Ubuntu VM

Below advice applies for:

• Deployment service: AWS Lightsail, AWS EC2
• Architecture: Intel/AMD (amd64), AWS Graviton2 (ARM64 / aarch64)

Recommended Preparations for Ubuntu System Configuration

Set hostname:

sudo hostnamectl set-hostname XXXX-sg01.soluvas.com

Enable byobu and make sure LC_ALL is set by server even when connecting remotely:

# not just for multi-screens, but you'll get useful system load metrics
byobu-enable
sudo update-locale LC_ALL=en_US.UTF-8 LANG=en_US.UTF-8

Then re-login using ssh.

Update Ubuntu packages:

sudo apt update && sudo apt -y full-upgrade

To enable VSCode to watch files, please apply the following system tweak to the server.

Troubleshooting: UnhandledPromiseRejectionWarning: Error: ENOSPC: System limit for number of file watchers reached

Solution:

echo fs.inotify.max_user_watches=524288 | sudo tee -a /etc/sysctl.conf && sudo sysctl -p

Using CloudWatch to track memory usage on Lightsail instances

Reference: Using CloudWatch to track memory usage on Lightsail instances

Important guide:

• All operations must be done as root, so sudo su before all steps.
• CloudWatch agent IAM user is cloudwatch_agent.
• Configuration file is /opt/aws/amazon-cloudwatch-agent/bin/config.json

Configuration file that works well and doesn’t use excessive custom metrics:

{
        "agent": {
                "metrics_collection_interval": 60,
                "run_as_user": "root"
        },
        "logs": {
                "logs_collected": {
                        "files": {
                                "collect_list": [
                                        {
                                                "file_path": "/var/log/*error.log",
                                                "log_group_name": "*error.log",
                                                "log_stream_name": "{hostname}"
                                        }
                                ]
                        }
                }
        },
        "metrics": {
                "metrics_collected": {
                        "cpu": {
                                "measurement": [
                                        "cpu_usage_idle",
                                        "cpu_usage_iowait"
                                ],
                                "metrics_collection_interval": 60,
                                "totalcpu": true
                        },
                        "disk": {
                                "measurement": [
                                ],
                                "metrics_collection_interval": 60,
                                "resources": [
                                        "/"
                                ]
                        },
                        "diskio": {
                                "measurement": [
                                        "io_time",
                                        "write_bytes",
                                        "read_bytes",
                                        "writes",
                                        "reads"
                                ],
                                "metrics_collection_interval": 60,
                                "resources": [
                                        "xvda"
                                ]
                        },
                        "mem": {
                                "measurement": [
                                        "mem_used_percent"
                                ],
                                "metrics_collection_interval": 60
                        },
                        "net": {
                                "measurement": [
                                        "net_bytes_sent",
                                        "net_bytes_recv"
                                ],
                                "metrics_collection_interval": 60,
                                "resources": [
                                        "*"
                                ]
                        },
                        "swap": {
                                "measurement": [
                                ],
                                "metrics_collection_interval": 60
                        }
                }
        }
}