Amazon CloudWatch adds support for Extended metrics retention, Percentile statistics and High-Resolution Custom Metrics and Alarms in the AWS GovCloud (US) region

Posted on: Oct 30, 2017

We are excited to announce that CloudWatch added support for Extended metrics retention, Percentile statistics on metrics, and High-Resolution Custom Metrics and Alarms in the AWS GovCloud (US) region. 

With this launch, CloudWatch Metrics now supports the following three retention schedules:

  • 1 minute datapoints are available for 15 days
  • 5 minute datapoints are available for 63 days
  • 1 hour datapoints are available for 455 days

In addition, CloudWatch added support for percentile statistics on Metrics. You can now visualize metrics and alarm on p90, p95, p99, p99.9 or any other percentile statistics. Percentiles are particularly useful when applied to metrics that exhibit large variances. They also help you understand the distribution of a metric, and can be critical to understand outliers or unusual metric behaviors. 

CloudWatch also lets you to monitor your custom applications and infrastructure in near real-time, down to per-second resolution. Using the existing PutMetricData API, you can publish Custom Metrics down to 1-second resolution. This gives you more immediate visibility and greater granularity into the state and performance of your custom applications, such as observing short-lived spikes and functions. In addition, you can also alert sooner with High-Resolution Alarms, as frequently as 10-second periods. Additionally, if you use collectd to gather your metrics, you can publish these metrics to CloudWatch using our updated collectd plugin supporting high-resolution periods down to 1-second.  

Start exploring these new features using the AWS Management Console, AWS Command Line Interface (CLI), and AWS SDKs. To learn more, please visit CloudWatch documentation, and CloudWatch pricing page.

Extended metrics retention, Percentile statistics, and High-Resolution Custom Metrics and Alarms are available in AWS GovCloud (US) region and all AWS Public Regions.