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Remediation

24 Times Used
22 MAY 2019
Reboot Process in EC2 instances (Triggered by Jira)
EC2
Remediation
Remediation

What if managing your instances were as easy as raising a JIRA ticket? Almost every DevOps team uses JIRA as a standard means of issue tracking & task management. We’ve seen a ton of our customers prefer using an integrated approach to their cloud & workflows. Hence, we’ve adopted a workflow for easier management of instance states through JIRA triggers. 


Benefits


  • Scheduled alerts
  • Auto-remediation
  • Cost-saving
  • Customization


Workflow Brief


To automate the process end-to-end- the workflow raises a JIRA ticket when a CloudWatch alarm goes off, the corrective action then executes, and the workflow then closes the ticket. The workflow acts as a virtual DevOps engineer. The action here would be rebooting the instances when an alarm for high CPU utilization goes off. See the detailed workflow docs here.


Process


Reboot the process associated with a machine by raising a ticket. The Apache servers associated with the EC2 machines will be rebooted when it causes high CPU utilization(set threshold as per your need). The trigger is the tags specified in the Jira Ticket description. The workflow will create a Jira ticket when the CloudWatch alarm alerts of high CPU utilization and then after the machines reboot, the ticket is closed before the workflow ends.

Increase EBS volume size if Instance's disk utilisation exceeds 90%
EC2
Remediation
AWS Best Practices
Remediation
Automation

A common occurrence in Instance management is the risk of overutilization of disk space. Several factors can cause an increase in Diskutilization to go over 90%. For example, user-initiated heavy workloads, analytic queries, prolonged deadlocks & lock waits, multiple concurrent transactions, long-running transactions, or other processes that utilize CPU resources.


Over-utilized instances can incur several performance issues that later affect your budget. Having a simple, automated means of scaling the volume of your instances when necessary take off any management overhead from your side. This use case focuses on automatically increasing disk space by a defined amount when a DSU of above 90% is detected. 


Workflow Brief


In this particular template, you instruct the workflow to increase the DB size by 20GB when the disk space utilization crosses 90%. This event (DSU > 90%) sets off a CloudWatch Alarm, which triggers the TotalCloud workflow. Even if your CloudWatch Alarm alerts you of overutilization in the middle of the night, the workflow would have handled it for you before you even think of having to respond. Since it’s automated, the fix is executed immediately - eliminating any response time delays. If you wish to approve of the action before it occurs, you can enable user approval as well. 


Process & Integrations


The workflow increases your EBS volume by 20GB, as a default value. This value can be altered depending on your workload demands. When a CloudWatch Alarm goes off and sends an SNS alert for high disk space utilization, the workflow is automatically triggered and executes the action. Like we’ve pointed out, you can set the trigger to be anything - a CloudWatch Alarm, any other external system, platform, or ticketing system such as JIRA. In this case, you can also instruct the workflow to create the ticket on your ticketing platform when the Alarm goes off. It can then close the ticket once remediation is completed. This is helpful for logging purposes, and to enable end-to-end automation. 


After the Workflow matches the instances to be modified, it requests for user approval. On receiving a green signal, it increases the EBS volume and sends an SSM command that will attach the new volume to its EBS, and inform the OS. 

The workflow has two primary steps being achieved with a total of 8 nodes. The first step is to filter out the right instance(s) using simple conditional operations. The second is to modify the volume and apply it to your instance.


Copy EC2 Logs Data to S3 and Delete the Log Folder
S3
EC2
Remediation
AWS Best Practices
Remediation

The workflow transfers the logs present in the log folder of EC2 machines into a specified S3 Bucket. This use case helps you to store the logs you want, without worrying about increasing the disk space in the machine.

Modify Instance Type if CPU Utilization <10% For a Week
EC2
Cost Saving
Remediation
Cost Saving
Remediation

If CPU utilization is less than 10% for a week, you are not utilizing the instance efficiently. This workflow identifies such instances and switches them to another instance type.