Enable or turn off detailed monitoring for your instances - Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud
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Enable or turn off detailed monitoring for your instances

By default, your instance is enabled for basic monitoring. You can optionally enable detailed monitoring.

The following table highlights the differences between basic monitoring and detailed monitoring for instances.

Monitoring type Description Charges
Basic monitoring

Only status check metrics are available in 1-minute periods.

All other metrics are available in 5-minute periods.

No charge.
Detailed monitoring All metrics, including status check metrics, are available in 1-minute periods. To get this level of data, you must specifically enable it for the instance. For the instances where you've enabled detailed monitoring, you can also get aggregated data across groups of similar instances. You are charged per metric that is sent to CloudWatch. You are not charged for data storage. For more information, see Paid tier and Example 1 - EC2 Detailed Monitoring on the Amazon CloudWatch pricing page.

Required IAM permissions

To enable detailed monitoring for an instance, your user must have permission to use the MonitorInstances API action. To turn off detailed monitoring for an instance, your user must have permission to use the UnmonitorInstances API action.

Enable detailed monitoring

You can enable detailed monitoring on an instance as you launch it or after the instance is running or stopped. Enabling detailed monitoring on an instance does not affect the monitoring of the EBS volumes attached to the instance. For more information, see Amazon CloudWatch metrics for Amazon EBS.

Console
To enable detailed monitoring for an existing instance
  1. Open the Amazon EC2 console at https://console.amazonaws.cn/ec2/.

  2. In the navigation pane, choose Instances.

  3. Select the instance and choose Actions, Monitoring, Manage detailed monitoring.

  4. On the Detailed monitoring detail page, for Detailed monitoring, select the Enable check box.

  5. Choose Save.

 

To enable detailed monitoring when launching an instance

When launching an instance using the Amazon EC2 console, under Advanced details, select the Detailed CloudWatch monitoring check box.

Amazon CLI
To enable detailed monitoring for an existing instance

Use the following monitor-instances command to enable detailed monitoring for the specified instances.

aws ec2 monitor-instances --instance-ids i-1234567890abcdef0
To enable detailed monitoring when launching an instance

Use the run-instances command with the --monitoring flag to enable detailed monitoring.

aws ec2 run-instances --image-id ami-09092360 --monitoring Enabled=true...

Turn off detailed monitoring

You can turn off detailed monitoring on an instance as you launch it or after the instance is running or stopped.

Console
To turn off detailed monitoring
  1. Open the Amazon EC2 console at https://console.amazonaws.cn/ec2/.

  2. In the navigation pane, choose Instances.

  3. Select the instance and choose Actions, Monitoring, Manage detailed monitoring.

  4. On the Detailed monitoring detail page, for Detailed monitoring, clear the Enable check box.

  5. Choose Save.

Amazon CLI
To turn off detailed monitoring

Use the following unmonitor-instances command to turn off detailed monitoring for the specified instances.

aws ec2 unmonitor-instances --instance-ids i-1234567890abcdef0