Enabling Metrics for the AWS SDK for Java - AWS SDK for Java 1.x
How to Enable Java SDK Metric GenerationAvailable Metric TypesMore Information

We announced the upcoming end-of-support for AWS SDK for Java (v1). We recommend that you migrate to AWS SDK for Java v2. For dates, additional details, and information on how to migrate, please refer to the linked announcement.

Enabling Metrics for the AWS SDK for Java

The AWS SDK for Java can generate metrics for visualization and monitoring with Amazon CloudWatch that measure:

  • your application’s performance when accessing AWS

  • the performance of your JVMs when used with AWS

  • runtime environment details such as heap memory, number of threads, and opened file descriptors

How to Enable Java SDK Metric Generation

You need to add the following Maven dependency to enable the SDK to send metrics to CloudWatch.

<dependencyManagement>
  <dependencies>
    <dependency>
      <groupId>com.amazonaws</groupId>
      <artifactId>aws-java-sdk-bom</artifactId>
      <version>1.12.490*</version>
      <type>pom</type>
      <scope>import</scope>
    </dependency>
  </dependencies>
</dependencyManagement>
<dependencies>
  <dependency>
    <groupId>com.amazonaws</groupId>
    <artifactId>aws-java-sdk-cloudwatchmetrics</artifactId>
    <scope>provided</scope>
  </dependency>
  <!-- Other SDK dependencies. -->
</dependencies>

*Replace the version number with the latest version of the SDK available at Maven Central.

AWS SDK for Java metrics are disabled by default. To enable it for your local development environment, include a system property that points to your AWS security credential file when starting up the JVM. For example:

-Dcom.amazonaws.sdk.enableDefaultMetrics=credentialFile=/path/aws.properties

You need to specify the path to your credential file so that the SDK can upload the gathered datapoints to CloudWatch for later analysis.

Note

If you are accessing AWS from an Amazon EC2 instance using the Amazon EC2 instance metadata service, you don’t need to specify a credential file. In this case, you need only specify:

-Dcom.amazonaws.sdk.enableDefaultMetrics

All metrics captured by the AWS SDK for Java are under the namespace AWSSDK/Java, and are uploaded to the CloudWatch default region (us-east-1). To change the region, specify it by using the cloudwatchRegion attribute in the system property. For example, to set the CloudWatch region to us-east-1, use:

-Dcom.amazonaws.sdk.enableDefaultMetrics=credentialFile=/path/aws.properties,cloudwatchRegion={region_api_default}

Once you enable the feature, every time there is a service request to AWS from the AWS SDK for Java, metric data points will be generated, queued for statistical summary, and uploaded asynchronously to CloudWatch about once every minute. Once metrics have been uploaded, you can visualize them using the AWS Management Console and set alarms on potential problems such as memory leakage, file descriptor leakage, and so on.

Available Metric Types

The default set of metrics is divided into three major categories:

AWS Request Metrics

  • Covers areas such as the latency of the HTTP request/response, number of requests, exceptions, and retries.

    RequestMetric 131111
AWS service Metrics

  • Include AWS service-specific data, such as the throughput and byte count for S3 uploads and downloads.

    ServiceMetric 131111
Machine Metrics

  • Cover the runtime environment, including heap memory, number of threads, and open file descriptors.

    MachineMetric 131111

    If you want to exclude Machine Metrics, add excludeMachineMetrics to the system property:

    -Dcom.amazonaws.sdk.enableDefaultMetrics=credentialFile=/path/aws.properties,excludeMachineMetrics

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