Attempting to put a CloudWatch Agent onto an On-Premise server. Issues with cwagent-otel-collector

Question

As said in the title, I am attempting to put a CloudWatch Agent (CW agent) on my On-Premise-Server (OPS).

After running this line of code that I got from the AWS User Guide to start the CW agent: & $Env:ProgramFiles\Amazon\AmazonCloudWatchAgent\amazon-cloudwatch-agent-ctl.ps1 -m ec2 -a start

I got this error:

****** processing cwagent-otel-collector ****** cwagent-otel-collector will not be started as it has not been configured yet. ****** processing amazon-cloudwatch-agent ****** AmazonCloudWatchAgent has been started

I did/do not know what this was so I searched and found that when someone else had this issue, they did not create a config file. I did create a config file (named config.json by default) using the configuration wizard and I am still having the issue.

I have tried looking into a number of pages on that user guide, but nothing has resolved the issue.

Thank you in advance for any assistance you can provide.

Answer 1

This message is info and not an error.

CloudWatch agent is bundled with the AWS OpenTelemetry collector agent. They're actually two agents. CloudWatch agent and Otel collector have separate configuration files. If you provide a config for one and not the other, it will only start the one that is configured. This is expected behavior.

Answer 2

Thank you for taking the time to answer. I have since resolved the issue (recently). Everything from the command I was using to the path where the file resided was incorrect. Starting over and going through all the steps again with background information helped.

The first installation combined with learning everything for the first time produced the issue.

Anyone having this issue I recommend that when you hit a wall like this you start over. I know it is not what anyone wants to do, but in the end it saved time.