Stan - Amazon recently announced: "CloudWatch provides free Basic Monitoring for all Amazon EC2 instances. Basic Monitoring provides metrics at 5-minute granularity." <http://aws.amazon.com/cloudwatch/>
I also like Munin (no $) which not only monitors at finer granularity, it monitors more factors; here's a quick start: < http://alestic.com/2009/05/amazon-cloudwatch>. (Of course it does add some load, so be aware of that.) If it's just getting immediate info on the instance itself, the "uptime" command show the 1-, 5- and 15-minute load averages. The "top" command shows that info and other resource utilization, like memory. And like Pete said, the info must be interpreted in light of your instance's config; a load greater than the number of cores indicates a potential problem - especially if the longer-time averages are above. The m1.large type has two virtual cores, so a load of 2.0 is what you're trying to stay below. Of course other factors (ex: I/O ) may cause the load to spike so it's important to look at the whole picture, over time. Something like Munin is a great aid for this, since you can look at graphs side-by-side and see if a few things spike at the same time, or one thing spikes right after another, etc. BTW: This all presumes you're using a Linux, not a Windows instance. - Marc On Thu, Dec 9, 2010 at 12:25 AM, Stanley Brinkerhoff <[email protected]>wrote: > Is anyone using Amazon's EC2? I have a simple question I can't seem to > find the answer to -- how do I tell if my application is CPU bound on the > instance without using CloudWatch? My GoogleFu fails me. (I have a couple > m1.large instances) > > Stan >
