Announcing Amazon CloudWatch metrics for Amazon EC2 On-Demand Capacity Reservations

Posted on: Jul 20, 2020

Starting today, you can now monitor Capacity Reservations usage metrics via Amazon CloudWatch metrics. With these new metrics, you can efficiently monitor your Capacity Reservations and identify unused capacity by setting CloudWatch alarms to notify you when usage thresholds are met. You no longer need to manually monitor your Capacity Reservation usage.  

The new metrics include:

  • Used Instance Count - The number of instances that are currently in use.
  • Available Instance Count - The number of instances that are available.
  • Total Instance Count - The total number of instances you have reserved.
  • Instance Utilization - The percentage of reserved capacity instances that are currently in use.

To use these metrics, First, you open the CloudWatch console, select Metrics from the navigation pane, and select the metric namespace as “EC2 Capacity Reservations”. Next, you select the metric dimension as “By Capacity Reservation” and then choose the metrics which will be grouped by Capacity Reservation Id.  

These metrics are now available to all Capacity Reservations customers at no additional cost and can be viewed via the CloudWatch console or CloudWatch API. These metrics are enabled by default for existing and new Capacity Reservations and available in all AWS commercial Regions and AWS GovCloud (US) Regions. To learn more about CloudWatch metrics for On-Demand Capacity Reservations, including ways to view the CloudWatch metrics or add CloudWatch alarms for automatic notifications, visit the technical documentation. To learn more about Capacity Reservations and how to use them, visit FAQs, Linux or Windows user guides.