Install the CloudWatch agent

The CloudWatch agent is available as a package in Amazon Linux 2023 and Amazon Linux 2. If you are using one of these operating systems, you can install the package by entering the following command. You must also make sure that the IAM role attached to the instance has the CloudWatchAgentServerPolicy attached. For more information, see Create IAM roles to use with the CloudWatch agent on Amazon EC2 instances.

sudo yum install amazon-cloudwatch-agent

On all supported operating systems including Linux and Windows Server, you can download and install the CloudWatch agent using either the command line with an Amazon S3 download link, using Amazon EC2 Systems Manager, or using an AWS CloudFormation template. See the following sections for details.