By adding your cloud provider credentials, we can automatically sync your list of instances and add them into Server Density ready to be monitored.
Each cloud instance will get its own unique agent key and you can then install the agent to return monitoring data.
We only count devices against your billing quota once the agent is installed so you can add all of your instances to manage/view/organise within Server Density even if they are not monitored.
Auto monitoring
In many cases, customers use our API, shell script or Puppet, Chef or Ansible modules to automatically add their servers into Server Density. If these servers are hosted by a cloud provider and you have added your cloud credentials, then a problem can arise where you have added a normal device type into Server Density and then shortly afterwards we sync via the provider API and import a duplicate of the existing device.
There are 2 recommended ways to avoid this:
1. When you add a new device through our API, you can set a "provider" field. This can be amazon, google or rackspace (lower case). This can also be set in the UI. If you set this field and we then import the cloud instances automatically we will do a match comparison against the provider name and the name of the device. If the provider matches and the name of the device in Server Density matches the name of the instance on the cloud provider, we will merge the existing device and switch it to be linked to the cloud device.
E.g. you create a device in Server Density with the provider amazon and the name instance-1. This instance will be detected through our API integration with Amazon and we will import it automatically. If the name of the device in Amazon is instance-1 then this will be linked to your existing device.
2. In some cases the name of your instances will be the same across multiple instances e.g. in Amazon Auto Scaling, which means the above method will not work. Instead, you can set the providerId API field and we will match based on the unique ID given to the instance by the cloud provider. You also need to set the "provider" field. This can be amazon, google or rackspace (lower case).
E.g. you create a device in Server Density with the provider amazon and the providerId i-38ac2. This instance will be detected through our API integration with Amazon and we will import it automatically. Since the ID matches, we will link the cloud instance to the existing device.
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