Active Discovery and AWS CloudWatch Metrics
Last updated - 12 August, 2025
Automatically track your Amazon Web Services (AWS) CloudWatch custom metrics in LogicMonitor by enabling Active Discovery in a DataSource. Active Discovery regularly checks for changes in your monitored environment and updates the relevant resource properties. For more information, see Active Discovery.
Requirements for Enabling Active Discovery Using AWS CloudWatch
To retrieve the AWS CloudWatch custom metrics, the LM Cloud DataSource needs to call AWS CloudWatch ListMetrics with the following request parameters:
| Parameter | Description |
| namespace | The name space to filter against. |
| metric name | The name of the metric to filter against. |
| dimensions | The list of dimensions to filter against. Each dimension contains a name and value. |
ou cannot filter the results returned by ListMetrics by time. Metric availability depends on AWS CloudWatch’s retention policy, as shown in the following table:
| Frequency | Retention Period |
| Data points with a period of less than 60 seconds (high-resolution custom metrics) | 3 hours |
| Data points with a period of 60 seconds (1 minute) | 15 days |
| Data points with a period of 300 seconds (5 minutes) | 63 days |
| Data points with a period of 3600 seconds (1 hour) | 455 days (15 months) |
Note: When receiving metrics from AWS CloudWatch, there is a discrepancy in the timestamps when the metric happens, when it is published to AWS CloudWatch, and when it is ingested by LogicMonitor. Note the following about this discrepancy:
- There is a delay (typically between 2 and 3 minutes) between when the metric occurs and when it is published to AWS CloudWatch. You cannot control this delay.
- The time period between when a metric is published to CloudWatch and when LogicMonitor ingests that metric is between 0 sec and the DataSource polling interval. You can control this time length by adjusting the polling interval.
Enabling Active Discovery Using AWS CloudWatch
To enable Active Discovery, complete the following steps:
1. In LogicMonitor, navigate to Modules.
2. Select Add to create a new LogicModule.
3. Select DataSource.
3. In the Name, Displayed as, and Applies to fields, enter appropriate values to identify your DataSource.
4. In the Collector field, select the “AWS CLOUDWATCH” option.
5. Enable Multi-instance and Enable Active Discovery.
6. Under the Active Discovery options, in the Discovery Method field, select “AWS CLOUDWATCH”.
7. Set the following parameters under the Active Discovery options:
| Parameter | Description |
| Namespace | (Required) The namespace to filter the metrics. |
| Metric Name | (Optional, available since version 136) The name of the metric to filter against. Use this to monitor a single specific metric. |
| Device Dimension Name | (Required) The Cluster or Domain Dimension Name to filter the metrics against the device. The value is read from the AWS Properties and is case sensitive. You will need to specify which LogicMonitor property matches this in Device Dimension Value. Example: DomainName. |
| Device Dimension Value | A wildcard value from the instance’s LogicMonitor properties. Example: ##system.aws.DomainName## |
| Instance Dimension | (Required) The name of the dimension used to discover the nodes/instances. For example, “NodeId” adds the AWS NodeId in the metric path. |
| Metrics Period | (Optional) Specifies how often the metrics we are trying to pull are published. If blank, it shows all metric periods. |
- Select Save.
Once saved, Active Discovery will automatically detect devices via CloudWatch that match the parameters you set.
Example Metric Path
The following is an example of a metric path:
AWS/ES>DomainName:##system.aws.DomainName##>NodeId:##WILDVALUE##>CPUUtilization>Maximum
When instances are found, the path translates to the following:
AWS/ES>DomainName:testdomain>NodeId:TeSt1234>CPUUtilization>Maximum