# Monitoring Boomi with AWS CloudWatch - URL: https://www.obytes.com/blog/monitoring-boomi-with-aws-cloudwatch - Published: 2021-01-12 - Author: Ahmed AL-Haffar - Topics: DevOps, Integration - Summary: Monitor Boomi processes with AWS CloudWatch. Install the agent, ship process logs, create metrics and send Slack alerts through AWS Chatbot. In this article, we are going to leverage on what we had built in [Part 1](https://www.obytes.com/blog/deploying-boomi-on-aws-ecs) of this series and integrate the Atom container with [AWS CloudWatch Agent](https://docs.aws.amazon.com/AmazonCloudWatch/latest/monitoring/Install-CloudWatch-Agent.html), So I would encourage you to go through it to have a clearer view of the infrastructure. Our goal here is to push Boomi processes execution logs, plus the Atom logs, to CloudWatch for log collection and alerting via different channels. Here we will cover the alerting via Slack. ### AWS CloudWatch Agent Installation The first step is to install the AmazonCloudWatch Agent as a sidecar container; the sidecars are additional containers that run alongside the main one, they are usually used to perform peripheral tasks such as logging, configuration, or proxying requests, this will be deployed to the same ECS service built in our previous [article](https://www.obytes.com/blog/deploying-boomi-on-aws-ecs), the container definition of the CWA could be found in the [CloudWatch Agent Dockerfile](https://github.com/obytes/terraform-aws-ecs-boomi/blob/a3aed6a4e98bf701fdcb4fd2cda992e4a391d32c/CWA_Dockerfile) in addition to the [entrypoint](https://github.com/obytes/terraform-aws-ecs-boomi/blob/a3aed6a4e98bf701fdcb4fd2cda992e4a391d32c/CWA_entrypoint.sh) which will copy all the required files by the CW Agent to run successfully, Our CWA config file can be found [here](https://github.com/obytes/terraform-aws-ecs-boomi/blob/a3aed6a4e98bf701fdcb4fd2cda992e4a391d32c/modules/boomi_node/templates/cwa_config.json), for more details or customization please refer to [AWS Documentation](https://docs.aws.amazon.com/AmazonCloudWatch/latest/monitoring/CloudWatch-Agent-Configuration-File-Details.html), below are the main points about the CWA Installation - Build the CWA image and push it to ECR, as shown in the below snippet. > The ECR repository used in the below example is the same one created in previous [Part](https://www.obytes.com/blog/deploying-boomi-on-aws-ecs) ```bash docker build -t cw_agent:cwa -f CWA_Dockerfile . aws ecr get-login-password --region | docker login --username AWS --password-stdin .dkr.ecr.us-east-1.amazonaws.com docker tag cw_agent:cwa .dkr.ecr.us-east-1.amazonaws.com/:cwa docker push .dkr.ecr.us-east-1.amazonaws.com/:cwa ``` - By default, the CWA sidecar container image would be tagged with `cwa` if no value provided to `var.cwa_tag`, here is the complete [ECS task definition](https://github.com/obytes/terraform-aws-ecs-boomi/blob/64e4e0f440b23499c59e378d02a6000f8d18644c/modules/boomi_node/main.tf#L277) for the CW Agent side-container. ```hcl ..... "name": "${var.cloudwatch-container-name}", "image": "${var.repository_url}:${var.cwa_tag}", "entryPoint": [ "sh", "entrypoint.sh" ], ..... ``` - CWA container will be using the same EFS mount points used by the Boomi Atom container; by leveraging this approach, the CWA will have access to the Atom and process execution logs. - CWA configuration file is a JSON file that would be generated by executing the `terraform` plan and storing it on AWS SecretsManger. ```hcl resource "aws_secretsmanager_secret_version" "config-file" { secret_id = aws_secretsmanager_secret.cloudwatch-config-file.id secret_string = templatefile(join("/", [local.templates, "config.json"]), { for key, value in local.cw_agent_config : key => value }) } ``` - CWA entrypoint script will copy the config file from the SecretsManger to the Cloudwatch Agent installation folder. ```bash aws secretsmanager get-secret-value --secret-id ${CONFIG_FILE_SECRET_ID} --query SecretString \ --output text > /opt/aws/amazon-cloudwatch-agent/bin/default_linux_config.json ``` ### Boomi Process Logging Next, we will switch to [Dell Boomi Platform](https://platform.boomi.com/) to understand how the logging is working; But before doing so, let's take a look first at what Boomi Event Framework offers us and how we can leverage it. [Boomi Event Framework](https://community.boomi.com/s/article/understandingtheeventframework) captures Events from processes and Atoms within your account and records them in the platform database, which later would be consumed by either Email, RSS, Atmosphere API, or the Process Execution UI. By default, these logs are not being written to any Atom logs unless we use the `Notify` shape with `User Log` enabled, for more information about the Atom Logs locations and description kindly refer to [AtomSphere Logs](https://community.boomi.com/s/article/overviewofatomspherelogsfortroubleshooting), one more thing I need to highlight here is that, the default installation folder for Boomi Atom is `/var/boomi/Atom_` and this is controlled by an environment variable `INSTALLATION_DIRECTORY`, for more information about the env vars available for Atom installation please refer to [boomi/atom