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:

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.

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.

Node

cloudwatch_metrics_collector

Sends metrics in a ROS system to AWS CloudWatch Metrics service.

Subscribed Topics

• Configurable (default="/metrics")

  The node can subscribe to a configurable list of topic names. If no list in provided then it will default to subscribing to a global topic names /metrics.
  Message Type: ros_monitoring_msgs/MetricList

Published Topics

None

Services

None

Contributing Guidelines

Thank you for your interest in contributing to our project. Whether it’s a bug report, new feature, correction, or additional documentation, we greatly value feedback and contributions from our community.

Please read through this document before submitting any issues or pull requests to ensure we have all the necessary information to effectively respond to your bug report or contribution.

Reporting Bugs/Feature Requests

We welcome you to use the GitHub issue tracker to report bugs or suggest features.

When filing an issue, please check existing open, or recently closed, issues to make sure somebody else hasn’t already reported the issue. Please try to include as much information as you can. Details like these are incredibly useful:

• A reproducible test case or series of steps
• The version of our code being used
• Any modifications you’ve made relevant to the bug
• Anything unusual about your environment or deployment

Contributing via Pull Requests

Contributions via pull requests are much appreciated. Before sending us a pull request, please ensure that:

1. You are working against the latest source on the master branch.
2. You check existing open, and recently merged, pull requests to make sure someone else hasn’t addressed the problem already.
3. You open an issue to discuss any significant work - we would hate for your time to be wasted.

To send us a pull request, please:

1. Fork the repository.
2. Modify the source; please focus on the specific change you are contributing. If you also reformat all the code, it will be hard for us to focus on your change.
3. Ensure local tests pass.
4. Commit to your fork using clear commit messages.
5. Send us a pull request, answering any default questions in the pull request interface.
6. Pay attention to any automated CI failures reported in the pull request, and stay involved in the conversation.

GitHub provides additional document on forking a repository and creating a pull request.

Finding contributions to work on

Looking at the existing issues is a great way to find something to contribute on. As our projects, by default, use the default GitHub issue labels ((enhancement/bug/duplicate/help wanted/invalid/question/wontfix), looking at any ‘help wanted’ issues is a great place to start.

Code of Conduct

This project has adopted the Amazon Open Source Code of Conduct. For more information see the Code of Conduct FAQ or contact opensource-codeofconduct@amazon.com with any additional questions or comments.

Security issue notifications

If you discover a potential security issue in this project we ask that you notify AWS/Amazon Security via our vulnerability reporting page. Please do not create a public github issue.

Licensing

See the LICENSE file for our project’s licensing. We will ask you to confirm the licensing of your contribution.

We may ask you to sign a Contributor License Agreement (CLA) for larger changes.