
Amazon CloudWatch Concepts
- Namespaces. A namespace is a container for CloudWatch metrics. ...
- Metrics. Metrics are the fundamental concept in CloudWatch. ...
- Dimensions. A dimension is a name/value pair that is part of the identity of a metric. ...
- Resolution. Metrics produced by AWS services are standard resolution by default. ...
- Statistics. ...
What is a namespace in AWS CloudWatch?
A namespace is a container for CloudWatch metrics. The AWS namespaces typically use the following naming convention: AWS/ service . Click to see full answer. Similarly, you may ask, what is namespace in CloudWatch? A namespace is a CloudWatch metrics container.
What is it about CloudWatch?
It enables you to collect performance and operational data and compiles that data into interpretable metrics. From the Cloudwatch homepage, you can visualize your metrics data in pre-built charts.
What is the unit of measurement in CloudWatch?
Though CloudWatch attaches no significance to a unit internally, other applications can derive semantic information based on the unit. Metric data points that specify a unit of measure are aggregated separately. When you get statistics without specifying a unit, CloudWatch aggregates all data points of the same unit together.
What is a statistic set in CloudWatch?
With statistic sets, you give CloudWatch the Min, Max, Sum, and SampleCount for a number of data points. This is commonly used when you need to collect data many times in a minute. For example, suppose you have a metric for the request latency of a webpage. It doesn't make sense to publish data with every webpage hit.

Where is my namespace in CloudWatch?
To search for available metrics in CloudWatch In the navigation pane, choose Metrics. In the search field on the All metrics tab, enter a search term, such as a metric name, namespace, dimension name or value, or resource name. This shows you all of the namespaces with metrics with this search term.
How do you make a namespace in CloudWatch?
Sign in to the AWS Management Console and open the AWS Cloud Map console at https://console.aws.amazon.com/cloudmap/ .Choose Create namespace.On the Create namespace page, enter the applicable values. For more information, see Values That You Specify When You Create Namespaces.Choose Create namespace.
What is dimension in AWS CloudWatch?
A dimension is a name/value pair that is part of the identity of a metric. Because dimensions are part of the unique identifier for a metric, whenever you add a unique name/value pair to one of your metrics, you are creating a new variation of that metric.
Which of the following distinguishes to CloudWatch metrics that are in the same namespace and have the same name?
The key to distinguishing between Metrics with the same Name are Dimensions: A dimension is a name/value pair that is part of the identity of a metric.
What is a namespace in AWS?
A namespace is a way to group services for an application. When you create a namespace, you specify how you want to discover service instances that you register with AWS Cloud Map: using API calls or using DNS queries. You also specify the name that you want your application to use to discover instances. Topics.
What is namespace in ECS?
Namespaces are global resources in ECS. A System Administrator or Namespace Administrator can access ECS from any federated VDC and can configure the namespace settings. The object users that you assign to a namespace are global and can access the object store from any federated VDC.
What is data point in CloudWatch?
A datapoint is the value of a metric for a given metric aggregation period i.e. if you use one minute as an aggregation period for a metric, then there will be one datapoint every minute.
What is sample count in CloudWatch?
SampleCount is the number of data points during the period. Sum is the sum of the values of the all data points collected during the period. Average is the value of Sum/SampleCount during the specified period. Minimum is the lowest value observed during the specified period.
What are the default metrics in CloudWatch?
First, by default CloudWatch uses basic monitoring, which only publishes metrics at five-minute intervals. You can enable detailed monitoring when available to increase that resolution to one minute, at additional cost. Second, some metrics have nuances specific to EC2 instances, which we will cover below.
How long are CloudWatch metrics stored?
CloudWatch announces the extension of metric retention from 14 days to 15 months, free of charge. CloudWatch has already stored at least 3 months of all existing metrics, which customers can begin using immediately to analyze seasonality, monthly trends and in the future, year-over-year comparisons and forecasts.
What is evaluation period in CloudWatch?
If you choose one minute as the period, the alarm evaluates the metric once per minute. Evaluation Periods is the number of the most recent periods, or data points, to evaluate when determining alarm state.
How do you aggregate CloudWatch metrics?
Aggregating statistics across resourcesIn the navigation pane, choose Metrics.Choose the EC2 namespace and choose Across All Instances.Select the row that contains CPUUtilization , which displays a graph for the metric for all your EC2 instances. ... To change the statistic, choose the Graphed metrics tab.More items...
What is cloudwatch alarm?
Alarms in Cloudwatch are thresholds defined by you for specific metrics. Alarms trigger according to state changes, not current values. You can use these alarms to start, stop, or terminate resources or to send a notification to your team that something has changed.
What is a metrics in Cloudwatch?
