How to provide Credentials to Micrometer for CloudWatch in Spring Boot 2

Question

I'm using Spring Boot 2.0.9.RELEASE and am trying to figure out how to configure CloudWatch monitoring for my application running on an EC2-instance. What I did can be seen in my answer to this question . But I'm stuck with the following exception:

ERROR Oct 23, 2019 12:20:06.881 [pool-2-thread-30] {} io.micrometer.cloudwatch.CloudWatchMeterRegistry:134 - error sending metric data.
com.amazonaws.SdkClientException: Unable to load AWS credentials from any provider in the chain: [com.amazonaws.auth.profile.ProfileCredentialsProvider@32ee6fee: profile file cannot be null]
    at com.amazonaws.auth.AWSCredentialsProviderChain.getCredentials(AWSCredentialsProviderChain.java:136) ~[aws-java-sdk-core-1.11.641.jar!/:?]
    at com.amazonaws.http.AmazonHttpClient$RequestExecutor.getCredentialsFromContext(AmazonHttpClient.java:1225) ~[aws-java-sdk-core-1.11.641.jar!/:?]
    at com.amazonaws.http.AmazonHttpClient$RequestExecutor.runBeforeRequestHandlers(AmazonHttpClient.java:801) ~[aws-java-sdk-core-1.11.641.jar!/:?]
    at com.amazonaws.http.AmazonHttpClient$RequestExecutor.doExecute(AmazonHttpClient.java:751) ~[aws-java-sdk-core-1.11.641.jar!/:?]
    at com.amazonaws.http.AmazonHttpClient$RequestExecutor.executeWithTimer(AmazonHttpClient.java:744) ~[aws-java-sdk-core-1.11.641.jar!/:?]
    at com.amazonaws.http.AmazonHttpClient$RequestExecutor.execute(AmazonHttpClient.java:726) ~[aws-java-sdk-core-1.11.641.jar!/:?]
    at com.amazonaws.http.AmazonHttpClient$RequestExecutor.access$500(AmazonHttpClient.java:686) ~[aws-java-sdk-core-1.11.641.jar!/:?]
    at com.amazonaws.http.AmazonHttpClient$RequestExecutionBuilderImpl.execute(AmazonHttpClient.java:668) ~[aws-java-sdk-core-1.11.641.jar!/:?]
    at com.amazonaws.http.AmazonHttpClient.execute(AmazonHttpClient.java:532) ~[aws-java-sdk-core-1.11.641.jar!/:?]
    at com.amazonaws.http.AmazonHttpClient.execute(AmazonHttpClient.java:512) ~[aws-java-sdk-core-1.11.641.jar!/:?]
    at com.amazonaws.services.cloudwatch.AmazonCloudWatchClient.doInvoke(AmazonCloudWatchClient.java:2027) ~[aws-java-sdk-cloudwatch-1.11.641.jar!/:?]
    at com.amazonaws.services.cloudwatch.AmazonCloudWatchClient.invoke(AmazonCloudWatchClient.java:1994) ~[aws-java-sdk-cloudwatch-1.11.641.jar!/:?]
    at com.amazonaws.services.cloudwatch.AmazonCloudWatchClient.invoke(AmazonCloudWatchClient.java:1983) ~[aws-java-sdk-cloudwatch-1.11.641.jar!/:?]
    at com.amazonaws.services.cloudwatch.AmazonCloudWatchClient.executePutMetricData(AmazonCloudWatchClient.java:1754) ~[aws-java-sdk-cloudwatch-1.11.641.jar!/:?]
    at com.amazonaws.services.cloudwatch.AmazonCloudWatchAsyncClient$20.call(AmazonCloudWatchAsyncClient.java:972) [aws-java-sdk-cloudwatch-1.11.641.jar!/:?]
    at com.amazonaws.services.cloudwatch.AmazonCloudWatchAsyncClient$20.call(AmazonCloudWatchAsyncClient.java:966) [aws-java-sdk-cloudwatch-1.11.641.jar!/:?]
    at java.util.concurrent.FutureTask.run(FutureTask.java:266) [?:1.8.0_191]
    at java.util.concurrent.ThreadPoolExecutor.runWorker(ThreadPoolExecutor.java:1149) [?:1.8.0_191]
    at java.util.concurrent.ThreadPoolExecutor$Worker.run(ThreadPoolExecutor.java:624) [?:1.8.0_191]
    at java.lang.Thread.run(Thread.java:748) [?:1.8.0_191]

Strange thing is that I already managed to put metrics to CloudWatch in an earlier try, but I do not know what I broke. I did not dream it. I can still see the metrics ^^.

From what I read, I'd have to do something with the IAM-role of my EC2-instance, but I'm lost here.

Answer 1

Turns out that the culprit was the following property:

cloud.aws.credentials.instanceProfile=false

I had it in my configuration, because I read somewhere that it is needed to run the application locally. However that wasn't true in my case.

Somehow it slipped to my procuction-configuration. And as the name of the property suggests, setting it to false will make Spring Boot not use the profile of the ec2-instance the application is running on. So unless you provide credentials in another way, the application will not be able to push metrics to CloudWatch.