Posted On: Dec 14, 2016
CloudWatch announced the extension of metric retention from 14 days to 15 months, free of charge. CloudWatch has already stored at least 2 months of all existing metrics, which customers can begin using immediately to analyze seasonality, monthly trends and in the future, year-over-year comparisons and forecasts.
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
Amazon CloudWatch also announced support for percentiles on CloudWatch Metrics. This new capability allows customers to visualize and alarm on any percentile of an Amazon Web Services 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.
CloudWatch extends a new Metrics user interface with improved graphing controls, an updated calendar widget with support for relative and absolute timelines, simpler visualization of metric groups, advanced metric searches and improved navigation to Alarms and Dashboards.
These new capabilities are also currently available in Amazon Web Services China (Beijing) Region operated by Sinnet.