# Using Amazon CloudWatch Metrics
<a name="UsingCloudWatchConsole-common"></a>

You can get monitoring data for your gateway using either the Amazon Web Services Management Console or the CloudWatch API. The console displays a series of graphs based on the raw data from the CloudWatch API. You can also use the CloudWatch API through one of the [Amazon Software Development Kits (SDKs)](https://www.amazonaws.cn/tools) or the [Amazon CloudWatch API](https://www.amazonaws.cn/cloudwatch) tools. Depending on your needs, you might prefer to use either the graphs displayed in the console or retrieved from the API. 

Regardless of which method you choose to use to work with metrics, you must specify the following information: 
+ The metric dimension to work with. A *dimension* is a name-value pair that helps you to uniquely identify a metric. The dimensions for Storage Gateway are `GatewayId`, `GatewayName`, and `VolumeId`. In the CloudWatch console, you can use the `Gateway Metrics` and `Volume Metrics` views to easily select gateway-specific and volume-specific dimensions. For more information about dimensions, see [Dimensions](https://docs.amazonaws.cn/AmazonCloudWatch/latest/monitoring/cloudwatch_concepts.html#Dimension) in the *Amazon CloudWatch User Guide*.
+ The metric name, such as `ReadBytes`.

The following table summarizes the types of Storage Gateway metric data that you can use. 

[\[See the AWS documentation website for more details\]](http://docs.amazonaws.cn/en_us/storagegateway/latest/vgw/UsingCloudWatchConsole-common.html)

Working with gateway and volume metrics is similar to working with other service metrics. You can find a discussion of some of the most common metrics tasks in the CloudWatch documentation listed following: 
+ [Viewing Available Metrics](https://docs.amazonaws.cn/AmazonCloudWatch/latest/monitoring/viewing_metrics_with_cloudwatch.html)
+ [Getting Statistics for a Metric](https://docs.amazonaws.cn/AmazonCloudWatch/latest/monitoring/US_GetStatistics.html)
+ [Creating CloudWatch Alarms](https://docs.amazonaws.cn/AmazonCloudWatch/latest/monitoring/AlarmThatSendsEmail.html)