Posted On: Nov 17, 2016

Amazon CloudWatch announced support for percentiles on CloudWatch Metrics. This new capability allows customers to visualize and alarm on any percentile of an AWS or custom metric.

CloudWatch Metrics already supports statistics such as average, minimum or maximum, which are useful for many metrics. Percentiles are particularly useful when applied to metrics that exhibit large variances. They also help customers understand the distribution of a metric, and can be critical to understand outliers or unusual metric behaviors. Customers can now visualize and alarm on p90, p95, p99, p99.9 or any other percentile. Percentile metrics can also be accessed using the CloudWatch console, SDK or API.

Support for percentiles is available today for Amazon EC2, Amazon RDS, Amazon Kinesis, and for newly created Application Load Balancers. Support for percentiles on metrics from Elastic Load Balancers or from your existing Application Load Balancers will be available automatically within the next few weeks. We will continue to work to provide support for additional services in the future. To learn more about the feature click here.

This new capability is currently available in US East (N. Virginia), US East (Ohio), US West (Oregon), US West (N. California), EU (Ireland), EU (Frankfurt), S. America (São Paulo), Asia Pacific (Singapore), Asia Pacific (Tokyo), Asia Pacific (Seoul), Asia Pacific (Mumbai) and Asia Pacific (Sydney).