CloudWatch Metric Guide
Amazon EKS CloudWatch AlarmsThresholds, failures, and debugging guides
4 CloudWatch metrics covered for Amazon EKS. Each guide includes the recommended alarm threshold, common root causes, and how Nuberio automatically diagnoses it when it fires.
4
metrics covered
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namespace
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Amazon EKS metrics
pod_cpu_utilization
pod_cpu_utilization reports the percentage of CPU units used by a pod (or aggregated by Namespace, Service, or ClusterName, depending on which dimension set you query), calculated as pod_cpu_usage_total ÷ node_cpu_limit — the node's total CPU capacity, not the pod's own CPU limit.
Threshold
> 80% sustained for 5+ minutes at the PodName+Namespace+ClusterName dimension for critical workloads
pod_memory_utilization
pod_memory_utilization reports the percentage of memory used by a pod (or aggregated by Namespace, Service, or ClusterName), calculated as pod_memory_working_set ÷ node_memory_limit — the node's total memory capacity, not the pod's own memory limit.
Threshold
Namespace or ClusterName aggregate > 75% sustained for 10+ minutes; per-pod, pair with pod_memory_utilization_over_pod_limit for OOM-kill-specific alerting
node_cpu_utilization
node_cpu_utilization reports the total percentage of CPU units in use on a worker node (or aggregated across all nodes at the ClusterName dimension), calculated as node_cpu_usage_total ÷ node_cpu_limit — the node's total allocatable CPU capacity.
Threshold
> 80% sustained for 15 minutes, evaluated per NodeName
cluster_failed_node_count
cluster_failed_node_count reports the number of worker nodes in the cluster currently suffering from a Kubernetes node condition — per AWS documentation, a node is considered failed if it is suffering from any node condition (e.g. NotReady, MemoryPressure, DiskPressure, or PIDPressure).
Threshold
> 0 — alarm immediately
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Looking for alarms across other AWS services? View the full CloudWatch metric guide — thresholds and debugging guides for RDS, Lambda, ECS, ALB, EC2, DynamoDB, SQS, API Gateway, S3, CloudFront, ElastiCache, and EKS.