Amazon Kinesis Streams Introduces Time-based Shard Iterators and Shard-level Metrics

Amazon Kinesis Streams enables you to build custom applications that process or analyze streaming data for specialized needs. Today we are adding two new features, time-based shard iterators and shard-level metrics, to make it easy to replay and manage your Amazon Kinesis streams.

Time-based iterators make your streams easily replay-able by your processing applications. Using time-based iterators, you can read records from a position in the stream corresponding to a timestamp. This gives you the ability to go back in time and replay the stream for any time window within the default 24-hour or the extended 7-day data retention period. For more information, see GetShardIterator in the Amazon Kinesis Streams API Reference.

You now get ten new Amazon CloudWatch metrics for monitoring your Amazon Kinesis streams, including seven shard-level metrics. Shard-level metrics make stream management easier when using open-source processing frameworks like Apache Spark Streaming. With shard-level metrics, you can get better visibility into the performance and utilization of shards, which are units of streaming capacity. This allows you to monitor, scale, and troubleshoot your streams more easily. For more information, see Amazon Kinesis Shard-level Metrics in the Amazon Kinesis Streams developer guide.

To learn more about Amazon Kinesis and get started with streaming data, see the Amazon Kinesis Streams website and developer guide.

The Amazon Kinesis Team