Monitoring Athena queries with CloudWatch metrics

Athena publishes query-related metrics to Amazon CloudWatch, when the publish query metrics to CloudWatch option is selected. You can create custom dashboards, set alarms and triggers on metrics in CloudWatch, or use pre-populated dashboards directly from the Athena console.

When you enable query metrics for queries in workgroups, the metrics are displayed within the Metrics tab in the Workgroups panel, for each workgroup in the Athena console.

Athena publishes the following metrics to the CloudWatch console:

• EngineExecutionTime – in milliseconds

• ProcessedBytes – the total amount of data scanned per DML query

• QueryPlanningTime – in milliseconds

• QueryQueueTime – in milliseconds

• ServiceProcessingTime – in milliseconds

• TotalExecutionTime – in milliseconds, for DDL and DML queries

These metrics have the following dimensions:

• QueryState – SUCCEEDED, FAILED, or CANCELED

• QueryType – DML, DDL, or UTILITY

• WorkGroup – name of the workgroup

Athena publishes the following metric to the CloudWatch console under the AmazonAthenaForApacheSpark namespace:

• DPUCount – number of DPUs consumed during the session to execute the calculations.

This metric has the following dimensions:

• SessionId – The ID of the session in which the calculations are submitted.

• WorkGroup – Name of the workgroup.

For more information, see the List of CloudWatch metrics and dimensions for Athena later in this topic. For information about Athena usage metrics, see Monitoring Athena usage metrics.

To view query metrics for a workgroup in the console

1. Open the Athena console at https://console.aws.amazon.com/athena/.

2. If the console navigation pane is not visible, choose the expansion menu on the left.

   

3. In the navigation pane, choose Workgroups.

4. Choose the workgroup that you want from the list, and then choose the Metrics tab.

   The metrics dashboard displays.

   Note

   If you just recently enabled metrics for the workgroup and/or there has been no recent query activity, the graphs on the dashboard may be empty. Query activity is retrieved from CloudWatch depending on the interval that you specify in the next step.

5. In the Metrics section, choose the metrics interval that Athena should use to fetch the query metrics from CloudWatch, or specify a custom interval.

   

6. To refresh the displayed metrics, choose the refresh icon.

   

7. Click the arrow next to the refresh icon to choose how frequently you want the metrics display to be updated.

   

To view metrics in the Amazon CloudWatch console

1. Open the CloudWatch console at https://console.aws.amazon.com/cloudwatch/.

2. In the navigation pane, choose Metrics, All metrics.

3. Select the AWS/Athena namespace.

To view metrics with the CLI

• Do one of the following:

  • To list the metrics for Athena, open a command prompt, and use the following command:

    aws cloudwatch list-metrics --namespace "AWS/Athena"

  • To list all available metrics, use the following command:

    aws cloudwatch list-metrics"

List of CloudWatch metrics and dimensions for Athena

If you've enabled CloudWatch metrics in Athena, it sends the following metrics to CloudWatch per workgroup. The following metrics use the AWS/Athena namespace.

Metric name	Description
EngineExecutionTime	The number of milliseconds that the query took to run.
ProcessedBytes	The number of bytes that Athena scanned per DML query. For queries that were canceled (either by the users, or automatically, if they reached the limit), this includes the amount of data scanned before the cancellation time. This metric is not reported for DDL queries.
QueryPlanningTime	The number of milliseconds that Athena took to plan the query processing flow. This includes the time spent retrieving table partitions from the data source. Note that because the query engine performs the query planning, query planning time is a subset of EngineExecutionTime.
QueryQueueTime	The number of milliseconds that the query was in the query queue waiting for resources. Note that if transient errors occur, the query can be automatically added back to the queue.
ServiceProcessingTime	Number of milliseconds that Athena took to process the query results after the query engine finished running the query.
TotalExecutionTime	The number of milliseconds that Athena took to run a DDL or DML query. TotalExecutionTime includes QueryQueueTime, QueryPlanningTime, EngineExecutionTime, and ServiceProcessingTime.

These metrics for Athena have the following dimensions.

Dimension	Description
QueryState	The query state. Valid statistics: SUCCEEDED, FAILED, or CANCELED.
QueryType	The query type. Valid statistics: DDL, DML, or UTILITY. The type of query statement that was run. DDL indicates DDL (Data Definition Language) query statements. DML indicates DML (Data Manipulation Language) query statements, such as CREATE TABLE AS SELECT. UTILITY indicates query statements other than DDL and DML, such as SHOW CREATE TABLE, or DESCRIBE TABLE.
WorkGroup	The name of the workgroup.