Troubleshooting Metrics Insights

The results include "Other," but I don't have this as a dimension

This means that the query includes a GROUP BY clause that specifies a label key that is not used in some of the metrics that are returned by the query. In this case, a null group named Other is returned. The metrics that do not include that label key are probably aggregated metrics that return values aggregated across all values of that label key.

For example, suppose we have the following query:

SELECT AVG(Faults) 
FROM MyCustomNamespace 
GROUP BY Operation, ServiceName

If some of the returned metrics don't include ServiceName as a dimension, then those metrics are displayed as having Other as the value for ServiceName.

To prevent seeing "Other" in your results, use SCHEMA in your FROM clause, as in the following example:

SELECT AVG(Faults) 
FROM SCHEMA(MyCustomNamespace, Operation)
GROUP BY Operation, ServiceName

This limits the returned results to only the metrics that have both the Operation and ServiceName dimensions.

The oldest timestamp in my graph has a lower metric value than the others

CloudWatch Metrics Insights supports up to two weeks of historical data. When you graph with a period larger than one minute, there could be cases where the oldest data point differs from the expected value. This is because the CloudWatch Metrics Insights queries return only data within the two-week retention period. In this case, the oldest data point in the query returns only the observations that have been measured within the two-week boundary, instead of returning all the observations within the period of that data point.