Dockerhub](https://hub.docker.com/r/boomi/atom/), our CW Agent configuration file specifies the path of the log file to upload to CloudWatch Logs as `/var/boomi/Atom_ecs_mol/logs/**.log` where `ecs_mol` is the Atom containers' name, for a complete config JSON file please check [CloudWatch Agent Config](https://github.com/obytes/terraform-aws-ecs-boomi/blob/master/modules/boomi_node/templates/cwa_config.json), following is a snippet of `file_path` configuration. ``` "logs": { "logs_collected": { "files": { "collect_list": [ { "file_path": "/var/boomi/Atom_ecs_mol/logs/**.log"} ``` ![Notify Shape](https://www.obytes.com/assets/posts/2021-01-12-monitoring-boomi-with-aws-cloudwatch/images/monitoring_001.png) Next, let's add a `Notify Shape` to our process with `Enable User Log` is checked, this would write the data generated by the previous shape to the process logs that will be sent to the log groups configured in the CW Agent. ![Enabling User Log](https://www.obytes.com/assets/posts/2021-01-12-monitoring-boomi-with-aws-cloudwatch/images/monitoring_002.png) Once the process execution completed, we can see the logs on AWS CloudWatch, as shown below. > Note: The type of `Code` key is Number, as this would help us while configuring the CW metric filter to be filtered by numeric values, as we will see in the next sections ![AWS CloudWatch Logs](https://www.obytes.com/assets/posts/2021-01-12-monitoring-boomi-with-aws-cloudwatch/images/monitoring_003.png) ### CloudWatch Metric and Slack Alerting As shown in the last picture, the collected logs from the Boomi process is a JSON file. This is not the default behavior; but our `Data Map` shape is configured to send the logs to `Notify Shape` as a JSON log, below is an example of the generated log structure by the `Data Map` , the idea behind that is to take advantage of the metric's filter for AWS CloudWatch Logs and build a filter pattern based on `Keys` such as Error Number or Process Name, below is an example to build a metric filter if the `Error` value is 400 and above, for more information about the filter syntax of log events, please check [Filter and Pattern Syntax](https://docs.aws.amazon.com/AmazonCloudWatch/latest/logs/FilterAndPatternSyntax.html). ![Boomi Data map](https://www.obytes.com/assets/posts/2021-01-12-monitoring-boomi-with-aws-cloudwatch/images/monitoring_004.png) ```hcl resource "aws_cloudwatch_log_metric_filter" "boomi_metric_filter_error_401" { log_group_name = aws_cloudwatch_log_group.boomi_log_files.name name = "${aws_cloudwatch_log_group.boomi_log_files.name}-filter" pattern = "{$.Code >= 400}" metric_transformation { name = "ErrorGreaterThan400" namespace = "BOOMI_METRIC" value = "1" default_value = "0" } } ``` Besides this, we will implement a metric to send any alarms generated by the above filter to the SNS channel, whose in return would be fanned-out to Slack by leveraging the AWS Chatbot's feature, as we will see in the next section. ```hcl resource "aws_cloudwatch_metric_alarm" "boomi_metric_alarm_http_401" { alarm_name = "${local.prefix}-boomi-http-400" comparison_operator = "GreaterThanThreshold" evaluation_periods = 1 metric_name = aws_cloudwatch_log_metric_filter.boomi_metric_filter_error_401.metric_transformation[0].name namespace = "BOOMI_METRIC" period = 60 statistic = "Average" threshold = 0 datapoints_to_alarm = 1 alarm_description = "Alarm to be triggered if the number of HTTP_401 is greater than 0 for the last minute" treat_missing_data = "missing" alarm_actions = [aws_sns_topic.cloudwatch_alarms.arn] tags = local.common_tags } ``` ### AWS Chatot Integration In this article, we are not going to discuss the AWS Chatbot creation instead, we will refer to our blog entry for [Sending notifications to Slack using AWS Chatbot](https://www.obytes.com/blog/sending-notifications-to-slack-using-aws-chatbot). Our module in [terraform-aws-ecs-boomi](https://github.com/obytes/terraform-aws-ecs-boomi) is configured with an **optional** AWS Chatbot module that is controlled by the variable `var.is_chatbot_enabled` which is defaulted to `false`. here we will configure the boolean variable `var.chatbot_is_enabled` to True. Unfortunately, there is one pre-requisite step for the Chatbot module where we have to create the client manually via AWS console and configure a new Slack client, as shown in the below picture. ![AWS Chatbot](https://www.obytes.com/assets/posts/2021-01-12-monitoring-boomi-with-aws-cloudwatch/images/monitoring_005.png) Once the client is configured and `chatbot_is_enabled` turned on. Our module creates the required Chatbot configuration and associates it with the provided Slack `workspace`, `channel` IDs and would listen to the SNS topic created above. Below is an example of how the CW alarm would look like when received on the Slack channel. ![Slack Alarm](https://www.obytes.com/assets/posts/2021-01-12-monitoring-boomi-with-aws-cloudwatch/images/monitoring_006.png) ### Conclusion I hope you find this article useful and informative for you and I do appreciate your comments if you faced any issues while deploying this, or you have any improvements, enhancements you are welcome to submit a PR to [terraform-aws-ecs-boomi](https://github.com/obytes/terraform-aws-ecs-boomi)