Query AWS CloudWatch custom metrics across dimensions

Question

I recently added the ability for my application to upload custom metrics to AWS CloudWatch so that we can better monitor the performance characteristics of the system.

I am now trying to create a report by querying those collected custom metrics using the AWS CloudWatch CLI. However, I've come across a seemingly insurmountable problem, namely, the inability to aggregate statistics across dimensions for custom metrics emitted using PutMetricData as per this article.

Is anyone aware of a way to specify dimension values using something like wildcards or regular expressions (e.g. *,?,.+ etc) ?

Answer 1

You can't query across dimensions, but you can create additional summary metrics to roll up the same data. For example, if you were recording messages processed on behalf of your customers, you might put metric data twice for each message -- one to the summary message count, and one to the message count with the customer as a dimension. It's a bit redundant, but it works.

If you take a look at the metrics set up in CloudWatch for an Elastic Load Balancer, you'll see the same metrics recorded several ways to summarize by availability zone, load balancer, load balancer and AZ, etc.