AWS CloudWatch Agent not starting

Question

I have an Ubuntu EC2 instance. I manually created the following basic CloudWatch Agent config file in:

/opt/aws/amazon-cloudwatch-agent/etc/amazon-cloudwatch-agent.json

{
    "metrics": {
        "metrics_collected": {
            "collectd": {},
            "mem": {
                "measurement": [
                    "used_percent",
                    "total"
                ]
            },
            "disk": {
                "measurement": [
                    "used_percent",
                    "total"
                ]
            }
        }
    }
}

I'm trying to start the CloudWatch Agent using the command below.

sudo /opt/aws/amazon-cloudwatch-agent/bin/amazon-cloudwatch-agent-ctl -m ec2 -a start

Then I check the status using the command below to confirm that it's running.

sudo /opt/aws/amazon-cloudwatch-agent/bin/amazon-cloudwatch-agent-ctl -m ec2 -a status

But I get the output below that shows the Agent as being in a stopped status.

{
  "status": "stopped",
  "starttime": "",
  "version": "1.223987.0"
}

I checked the log file below.

/var/log/amazon/amazon-cloudwatch-agent

It contains:

2019/07/23 06:51:04 I! I! Detected the instance is EC2
2019/07/23 06:51:04 Reading json config file path: /opt/aws/amazon-cloudwatch-agent/etc/amazon-cloudwatch-agent.json ...
Valid Json input schema.
I! Detecting runasuser...
No csm configuration found.
No log configuration found.
No structuredlog configuration found.
Configuration validation first phase succeeded

2019/07/23 06:51:04 I! Config has been translated into TOML /opt/aws/amazon-cloudwatch-agent/etc/amazon-cloudwatch-agent.toml
2019/07/23 06:51:04 Reading json config file path: /opt/aws/amazon-cloudwatch-agent/etc/amazon-cloudwatch-agent.json ...
2019/07/23 06:51:04 I! Detected runAsUser: root

What do I need to do get the CloudWatch Agent running?

Answer 1

For CentOS

yum update && yum install epel-release && yum install collectd

For Ubuntu

sudo apt-get update && sudo apt-get install collectd 

Answer 2

The above solution didn't work for me:

yum update && yum install epel-release && yum install collectd

However, I used the following command and the epel and collectd were installed without a problem:

EPEL:

sudo amazon-linux-extras install epel -y

Collected:

sudo amazon-linux-extras install collectd -y

My Linux Distribution: Amazon Linux 2( Elastic Beanstalk 64bit Amazon Linux 2 running Tomcat 8.5 Corretto 8)