Review EC2 detailed monitoring

Choose detailed monitoring according to required metric resolution and cost.

Description

EC2 detailed monitoring provides major instance metrics at one-minute intervals. Basic monitoring also provides metrics, but most use five-minute intervals, which can limit analysis of short load changes.

Potential impact

  • Brief changes in CPU or network load can be harder to investigate.
  • Alarms or capacity decisions that need finer metrics may be delayed.

Remediation

Set monitoring to true for instances that need one-minute metrics. Adjust alarm periods and evaluation settings and review the additional cost. Configure separate collection for operating-system metrics, such as memory, that are not provided by default.

Examples

These excerpts compare only the detailed-monitoring option. Configure the AMI, instance type and networking separately.

Before

yaml
resources:
  example:
    type: aws:ec2:Instance
    properties:
      monitoring: false

After

yaml
resources:
  example:
    type: aws:ec2:Instance
    properties:
      monitoring: true

The after example enables detailed monitoring. Basic monitoring and status-check metrics are available without this setting, and detailed monitoring itself does not automatically recover failed instances.

References