Amazon EC2: how to find out detailed CPU usage?

Posted by j0nes on Server Fault See other posts from Server Fault or by j0nes
Published on 2012-03-14T07:26:38Z Indexed on 2012/11/05 11:08 UTC
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amazon-ec2

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cpu

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cpu-usage

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munin

I am running several EC2 instances, and I want to know the exact work my CPU is doing. On "normal" machines I am doing this with munin and its CPU plugin which looks at the statistics provided by /proc/stat.

On my EC2 machines however, I get incorrect graphs. The machine has two cores, so the max CPU usage should be 200% - however it gets as high as 400%:

Munin CPU Graph

I know that I should use Amazon CloudWatch to see the total CPU usage (and this is the official and recommended from Amazon way to do this), but I am specifically looking on how the CPU usage is spend (e.g. system, user, iowait).

Is there a way to get detailed CPU usage statistics on EC2 instances?

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