Amazon CloudWatch Metric Math

Posted on: Apr 4, 2018

You can now use Amazon CloudWatch Metric Math to perform calculations across multiple metrics for real-time analysis. You can visualize these computed metrics through the console, add them to CloudWatch Dashboards, or retrieve through the newly launched GetMetricData API. Metric Math enables you to easily derive insights from your existing CloudWatch metrics and better understand the operational health and performance of your infrastructure.  

With CloudWatch Metric Math, you can compute metrics from existing metrics without using scripts or additional tools. For example, you can calculate your consumed IOPS for Amazon DynamoDB as a percentage of the provisioned IOPS in CloudWatch console. This enables you to understand when you are approaching your provisioned limit. Metric Math supports arithmetic operations such as +, -, /, *, and mathematical functions such as Sum, Average, Min, Max, Standard Deviation and more.

CloudWatch Metric Math and GetMetricData API are available in all AWS Public Regions and AWS GovCloud (US) region. To get started, please visit the CloudWatch Metrics console and use the ‘Add a math expression’ option on the Graphed Metrics tab. The GetMetricData API can be accessed through AWS SDK or AWS CLI. Please refer to the documentation for all the supported operations and functions.

To learn more, visit Metric Math documentation here and GetMetricData API documentation here. You can find more information about Amazon CloudWatch on the product page.

Want to dig deeper? Read our blog about how EFS customers use Metric Math to simplify near real-time monitoring for file systems.