Sign In to the Console
Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud
User Guide for Linux Instances

AWS Documentation » Amazon EC2 » User Guide for Linux Instances » Monitoring Amazon EC2 » Monitoring Your Instances Using CloudWatch » Enable or Disable Detailed Monitoring for Your Instances

Enable or Disable Detailed Monitoring for Your Instances

By default, your instance is enabled for basic monitoring. You can optionally enable detailed monitoring. After you enable detailed monitoring, the Amazon EC2 console displays monitoring graphs with a 1-minute period for the instance. The following table describes basic and detailed monitoring for instances.

Monitoring Type Description

Basic

Data is available automatically in 5-minute periods at no charge.

Detailed

Data is available in 1-minute periods for an additional cost. To get this level of data, you must specifically enable it for the instance. For the instances where you've enabled detailed monitoring, you can also get aggregated data across groups of similar instances.

For information about pricing, see the Amazon CloudWatch product page.

Enabling Detailed Monitoring

You can enable detailed monitoring on an instance as you launch it or after the instance is running or stopped.

To enable detailed monitoring for an existing instance (console)

  1. Open the Amazon EC2 console at https://console.aws.amazon.com/ec2/.

  2. In the navigation pane, choose Instances.

  3. Select the instance and choose Actions, CloudWatch Monitoring, Enable Detailed Monitoring.

  4. In the Enable Detailed Monitoring dialog box, choose Yes, Enable.

  5. Choose Close.

To enable detailed monitoring when launching an instance (console)

When launching an instance using the AWS Management Console, select the Monitoring check box on the Configure Instance Details page.

To enable detailed monitoring for an existing instance (AWS CLI)

Use the following monitor-instances command to enable detailed monitoring for the specified instances. 

aws ec2 monitor-instances --instance-ids i-1234567890abcdef0

To enable detailed monitoring when launching an instance (AWS CLI)

Use the run-instances command with the --monitoring flag to enable detailed monitoring. 

aws ec2 run-instances --image-id ami-09092360 --monitoring Enabled=true...

Disabling Detailed Monitoring

You can disable detailed monitoring on an instance as you launch it or after the instance is running or stopped.

To disable detailed monitoring (console)

  1. Open the Amazon EC2 console at https://console.aws.amazon.com/ec2/.

  2. In the navigation pane, choose Instances.

  3. Select the instance and choose Actions, CloudWatch Monitoring, Disable Detailed Monitoring.

  4. In the Disable Detailed Monitoring dialog box, choose Yes, Disable.

  5. Choose Close.

To disable detailed monitoring (AWS CLI)

Use the following unmonitor-instances command to disable detailed monitoring for the specified instances. 

aws ec2 unmonitor-instances --instance-ids i-1234567890abcdef0