cloudwatch_metrics_collector

Overview

The cloudwatch_metrics_collector ROS Node publishes your robot's metrics to the cloud to enable you to easily track the health of a fleet with the use of automated monitoring and actions for when a robot's metrics show abnormalities. You can easily track historic trends and profile behavior such as resource usage. Out of the box it provides a ROS interface to take a ROS message defining a metric and publish it to Amazon CloudWatch Metrics. The only configuration required to get started is setting up AWS Credentials and Permissions for your robot.The CloudWatch Metrics Node can be used with existing ROS Nodes that publish metric messages or with your own nodes if you instrument them to publish your own custom metrics.

Amazon CloudWatch Metrics Summary: Amazon CloudWatch is a monitoring and management service built for developers, system operators, site reliability engineers (SRE), and IT managers. CloudWatch provides you with data and actionable insights to monitor your applications, understand and respond to system-wide performance changes, optimize resource utilization, and get a unified view of operational health. CloudWatch collects monitoring and operational data in the form of logs, metrics, and events, providing you with a unified view of AWS resources, applications and services that run on AWS, and on-premises servers. You can use CloudWatch to set high resolution alarms, visualize logs and metrics side by side, take automated actions, troubleshoot issues, and discover insights to optimize your applications, and ensure they are running smoothly.

Keywords: ROS, AWS, CloudWatch, Metrics

License

The source code is released under an Apache 2.0.

Author: AWS RoboMaker
Affiliation: Amazon Web Services (AWS)

RoboMaker cloud extensions rely on third-party software licensed under open-source licenses and are provided for demonstration purposes only. Incorporation or use of RoboMaker cloud extensions in connection with your production workloads or commercial product(s) or devices may affect your legal rights or obligations under the applicable open-source licenses. License information for this repository can be found here. AWS does not provide support for this cloud extension. You are solely responsible for how you configure, deploy, and maintain this cloud extension in your workloads or commercial product(s) or devices.

Supported ROS Distributions

Kinetic
Melodic

Installation

AWS Credentials

You will need to create an AWS Account and configure the credentials to be able to communicate with AWS services. You may find AWS Configuration and Credential Files helpful. Specifying AWS credentials by setting environment variables is not supported.

This node will require the following AWS account IAM role permissions:

cloudwatch:PutMetricData

Building from Source

To build from source you'll need to create a new workspace, clone and checkout the latest release branch of this repository, install all the dependencies, and compile. If you need the latest development features you can clone from the master branch instead of the latest release branch. While we guarantee the release branches are stable, the master should be considered to have an unstable build due to ongoing development.

Install build tool: please refer to colcon installation guide
Create a ROS workspace and a source directory
```
  mkdir -p ~/ros-workspace/src
```

Clone the package into the source directory .

  cd ~/ros-workspace/src
  git clone https://github.com/aws-robotics/cloudwatchmetrics-ros1.git -b release-latest

Install dependencies

  cd ~/ros-workspace 
  sudo apt-get update && rosdep update
  rosdep install --from-paths src --ignore-src -r -y

Note: If building the master branch instead of a release branch you may need to also checkout and build the master branches of the packages this package depends on.

Build the packages
```
  cd ~/ros-workspace && colcon build
```

Configure ROS library Path

  source ~/ros-workspace/install/setup.bash

Build and run the unit tests

  colcon build --packages-select cloudwatch_metrics_collector --cmake-target tests
  colcon test --packages-select cloudwatch_metrics_collector cloudwatch_metrics_common && colcon test-result --all

Launch Files

In order to include a cloudwatch_metrics_collector in your launch file, you should add <include file="$(find cloudwatch_metrics_collector)/launch/cloudwatch_metrics_collector.launch" /> to your launch file. The launch file uses the following arguments:

Arg Name	Description
node_name	(optional) The name the metrics node should be launched with. If not provided the node will default to "cloudwatch_metrics_collector"
config_file	(optional) A path to a rosparam config file. If provided the launch file will use rosparam to load the configuration into the private namespace of the node.

An example launch file called sample_application.launch is included in this project that gives an example of how you can include this node in your project and provide it with arguments.

Usage

Run the node

With launch file using parameters in .yaml format (example provided)
- ROS: roslaunch cloudwatch_metrics_collector sample_application.launch --screen

Send a test metric

rostopic pub /metrics ros_monitoring_msgs/MetricList '[{header: auto, metric_name: "ExampleMetric", unit: "sec", value: 42, time_stamp: now, dimensions: []}, {header: auto, metric_name: "ExampleMetric2", unit: "count", value: 22, time_stamp: now, dimensions: [{name: "ExampleDimension", value: "1"}]}]'

Configuration File and Parameters

An example configuration file named sample_configuration.yaml is provided that contains a detailed example configuration for the Node.

All parameters to the Node are provided via the parameter server when the node is started. When loading configuration the Node will start looking for each setting inside of its private namespace and then search up the namespace heirarchy to the global namespace for the parameters.

Parameter Name	Description	Type	Default
aws_metrics_namespace	If provided it will set the namespace for all metrics provided by this node to the provided value. If the node is running on AWS RoboMaker then the provided launch file will ignore this parameter in favor of the namespace specified by the AWS RoboMaker ecosystem	string	ROS
aws_monitored_metric_topics	An optional list of topics to listen to. If not provided or is empty the node will just listen on the global "metrics" topic. If this list is not empty then the node will not subscribe to the "metrics" topic and will only subscribe to the topics in the list.	array of strings	metrics
storage_directory	The location where all offline metrics will be stored	string	~/.ros/cwmetrics/
storage_limit	The maximum size of all offline storage files in KB. Once this limit is reached offline logs will start to be deleted oldest first.	int	1048576
aws_client_configuration	If given the node will load the provided configuration when initializing the client. If a specific configuration setting is not included in the map then it will search up the namespace hierarchy for an 'aws_client_configuration' map that contains the field. In this way, a global configuration can be provided for all AWS nodes with only specific values overridden for a specific Node instance if needed	map
storage_resolution	The storage resolution level for presenting metrics in CloudWatch. For more information, see high-resolution-metrics.	int	60

Advanced Configuration Parameters

Most users won't need to touch these parameters, they are useful if you want fine grained control over how your metrics are stored offline and uploaded to CloudWatch.

Parameter Name	Description	Type	Default
batch_max_queue_size	The maximum number metrics items to add to the CloudWatch upload queue before they start to be written to disk	int	1024
batch_trigger_publish_size	Only publish metrics to CloudWatch when there are this many items in the queue. When this is set the publishing of metrics on a constant timer is disabled. This must be smaller than batch_max_queue_size. Metrics uploaded from offline storage are not affected by this.	int	unset
file_max_queue_size	The max number of batches in the queue, each of size file_upload_batch_size, when reading and uploading from offline storage files	int	5
file_upload_batch_size	The size of each batch of metrics in the queue, when reading and uploading from offline storage files	int	50
file_prefix	A prefix to add to each offline storage file so they're easier to identify later	string	cwmetric
file_extension	The extension for all offline storage files	string	.log
maximum_file_size	The maximum size each offline storage file in KB	int	1024
stream_max_queue_size	The maximum number of batches in the queue to stream to CloudWatch. If this queue is full subsequent batches of metrics will be written to disk.	int	3

Node