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).

Metrics analyzed by Amazon Compute Optimizer

After you opt in, Amazon Compute Optimizer analyzes the specifications, such as vCPUs, memory, or storage, and the CloudWatch metrics of your running resources from a period over the last 14 days. If you activate the enhanced infrastructure metrics recommendation preference, Amazon Compute Optimizer analyzes your resources for up to 93 days.

The analysis can take up to 24 hours to complete. When the analysis is complete, the findings are displayed on the dashboard page of the Compute Optimizer console. For more information, see Viewing the Amazon Compute Optimizer dashboard.

EC2 instance metrics

Metrics analyzed for EC2 instances

Compute Optimizer analyzes the following CloudWatch metrics of your EC2 instances, including instances that are part of Auto Scaling groups.

For more information about instance metrics, see List the available CloudWatch metrics for your instances in the Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud User Guide. For more information about EBS volume metrics, see Amazon CloudWatch metrics for Amazon EBS in the Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud User Guide.

Enabling memory utilization with the CloudWatch agent

To have Compute Optimizer analyze the memory utilization metric of your instances, install the CloudWatch agent on your instances. Enabling Compute Optimizer to analyze memory utilization data for your instances provides an additional measurement of data that further improves Compute Optimizer's recommendations. For more information about installing the CloudWatch agent, see Collecting Metrics and Logs from Amazon EC2 Instances and On-Premises Servers with the CloudWatch agent in the Amazon CloudWatch User Guide.

On Linux instances, Compute Optimizer analyses the mem_used_percent metric in the CWAgent namespace, or the legacy MemoryUtilization metric in the System/Linux namespace. On Windows instances, Compute Optimizer analyses the Available MBytes metric in the CWAgent namespace. If both the Available MBytes and Memory % Committed Bytes In Use metrics are configured in the CWAgent namespace, Compute Optimizer chooses Available MBytes as the primary memory metric to generate recommendations.

Additionally, the namespace must contain the InstanceId dimension. If the InstanceId dimension is missing or you overwrite it with a custom dimension name, Compute Optimizer can't collect memory utilization data for your instance. Namespaces and dimensions are defined in the CloudWatch agent configuration file. For more information, see Create the CloudWatch agent Configuration File in the Amazon CloudWatch User Guide.

Example: CloudWatch agent configuration for memory collection

{
    "agent": {
        "metrics_collection_interval": 60,
        "run_as_user": "root"
    },
    "metrics": {
        "namespace": "CWAgent",
        "append_dimensions": {
            "InstanceId": "${aws:InstanceId}"
        },
        "metrics_collected": {
            "mem": {
                "measurement": [
                    "mem_used_percent"
                ],
                "metrics_collection_interval": 60
            }
        }
    }
}
      

EBS volume metrics

Compute Optimizer analyzes the following CloudWatch metrics of your EBS volumes.

For more information about these metrics, see Amazon CloudWatch metrics for Amazon EBS in the Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud User Guide.

Lambda function metrics

Compute Optimizer analyzes the following CloudWatch metrics of your Lambda functions.

For more information about these metrics, see Working with Amazon Lambda function metrics in the Amazon Lambda Developer Guide.

In addition to these metrics, Compute Optimizer analyzes the memory utilization of your function during the look-back period. For more information about memory utilization for Lambda functions, see Using Lambda Insights in CloudWatch in the Amazon Lambda Developer Guide.

Metrics for Amazon ECS services on Fargate

Compute Optimizer analyzes the following CloudWatch and Amazon ECS utilization metrics of your Amazon ECS services on Fargate.

For more information about these metrics, see Amazon ECS CloudWatch metrics in the Amazon ECS User Guide for Amazon Fargate.

Metrics for commercial software licenses

Compute Optimizer analyzes the following metric to generate recommendations for commercial software licenses.

mssql_enterprise_features_used — the number of Microsoft SQL Server Enterprise edition features in use. The features are as follows: