Re:FreeBSD/EC2 on C5 instances
by _msw_ on Friday November 17, 2017 @01:07AM
(#15719412)
Does the updated documentation at http://docs.aws.amazon.com/AmazonCloudWatch/latest/monitorin... explain the CloudWatch metrics?
[ Parent
| on HN ]
That's more helpful. That's a lot of special cases - and thought - to put into each time we look at a C5-attached volume as opposed to any other. It also does not include any mention of Average Read Latency and Average Write Latency, which appears to be incorrect in all dimensions (average, min, max, sum).
We've found that CloudWatch is useful for some system and I/O related metrics (i.e., the from the EBS SAN's point of view) but less useful for others (i.e., metrics from the VM's point of view). It's worthwhile to install a monitoring agent on the VM that can collect I/O latency and other statistics there too. We use Datadog, but there are lots of options out there (collectd etc.).
This is a topic that we're continuing to iterate on between EBS, CloudWatch, and the AWS console team for metrics. When a newly introduced behavior makes step function changes in graphs displayed in the AWS console it doesn't meet the principle of least astonishment.
We're also continuing to investigate the reported latency in the console. Because this is a derived metric from VolumeTotal{Read,Write}Time and Volume{Read,Write}Ops, there may be a miscalculation happening due to the change in dimensions.
Not sure if this is related, but when I was getting EFS working last year I noticed that CloudWatch graphs were often complete nonsense due to EFS not logging zeroes for idle filesystems but CloudWatch treating this as "missing data" rather than "implied zeroes".