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1. Amazon Web Services

Amazon EC2

CPUUtilization

The percentage of allocated EC2 compute units currently in use. This metric indicates how heavily the instance CPU is being utilized.

  • Unit: Percent (%)
  • Statistic: Average, Maximum

Example

  • Average CPU utilization remains above 80% for 15 minutes, indicating the instance may be undersized.
  • CPU utilization remains below 10% for several days, suggesting potential overprovisioning.

StatusCheckFailed

Reports whether the instance has passed all status checks in the last minute.

This metric can be either 0 (passed) or 1 (failed).

  • Unit: Count
  • Statistic: Maximum

Status

Monitoring Explanation

If we configure:

  • Metric: CPUUtilization
  • Time range: Last 7 days
  • Statistic: Average
  • Period: 1 hour

it means: For each 1-hour interval during the last 7 days, CloudWatch calculates the average CPU utilization of all data points collected within that hour.

Suppose between 09:00 and 10:00 CloudWatch collected these CPU values:

Time CPUUtilization
09:00 20%
09:05 30%
09:10 40%
09:15 50%

The average for that 1-hour period might be:

(20 + 30 + 40 + 50 + ...) / number of samples
= 35%

For a 7-day range, we will get: 7 days × 24 hours = 168 data points.