As you may already know, our monitor groups feature provides users with a powerful view to not only organize, but also visually monitor the health and operational trend of AWS resources supporting your cloud deployments. But dealing with dynamically changing systems like Amazon's Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) often created some unique challenges. With AutoScaling adding new capacity during demand spikes and decreasing capacity during lulls, manually updating monitor groups to keep up with rapid changes became a cumbersome task.

Spending too much time on manual configuration or repeating frequently performed actions shouldn't be part of any discussion. So, we came up with a solution that not only helped users automatically create logical groups of resources but also kept it up to date, to save users the trouble of manual intervention. Enter Site24x7's custom tag: group_site24x7.

Now AWS users can assign a case sensitive tag with key = group_site24x7 and a value to their resources to automatically create monitor groups on the fly.

To get started

Sign in to the AWS Management Console of the cloud service. Label the resources deployed in your account with the key = group_site24x7, and add a value of your choice. For example, you can assign the tag key to each of your Auto Scaling groups with specific associated values like production, web server, or any other relevant name to create monitor groups in a way that is most suitable to you or your team.
You can also type in multiple comma separated values to assign the same resource to multiple monitor groups. For example, you might have a set of shared resources that have a specific configuration and serve a particular client. Here you can define the tag key group_site24x7 with client and cluster name as values.

Once you're done, Site24x7 takes over and rolls up all the resources and instances with the same key-value pair into a single monitor group during the next poll. This way, you don't need to reintegrate your AWS account with Site24x7 or update the settings of an existing integration.

Our developers have also introduced provisions to ensure this enhancement works well with existing monitor groups. For example, imagine that there is a current monitor group in the Site24x7 console by the name web_prod_1. Now, to update the group you can simply assign the key-value pair (group_site24x7 = web_prod_1) to all those AWS entities that you want in this group.
Site24x7 collects the tags associated with a specific resource in every poll (taken every 5 minutes), to make sure everything stays in sync and up to date.

So what are you waiting for? Start automatically organizing resources into an unlimited number of meaningful categories, quickly search and find them on the monitors list page and easily see comparative usage stats for resources within each group.