Using the existing PutMetricData API, you can now publish Custom Metrics down to 1-second resolution. This gives you more immediate visibility and greater granularity into the state and performance of your custom applications, such as observing short-lived spikes and functions. In addition, you can also alert sooner with High-Resolution Alarms, as frequently as 10-second periods. High-Resolution Alarms allow you to react and take actions faster, and support the same actions available today with standard 1-minute alarms. You can add these high-resolution metrics and alarms widgets to your Dashboards giving you easy observability of critical components. Additionally, if you use collectd to gather your metrics, you can publish these metrics to CloudWatch using our updated collectd plugin supporting high-resolution periods down to 1-second.

Start exploring high-resolution custom metrics and alarms using the AWS Management Console, AWS Command Line Interface (CLI), and AWS SDKs. High resolution is available in all AWS Public Regions, with AWS GovCloud coming soon.

To learn more, please visit the AWS Blog, CloudWatch documentation, and CloudWatch pricing page.