Choose percentage of traffic to monitor for your application - Amazon CloudWatch
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Choose percentage of traffic to monitor for your application

The coverage that you choose for the percentage of application traffic to monitor determines how many city-networks (client locations and ASNs, typically internet service providers) for your application are monitored, up to an optional city-networks maximum limit that you can also set.

If you choose to monitor less than 100% of your application traffic, an observability gap might exist with your monitor. That's because if there are health events that Internet Monitor creates where you aren't monitoring traffic, you won't be aware of those issues. You might also have less coverage for the performance and availability score information about client access to your application.

The following sections describe options to explore traffic percentage settings and coverage, and to get an idea about the impact of increasing or decreasing coverage.

Explore changing your application traffic percentage

You can explore values that you might want to change your application traffic percentage to, by viewing the number of city-networks monitored when you change the percentage. The procedure in this section provides step-by-step information.

In the Internet Monitor console, you can try increasing or decreasing the application traffic percentage for your monitor, and view the estimated number of your city-networks that would be covered as a result. With this option, you can quickly see how changing your traffic percentage affects the number of city-monitors are monitored. This can help you to get a feel for what a good application traffic percentage to choose might be, for your application.

To explore monitoring coverage and update percentage of traffic monitored
  1. Open the CloudWatch console at https://console.amazonaws.cn/cloudwatch/.

  2. In the left navigation pane, under Network Monitoring, choose Internet monitors.

  3. In your list of monitors, choose a monitor.

  4. On the Configure tab, in the View and evaluate traffic coverage section, you can evaluate the impact on the total number of city-networks that are monitored, depending on a traffic percentage that you choose. You can also update the percentage of traffic that you monitor or change the city-networks limit for your monitor.

    • Explore traffic percentage options: Under Compare options for traffic coverage, in the drop-down menu, choose one or more traffic percentages to graph and compare. For each traffic percentage that you choose, you can see the number of city-networks that will be monitored when you set that traffic percentage coverage.

      To learn more, see View number of city-networks monitored at different percentages.

    • Change monitoring coverage: Under Explore other traffic coverage options, choose Update monitoring coverage.

      In the Explore and set traffic monitoring coverage dialog, click the arrows to increase or decrease the percentage of traffic to monitor. By choosing 100% traffic, you can see how many city-networks are monitored with full coverage for monitoring your application.

      Note: To learn more about how the number of city-networks monitored (estimated here) might affect your costs, choose the link to the CloudWatch Pricing calculator, and then scroll down to Internet Monitor.

      To set a new percentage of traffic to monitor, choose Update monitor coverage. Or, to keep the current coverage level, choose Cancel.

View the number of city-networks monitored at different traffic percentage settings

You can view the number of city-networks that would be monitored for your application at different application traffic percentages. The procedure in this section provides step-by-step information.

In the Internet Monitor console, you can view graphs that show how coverage for your city-networks would change at different of application traffic percentages, over a time interval that you specify. This is a quick way to visualize and compare the monitoring coverage for your application at specific traffic percentages, all on one graph.

To view graphs of application traffic percentage and corresponding city-networks coverage
  1. Open the CloudWatch console at https://console.amazonaws.cn/cloudwatch/.

  2. In the left navigation pane, under Network Monitoring, choose Internet monitors.

  3. In your list of monitors, choose a monitor.

  4. Choose the Configure page, and scroll down to Traffic coverage.

  5. Under Compare options for traffic coverage, in the drop-down list, select one or more percentages. You can choose one or more application traffic percentages, and the graph of Total monitored city-networks is updated to display the monitoring coverage Internet Monitor provides for that traffic percentage. By choosing City-networks at 100% traffic, you can see how many city-networks are monitored with full coverage for monitoring your application.

Keep in mind the following:

  • Traffic coverage is computed based on the number of city-networks in the previous hour of your application traffic. This means that, after you choose a specific percentage of traffic to monitor, fewer city-networks might be monitored for your application than is shown here in a traffic coverage comparison graph.

  • To make sure that all your application traffic is monitored, set TrafficPercentageToMonitor to 100 and don’t set MaxCityNetworksToMonitor. Alternatively, you can set MaxCityNetworksToMonitor to 500,000, the upper limit in Internet Monitor.

  • If you set a city-networks maximum limit, the total number of monitored city-networks never exceeds that limit, regardless of the application traffic percentage option that you select.

  • You can learn more about how the number of city-networks monitored might affect your costs. On the Pricing calculator for CloudWatch page, scroll down to Internet Monitor.

To set a new percentage of traffic to monitor, under Explore other traffic coverage options, choose Update monitoring coverage. In the dialog, choose a percentage of traffic, and then choose Update monitor coverage.