Posted On: Oct 3, 2018

Amazon CloudWatch now enables you to aggregate metric data on the client-side and publish it in a single PutMetricData API call. This allows you to efficiently ingest high volumes of metric data whilst reducing costs with fewer API calls.

You can publish metric data in histogram format, as arrays of values and counts or simply leverage CloudWatch agent to do so. CloudWatch automatically creates percentile statistics from the data aggregations enabling you to visualize anomalies and filter outliers to reduce alarm noise.

You can get started with CloudWatch PutMetricData by using the AWS SDKs or AWS Command Line Interface (CLI). Alternatively, download and install the latest version of the CloudWatch agent with custom metrics support. PutMetricData is available in all AWS public regions, including AWS GovCloud.