Ganglia Layer - AWS OpsWorks
View the Ganglia Statistics

Ganglia Layer

Important

The AWS OpsWorks Stacks service reached end of life on May 26, 2024 and has been disabled for both new and existing customers. We strongly recommend customers migrate their workloads to other solutions as soon as possible. If you have questions about migration, reach out to the AWS Support Team on AWS re:Post or through AWS Premium Support.

Note

This layer is available only for Chef 11 and earlier Linux-based stacks.

AWS OpsWorks Stacks sends all of your instance and volume metrics to Amazon CloudWatch, making it easy to view graphs and set alarms to help you troubleshoot and take automated action based on the state of your resources. You can also use the Ganglia AWS OpsWorks Stacks layer for additional application monitoring options such as storing your chosen metrics.

The Ganglia layer is a blueprint for an instance that monitors your stack by using Ganglia distributed monitoring. A stack usually has only one Ganglia instance. The Ganglia layer includes the following optional configuration settings:

Ganglia URL

The statistic's URL path. The complete URL is http://DNSNameURLPath, where DNSName is the associated instance's DNS name. The default URLPath value is "/ganglia" which corresponds to something like: http://ec2-54-245-151-7.us-west-2.compute.amazonaws.com/ganglia.

Ganglia user name

A user name for the statistics web page. You must provide the user name when you view the page. The default value is "opsworks".

Ganglia password

A password that controls access to the statistics web page. You must provide the password when you view the page. The default value is a randomly generated string.

Note

Record the password for later use; AWS OpsWorks Stacks does not allow you to view the password after you create the layer. However, you can update the password by going to the layer's Edit page and clicking Update password.

Custom security groups

This setting appears if you chose to not automatically associate a built-in AWS OpsWorks Stacks security group with your layers. You must specify which security group to associate with the layer. For more information, see Create a New Stack.

Elastic Load Balancer

You can attach an Elastic Load Balancing load balancer to the layer's instances.

Important

If your stack includes a Ganglia layer, we recommend that you disable SSLv3 if possible for that layer to address the vulnerabilities described in CVE-2014-3566. To do so, you must override the Apache server's ssl.conf.erb template to modify the SSLProtocol setting. For details, see Disabling SSLv3 for Apache Servers.

View the Ganglia Statistics

AWS OpsWorks Stacks recipes install a low-overhead Ganglia client on every instance. If your stack includes a Ganglia layer, the Ganglia client automatically starts reporting to the Ganglia as soon as the instance comes on line. The Ganglia uses the client data to compute a variety of statistics and displays the results graphically on its statistics web page.

To view Ganglia statistics

  1. On the Layers page, click Ganglia to open the layer's details page.

  2. In the navigation pane, click Instances. Under Ganglia, click the instance name.

  3. Copy the instance's Public DNS name.

  4. Use the DNS name to construct the statistics URL, which will look something like: http://ec2-54-245-151-7.us-west-2.compute.amazonaws.com/ganglia.

  5. Paste the complete URL into your browser, navigate to the page, and enter the Ganglia user name and password to display the page. An example follows.

    ShortStack Cluster Report dashboard showing system metrics and load graph for the past hour.