Services or capabilities described in Amazon Web Services documentation might vary by Region. To see the differences applicable to the China Regions, see Getting Started with Amazon Web Services in China (PDF).

Monitor usage of scalable resources using CloudWatch

With Amazon CloudWatch, you get nearly continuous visibility into your applications across scalable resources. CloudWatch is a monitoring service for Amazon resources. You can use CloudWatch to collect and track metrics, set alarms, and automatically react to changes in your Amazon resources. You can also create dashboards to monitor the specific metrics or sets of metrics you need.

When you interact with the services that integrate with Application Auto Scaling, they send the metrics shown in the following table to CloudWatch. In CloudWatch, metrics are grouped first by the service namespace, and then by the various dimension combinations within each namespace. These metrics can help you monitor resource usage and plan capacity for your applications. If your application's workload is not constant, this indicates that you should consider using auto scaling. For detailed descriptions of these metrics, see the documentation for the metric of interest.

CloudWatch metrics for monitoring resource usage

The following table lists the CloudWatch metrics that are available to support monitoring resource usage. The list is not exhaustive but will give you a good starting point. If you do not see these metrics in the CloudWatch console, make sure that you have completed the set up of the resource. For more information, see the Amazon CloudWatch User Guide.

Predefined metrics for target tracking scaling policies

The following table lists the predefined metric types from the Application Auto Scaling API Reference with their corresponding CloudWatch metric name. Each predefined metric represents an aggregation of the values of the underlying CloudWatch metric. The result is the average resource usage over a one-minute period, based on a percentage unless otherwise noted. The predefined metrics are only used within the context of setting up target tracking scaling policies.

You can find more information about these metrics in the service's documentation that's available from the table in CloudWatch metrics for monitoring resource usage.

¹ Metric is based on a count instead of a percentage.

² For DynamoDB and Amazon Keyspaces, the predefined metrics are an aggregation of two CloudWatch metrics to support scaling based on provisioned throughput consumption.

³ For best scaling performance, Amazon EC2 detailed monitoring should be used.