Metrics are time-series data sent to Cloudwatch. When accessing metrics, you can view data points individually or as an ordered set, depending on whether you want point in time information or trends.
What is NetApp Cloud Insights?
NetApp Cloud Insights is an infrastructure monitoring tool that gives you visibility into your complete infrastructure. With Cloud Insights, you can monitor, troubleshoot and optimize all your resources including your public clouds and your private data centers.
What does a queue of zero mean?
You should expect there to be a small queue at most or all times since a queue of zero means an idle volume. The goal is to alert before your queue gets too large.
Can you aggregate metrics in Cloudwatch?
This means metrics from each region are stored separately. However, you can aggregate metrics using the Cloudwatch cross-region features as needed .
Working with CloudWatch logs using Boto3
The CloudWatch Logs ( logs client) centralizes the logs from different applications and AWS resources. You can filter through and explore the logs generated based on selected fields and dimensions in a CloudWatch console.
Working with CloudWatch metrics using Boto3
CloudWatch metrics represent data about your system’s resources and applications performance. CloudWatch service allows you to store and analyze metrics to get useful insights about your applications, systems, and business processes. And, the Boto3 library contains everything you need to achieve this goal.
Working with CloudWatch alarms using Boto3
You can define meaningful alarms to monitor the resources or applications based on CloudWatch metrics. Boto3’s cloudwatch client contains all required methods to work with CloudWatch alarms.
Working with CloudWatch events using Boto3
CloudWatch Events (now known as Amazon EventBridge) creates rule-based triggers and schedules. In this section, we will create CloudWatch events based on the custom metrics we’ve created.
Working with CloudWatch dashboards using Boto3
Now, we have the logs, metrics, alarms in place. And we can create a CloudWatch dashboard to help monitor all our resources.
Summary
In this article, we’ve covered examples of using Boto3 for writing, exploring, monitoring, and managing logs, metrics, and events in AWS CloudWatch. We’ve also looked at creative ways to bring out useful visualizations using CloudWatch dashboards.

Metrics
- Metricsare the fundamental concept in CloudWatch. A metric represents a time-ordered set of data points that are published to CloudWatch. Think of a metric as a variable to monitor, and the data points as representing the values of that variable over time. For example, the CPU usage of …
Dimensions
- A dimensionis a name/value pair that is part of the identity of a metric. You can assign up to 10 dimensions to a metric. Every metric has specific characteristics that describe it, and you can think of dimensions as categories for those characteristics. Dimensions help you design a structure for your statistics plan. Because dimensions are part of the unique identifier for a metr…
Resolution
- Each metric is one of the following: Metrics produced by AWS services are standard resolution by default. When you publish a custom metric, you can define it as either standard resolution or high resolution. When you publish a high-resolution metric, CloudWatch stores it with a resolution of 1 second, and you can read and retrieve it with a period of 1 second, 5 seconds, 10 seconds, 30 se…
Statistics
- Statisticsare metric data aggregations over specified periods of time. CloudWatch provides statistics based on the metric data points provided by your custom data or provided by other AWS services to CloudWatch. Aggregations are made using the namespace, metric name, dimensions, and the data point unit of measure, within the time period you specify. For detailed definitions o…
Units
- Each statistic has a unit of measure. Example units include Bytes, Seconds, Count, and Percent. For the complete list of the units that CloudWatch supports, see the MetricDatum data type in the Amazon CloudWatch API Reference. You can specify a unit when you create a custom metric. If you do not specify a unit, CloudWatch uses Noneas the unit. Units help provide conceptual mea…
Periods
- A periodis the length of time associated with a specific Amazon CloudWatch statistic. Each statistic represents an aggregation of the metrics data collected for a specified period of time. Periods are defined in numbers of seconds, and valid values for period are 1, 5, 10, 30, or any multiple of 60. For example, to specify a period of six minutes, use 360 as the period value. You …
Aggregation
- Amazon CloudWatch aggregates statistics according to the period length that you specify when retrieving statistics. You can publish as many data points as you want with the same or similar time stamps. CloudWatch aggregates them according to the specified period length. CloudWatch does not automatically aggregate data across Regions, but you can use metric math to aggregat…
Percentiles
- A percentileindicates the relative standing of a value in a dataset. For example, the 95th percentile means that 95 percent of the data is lower than this value and 5 percent of the data is higher than this value. Percentiles help you get a better understanding of the distribution of your metric data. Percentiles are often used to isolate anomalies. In a typical distribution, 95 percent of the data i…
Alarms
- You can use an alarmto automatically initiate actions on your behalf. An alarm watches a single metric over a specified time period, and performs one or more specified actions, based on the value of the metric relative to a threshold over time. The action is a notification sent to an Amazon SNS topic or an Auto Scaling policy. You can also add alarms to dashboards. Alarms invoke acti…