# Monitoring your metric streams with CloudWatch metrics
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Metric streams emit CloudWatch metrics about their health and operation in the `AWS/CloudWatch/MetricStreams` namespace. The following metrics are emitted. These metrics are emitted with a `MetricStreamName` dimension and with no dimension. You can use the metrics with no dimensions to see aggregated metrics for all of your metric streams. You can use the metrics with the `MetricStreamName` dimension to see the metrics about only that metric stream.

For all of these metrics, values are emitted only for metric streams that are in the **Running** state.


| Metric | Description | 
| --- | --- | 
| `MetricUpdate` | The number of metric updates sent to the metric stream. If no metric updates are streamed during a time period, this metric is not emitted during that time period.<br />If you stop the metric stream, this metric stops being emitted until the metric stream is started again.<br />Valid Statistic: `Sum`<br />Units: None | 
| `TotalMetricUpdate` | This is calculated as **MetricUpdate \+ a number based on additional statistics that are being streamed**.<br />For each unique namespace and metric name combination, streaming 1-5 additional statistics adds 1 to the `TotalMetricUpdate`, streaming 6-10 additional statistics adds 2 to `TotalMetricUpdate`, and so on. <br />Valid Statistic: `Sum`<br />Units: None | 
| `PublishErrorRate` | The number of unrecoverable errors that occur when putting data into the Firehose delivery stream. If no errors occur during a time period, this metric is not emitted during that time period.<br />If you stop the metric stream, this metric stops being emitted until the metric stream is started again.<br />Valid Statistic: `Average` to see the rate of metric updates unable to be written. This value will be between 0.0 and 1.0.<br />Units: None |