
            "mediapackage:ListChannels",
            "mediatailor:ListPlaybackConfigurations",
            "opsworks:DescribeStacks",
            "qldb:ListLedgers",
            "rds:DescribeDBClusters",
            "rds:DescribeDBInstances",
            "rds:DescribeEvents",
            "rds:ListTagsForResource",
            "redshift:DescribeClusters",
            "robomaker:ListSimulationJobs",
            "route53:ListHostedZones",
            "route53resolver:ListResolverEndpoints",
            "s3:ListAllMyBuckets",
            "sagemaker:ListEndpoints",
            "sns:ListTopics",
            "sqs:ListQueues",
            "storagegateway:ListGateways",
            "sts:GetCallerIdentity",
            "swf:ListDomains",
            "tag:GetResources",
            "tag:GetTagKeys",
            "transfer:ListServers",
            "workmail:ListOrganizations",
            "workspaces:DescribeWorkspaces"
          ],
          "Resource": "*"
        }
      ]
    }
  4. Give the policy a name.
  5. Select Create policy.

You'll need to generate an Access key and a Secret access key that Dynatrace can use to get metrics from Amazon Web Services.

  1. In your Amazon Console, go to Users and select Add Users.
  2. Enter the User name.
  3. In the next screen, choose Attach policies directly and attach the policy that you created before.
  4. Review the user details and select Create user.
  5. From the list of users, select your newly created user name and go to Security credentials, then select Create access key.
  6. On Access key best practices & alternatives, select Third-party service, then select Next.
  7. On Retrieve access keys, store the Access Key ID name (AKID) and Secret access key values.
  8. You can either download the user credentials or copy the credentials displayed online (select Show).

Terraform templates are an alternative way of creating and configuring AWS roles. For detailed instructions on how to create AWS roles with Terraform, see Configuring AWS role-based access with Terraform

Create monitoring configuration

You can create, activate, and manage multiple monitoring connections. Each connection is defined by the credentials and/or access tokens required for Dynatrace to be able to pull in the data.

Allowing for multiple connections and configurations makes it possible to monitor even extremely complex environments. With such an approach, you don't need to configure everything at once. Instead, you can gradually add monitoring configurations to your existing setup. Such an architecture also makes it easy to react to the dynamic changes of the monitored environment, without needing to reconfigure the unaffected elements.

If you've followed all the prior steps, you're ready to configure Amazon Web Services monitoring.

To add a new AWS connection

  1. Go to Settings > Cloud and virtualization > AWS. The page lists AWS connections already configured.

    If you haven't provided an ActiveGate required for AWS monitoring (check Prerequisites for details), the respective information will be provided on the screen and you will not be able to continue with the configuration process.

    You can go back to changing the already configured connections at any later point in time.

    1. Go to Settings > Cloud and virtualization > AWS. The page lists existing connections.
    2. Edit connections as needed.
      • To edit an existing connection or the monitored services within, select Edit Edit in that row.
      • To delete an existing connection, select Delete Remove in that row.

  2. Select Connect new instance and complete the following fields.

    • Enabled toggle—make sure it's selected if you want to monitor this configuration.

    • Connection name—enter a descriptive name for the connection.

    • Authentication method—select Role-based authentication.

    • IAM role…—enter the name of the role you created in Amazon for Dynatrace (either Dynatrace_monitoring_role or a customized role name, if you created one). Remember to always use the role that contains all required permissions.

    • Your Amazon account ID—enter your Amazon account ID (the account you want Dynatrace to pull metrics from).

  3. Select Connect to verify and save the connection.

    If your AWS account is on a different partition than the default AWS partition, you can use the AWS partition list to select your partition.

    You can limit the data acquired from the CloudWatch by defining a tag-based filter of specific resources. See Limit API calls to AWS using tags for more details on tag-based filtering.

After Dynatrace connects to your AWS environment, it immediately starts monitoring selected AWS services. Classic (formerly 'built-in') AWS metrics lists the metrics of AWS cloud services monitored by default.

In addition to AWS services, it's also possible to monitor all other AWS cloud services. AWS cloud services are enabled for monitoring per AWS connection.

To add a service to monitoring:

  1. Go to Settings > Cloud and virtualization > AWS.
  2. On the AWS overview page, find the connection that you want to change and select Edit Edit in that row.
  3. Under Services, select Manage services.
  4. Select Add service.
  5. Select the service from the list and then select Add service.
  6. Select Save changes to save your configuration.

You can add multiple cloud services by repeating the steps above.

After you add a service, Dynatrace automatically starts collecting a set of metrics for this particular service.

Recommended metrics:

  • Enabled by default
  • Can not be disabled
  • Can come with recommended dimensions (enabled by default, can't be disabled)
  • Can come with optional dimensions (disabled by default, can be enabled)

Apart from the recommended metrics, most services have the possibility of enabling optional metrics that can be added and configured manually.

To see the complete list of AWS cloud services and learn about the metrics collected for each of them, see All AWS cloud services.

Alternatively, you can check the list of supported AWS Services within in-product Dynatrace Hub (search for AWS) or in the web version of Dynatrace Hub.

  1. Go to Settings > Cloud and virtualization > AWS.
  2. On the AWS overview page, find the connection that you want to change and select the edit icon next to its name.
  3. Go to Services and select Manage services.
  4. To add a metric select the service for which you want to add metrics and select Add new metric.
  5. From the menu select Add metric for the metric you want to monitor.
  6. Select Edit to configure the metric.
  7. Select Apply to save your configuration.

After you select the cloud services and save your changes, monitoring of the newly added services starts automatically.

What's next?

Within minutes, you'll see the data on your dashboards.

To see the core measurements per each of the AWS connections

  1. Go to AWS.
  2. Select the connection for which you want to see an overview of the AWS infrastructure.

You can also build your own dashboard from the metrics collected for your AWS instances. For details on building dashboards, see Dashboards Classic.

Dynatrace OneAgent offers unparalleled depth of insight into hosts, containers, and code. To learn more, see Set up Dynatrace on Amazon Web Services.

After you set up AWS monitoring, you can:

  • Set up metric events for alerting. This enables you to create, enable, disable and configure recommended alerting rules.
  • Limit API calls to AWS using tags. By default, Dynatrace monitors all Amazon Web Services that have been specified in your permission policy. Optionally, you can use tagging to limit the AWS resources that are monitored by Dynatrace.

This method of monitoring does not require an ActiveGate. Dynatrace integration with Amazon CloudWatch Metric Streams provides a simple and safe way to ingest AWS metrics. Amazon CloudWatch Metric Streams allows all metrics issued in a given AWS region to be streamed through Kinesis Firehose to the Dynatrace API. For details, see Amazon CloudWatch Metric Streams.

It is also possible to trace AWS Lambda .NET Core functions with OpenTelemetry .NET.

Related tags
Infrastructure Observability