Managing the capacity of your AWS infrastructure
As a Capacity Planner or AWS Technology Specialist, use BMC Helix Continuous Optimization to configure, administer, and manage the capacity of your AWS infrastructure.
As the flow diagram illustrates, the data source (AWS API ETL) collects data from the AWS portal. The collected data is transferred to Continuous Optimization where it is processed, and then displayed on the user interface. Use the product features to review, analyze, and manage the capacity of your AWS infrastructure.
The following sections describe how you can achieve these goals:
Managing the capacity of AWS infrastructure
Analyze and manage the capacity of your AWS infrastructure elements by using the AWS EC2 Instances view. For the AWS data to be available in the view, the Administrator must first set up the data sources to collect data.
Task 1. Collect data and install the views
As an administrator, use Amazon-Web-Services-AWS-API-Extractor to collect data from the AWS EC2 instances:
- Configure and run this ETL to collect the required configuration and performance metrics from the VMs. In the ETL configuration, choose to collect data from a single or multiple AWS accounts depending on your AWS account setup.
- In addition to the required metrics collected by using the AWS API ETL, you can install, configure, and start the CloudWatch agent on your EC2 instances to collect the system-level metrics from them. These metrics are useful for investigating the capacity-related issues that might occur in your AWS cloud environment. The CloudWatch agent collects these metrics and sends them to Amazon CloudWatch. When you run the AWS API ETL, these metrics are imported into the Capacity Optimization database. For more information, see Collecting-EC2-instance-metrics-by-using-the-CloudWatch-agent.
(Optional) Use BMC-TrueSight-Capacity-Optimization-Gateway-VIS-files-parser to collect additional metrics at a higher granularity. Before using this ETL, you must instrument the VMs. The memory utilization value that is collected from an instrumented VM is based on the actual memory of the VM. The Agent collects the resource consumption breakdown at the process or workload level and helps you to detect specific in-guest OS level resource constraints (for example, in-guest paging due to the physical memory configuration of the VM being too low).
We recommend that you instrument your business-critical VMs to collect OS-level memory usage values.
To instrument a VM
- Install a Continuous Optimization Agent inside the VM from which you want to collect metrics.
- Configure the Gateway Server and Continuous Optimization Agent to initiate data collection.
For more information, see Collecting data via Continuous Optimization Agents. - Configure and use the out-of-the-box BMC-TrueSight-Capacity-Optimization-Gateway-VIS-files-parser to collect the required metrics from the VM.
After data collection starts, data is loaded daily and Indicators are available in the Workspace tab.
As an administrator, install the AWS views and Business Services view and grant the necessary permissions to Capacity Planners and AWS Technology Specialists to access these views. While creating the service pools, make sure that you select AWS domains to view data for AWS only.
Task 2. Analyze the collected data
For detailed analysis of AWS infrastructure elements, use the AWS-views.
The following common use cases are described here:
Identify overallocated VMs
Use the Recommendations-page-in-the-AWS-EC2-Instances-view to identify AWS EC2 instances that are overallocated. The page also provides actionable recommendations to help you resolve the issue.
Identify idle or unused VMs
Use the Recommendations-page-in-the-AWS-EC2-Instances-view to identify AWS EC2 instances that are idle. The page also provides actionable recommendations to help you resolve the issues.
For more information about these idle EC2 instances, view the EC2-Idle-Instances-page-in-the-AWS-EC2-Instances-view that provides some of the key metric details of such instances.
Determine and analyze the available resources and their utilization per EC2 instance
Review and analyze the relevant metrics on the EC2-Instances-page-in-the-AWS-EC2-Instances-view to determine the available resources and their utilization per instance. For example, view the utilization metrics for CPU, Memory, and datastore.
Determine and analyze the available resources for EBS volumes
Review the details on the EBS-Volumes-page-in-the-AWS-EC2-Instances-view to analyze the available resources for EBS volume per EC2 instance.
Performing advanced analysis
The capacity views help you analyze your AWS infrastructure using a predefined set of metrics. To perform advanced analysis on the imported AWS data, such as identifying specific performance issues, trends, and bottlenecks, use analysis.
Here are some use cases for which you can create and use analysis:
Analyze the CPU and memory utilization of EC2 instances
The following video explains the use of analysis to understand the trend of CPU and memory usage of EC2 instances.
Analyze the resource utilization pattern of AWS VMs
Create an analysis.
See sample configuration values:
- Review the analysis results.
The analysis results are shown in a tabular format. The summary table shows the resource utilization metric values for the virtual machines.
For more examples, see Creating-an-analysis.
Managing future demand
Use Models to predict service performance and obtain forecasts of historical series of metrics. For more information, see Modeling-capacity-usage.
The following video demonstrates how to create a custom model to forecast trends for the memory and file system utilization metrics.