Amazon CloudWatch now monitors EBS volumes exceeding provisioned performance

Today, Amazon announces the general availability of two new Amazon CloudWatch metrics to give insight into when your application is attempting to drive higher than your Amazon EBS volume’s provisioned performance. These two metrics, Volume IOPS Exceeded Check and Volume Throughput Exceeded Check, monitor if the driven IOPS or throughput is exceeding the provisioned performance of your Amazon EBS volume.

With these two new volume level metrics, you can quickly identify and respond to latency issues stemming from under provisioned EBS volumes that may impact the performance of your applications. These metrics will return a value of 0 (performance not exceeded) or a 1 (performance exceeded) depending on whether an application is attempting to overdrive the provisioned IOPS or throughput performance of an EBS volume. With Amazon CloudWatch, you can use these new metrics to create customized dashboards and set alarms that notify you or automatically perform actions based on these metrics.

The Volume IOPS Exceeded Check and Volume Throughput Exceeded Check metrics are available by default at a 1-minute frequency at no additional charges, and are available for all EBS volumes attached to Nitro-based EC2 instances. You can access these metrics via EC2 console, CLI, or CloudWatch API in all commercial AWS regions, including the AWS GovCloud (US) Regions. To learn more about these CloudWatch metrics, please visit the EBS CloudWatch Metrics documentation.