AWS News Blog

EBS Volume Status Checks

We’ve received some great feedback on the EC2 instance status checks that were released earlier this year. Our customers appreciate the fact that we can detect and report on how their EC2 instances are performing.

Today we are adding a new status check for EBS Provisioned IOPS volumes. As you know, you can now provision up to 2000 IOPS when you create a new EBS volume:

We are now making a new I/O Performance status check available for each Provisioned IOPS volume. The status check will tell you how well your volume is doing with respect to the number of IOPS that have been provisioned.  In the background, we measure the volume’s I/O performance each minute and determine if it is Normal, Degraded, Severely Degraded or Stalled. 

A volume’s performance may fall below normal if you are accessing data on it for the first time, making frequent snapshots at peak usage times, or accessing the volume from an EC2 instance that isn’t EBS-optimized.

You can view the status of your Provisioned IOPS volumes in the AWS Management Console:

You can also retrieve the status by calling the DescribeVolumeStatus function. To learn more about this feature, visit the Monitoring the Status of Your Volumes section of the EC2 documentation.

We are also publishing two new CloudWatch metrics for each volume at one minute intervals:

VolumeThroughputPercentage is the percentage of IOPS delivered out of the IOPS provisioned for an EBS volume.

VolumeConsumedReadWriteOps is the total amount of read and write operations consumed in the period. Provisioned IOPS volumes process your applications reads and writes in I/O block sizes of 16KB or less. Every increase in I/O size above 16KB will linearly increase the resources you need to achieve the same IOPS rate.

You can view these metrics in the AWS Management Console and you can access them through the CloudWatch APIs.

— Jeff;

 

Jeff Barr

Jeff Barr

Jeff Barr is Chief Evangelist for AWS. He started this blog in 2004 and has been writing posts just about non-stop ever since.