Amazon web services AWS Cloudwatch – difference between Maximum and Average metrics in cloudwatch.
I asked myself why has my cloudwatch monitoring such a big difference between maximum and average.
Lets just look at some facts first:
Cloudwatch can either monitor every 5 minutes, which is the default or you can select detailed monitoring then it is every 1 minute.
For the sake of this explanation we assume 5 minutes monitoring and we are graphing 1 hour.
So average would do this:
( 2 + 3 + 5 + 7+ 4 + 6 + 3 + 8 + 9 + 4 + 10 + 1) / 12 = 5.1666
So 5.1666 would be shown on the graph
On maximum it would show the highest number 10
And SUM of course would be
2 + 3 + 5 + 7+ 4 + 6 + 3 + 8 + 9 + 4 + 10 + 1 = 62