First time installation with 4 hosts. AWS 2 hosts won't connect and various issues with the other 2 non AWS hosts. How to troubleshoot?

[blacksensei (Joseph)]

CMK version:
Open Monitoring Distribution Version 2.1.0p24.cfe
OS version:
Ubuntu 20.04.6 LTS

Error message:

I am a real newbie, I just got to know checkmk only yesterday and I have installed it today. The purpose is that we do have some dedicated hosts on serverloft and some workloads on AWS. In AWS we are only interested in 2 EC2 instances. They are used as encryption domain for some VPNs we will need the agents on this EC2 boxes to monitor upstream services that we depend on. After installing the agent on the EC2 boxes (Ubuntu 18.04.3 LTS) they both reported down with:

CRIT Check_MK [agent] Communication failed: timed outCRIT, execution time 5.0 sec
CRIT Check_MK Discovery no unmonitored services found, no vanished services found, no new host labels, [agent] Communication failed: timed out

Then I added 2 serverloft hosts to it to find out whether I am the one making mistakes. That as well turns out to be interesting. Both are 2 but not without issues.
the first one is up but with warning because I didn’t choose to monitor all the services. Wondering how to clear that warning.
The second one though saying it’s up, the Check_MK and Check_MK Discovery are both saying the same message as the EC2 boxes that are shown as down. So I am confused.

I would like to use this opportunities to understand the tool and build some experience on how to troubleshoot , what to check and how to check it.

So community please where do I start. Thanks in advance

[elias.voelker (EliasV)]

Hi @blacksensei ,

and welcome to the forum.

You will not be able to monitor EC2 instances using the Agent, you will need to use the AWS “Special Agent”. Take a look here: Monitoring Amazon Web Services (AWS)

Best
Elias

[blacksensei (Joseph)]

Hi @elias.voelker ,

Thanks for your answer. I was really counting on leveraging the network monitoring capacity of the agents within the EC2s to monitor APIs , IP and ports available to the EC2 through various VPNs encryption domain it’s been part of. The main expectation is not to even have health data on the EC2s used as forward proxies but using the agent to check on uptime of APIs exposed to us.

Is there any way to achieve that? The only way I see now is to install the checkmk itself on the boxes. Not sure whether it would make sense to install it on both of them. the 2 boxes are on 2 availability zones to prevent SPOF scenario.