hands-on lab

Preparing to Migrate Servers with the Application Discovery Service

Beginner
Up to 2h
2,251
4.1/5
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Lab description

The AWS Application Discovery Service is an offering from AWS that helps customers with significant existing legacy systems plan for a migration to the cloud. It's aimed at enterprises that have a large number of virtual or bare-metal servers in production. The first step in migrating to the cloud is planning, and planning requires an analysis of the current state.

Workloads are often interdependent, and for mature systems documentation may be sparse, stale, or absent. AWS Application Discovery Service helps you collect information about configuration, system resource usage, and application behavior so you can deeply understand your workloads. You can use the collected data to estimate the cost of migrating to the cloud.

In this hands-on lab, you will install the AWS Application Discovery Agent on a server, use AWS Migration Hub to group an application, and you will examine the data collected by the agent using Amazon Athena.

This lab involves populating an Amazon S3 bucket with data from an Application Discovery agent which can take up to twenty-five minutes. Please ensure you have enough time available before starting the lab.

Learning Objectives

Upon completion of this beginner-level lab, you will be able to:

  • Install the AWS Application Discovery Agent on a server
  • Use AWS Migration Hub to verify the agent is collecting data
  • Use Amazon Athena to query the collected data

Intended Audience

This lab is intended for:

  • Cloud Migration Engineers
  • Cloud Engineers

Prerequisites

Knowledge of the following will be beneficial but is not required:

  • The Bash command-line
  • AWS Migration Hub
  • Amazon Athena

The following courses can be used to fulfill the prerequisites:

Updates

January 9th, 2024 - Addressed an issue that prevented the sample application from starting

August 8th, 2023 - Added example database containing sample application discovery service data

June 21st, 2023 - Addressed an issue that preventing the agent from reporting a healthy status

June 20th, 2023 - Updated the instruction and screenshots to reflect the latest UI

December 12th, 2022 - Updated the instructions and screenshots to reflect the latest UI

September 13th, 2022 - Updated the instructions and screenshots to reflect the latest UI

January 12th, 2022 - Updated the instructions and screenshots to reflect the latest UI

February 3rd, 2021 - Addressed an issue that prevented access to the AWS Migration Hub

Environment before

Environment after

About the author
Students
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Andrew is a Labs Developer with previous experience in the Internet Service Provider, Audio Streaming, and CryptoCurrency industries. He has also been a DevOps Engineer and enjoys working with CI/CD and Kubernetes.

He holds multiple AWS certifications including Solutions Architect Associate and Professional.

Covered topics
Lab steps
Logging In to the Amazon Web Services Console
Connecting to the Virtual Machine using EC2 Instance Connect
Collecting Data with the AWS Application Discovery Agent
Querying the Data Collected by the AWS Application Discovery Agent