New Amazon CloudWatch metrics for monitoring I/O latency of Amazon EBS volumes

Today, Amazon announces the availability of two new Amazon CloudWatch metrics, VolumeAvgReadLatency and VolumeAvgWriteLatency, to monitor the performance of your Amazon Elastic Block Store (EBS) volumes. You can gain insight into the average latency of the I/O being driven on your EBS volumes to help root cause any application performance bottlenecks.

With these new volume-level metrics, you can now easily observe volume latency and take recovery actions to ensure your applications are resilient to performance impacts. The metrics will provide visibility into the per-minute average read I/O latency and per-minute average write I/O latency for the EBS volume. Using CloudWatch, you can use the new metrics to create customized dashboards and set alarms that notify you or automatically perform actions based on the metric value.

The average latency metrics are available by default at a 1-minute frequency at no additional charge for all EBS volumes attached to an EC2 Nitro instance in all commercial AWS Regions, the AWS GovCloud (US) Regions, and the China Regions. To learn more about the VolumeAvgReadLatency and VolumeAvgWriteLatency metrics, please visit the EBS CloudWatch Metrics documentation.