Monitor ElastiCache memcached clusters with CloudWatch metrics, alarms and SNS

The caching layer is a critical component of each system that needs monitoring. Amazon ElastiCache provides Redis and memcached as a Service. Monitoring an ElastiCache memcached cluster touches multiple parts of AWS. In this post, you learn how to monitor ElastiCache memcached clusters.

CloudWatch metrics

Each cluster node sends metrics to CloudWatch that we can monitor with CloudWatch alarms. We recommend creating alarms for the following metrics:

• CPUUtilization: The percentage of CPU utilization.
• SwapUsage: The amount of swap used in bytes.
• Evictions: The number of non-expired items the cache evicted to allow space for new writes.

Event notifications

Besides metrics, ElastiCache sends out event notifications if the state of the cluster has changed. E.g., because of a cache node failure.

ElastiCache does not support filtering the notifications. You get all of them or none. You likely want to filter out the important ones from the noise.

Set up instructions

Monitoring Assistant
Monitor ElastiCache memcached and receive alerts in Slack or Microsoft Teams! marbot does the notifications filtering for you as well!

1. Add marbot to Slack or Microsoft Teams.
2. Invite marbot to a channel.
3. Follow the setup wizard.

It couldn't be easier!

Take your AWS monitoring to a new level! Chatbot for AWS Monitoring: Configure monitoring, escalate alerts, solve incidents.

Michael Wittig

Consultant focusing on Amazon Web Services (AWS). Entrepreneur building marbot.io. Author of Amazon Web Services in Action, Rapid Docker on AWS, and cloudonaut.io.

You can contact me via Email, Twitter, and LinkedIn.

Published on 23 Jan 2018 and updated on 17 Aug 2021.