Is My Own Workload the Problem?

These panels point inward at your application. When they move, look at your workload — not at the infrastructure.

Memory Utilization — Real Utilization

Memory your workload is actually holding, excluding page cache and buffers. This is the number that tells you whether you are running out of memory.

Memory Utilization — Utilization

The naive number most monitoring tools show by default — used / total, with cache counted as used. We show it next to Real Utilization so you can see the gap.

A high Utilization with a low Real Utilization is healthy: Linux is using free RAM as opportunistic cache, which is what it is supposed to do. A high Real Utilization is a workload problem: profile your application's memory use.

Swap In / Swap Out

Pages swapped in from / out to disk, per second. Non-zero swap traffic on a production VM almost always means the workload has exceeded its working set. Either give the instance more memory, reduce the working set, or accept the latency penalty.

KSWAPD Steal

How aggressively the kernel reclaim daemon is having to free pages. This rises before swap thrashing becomes visible — an early warning that the working set is approaching the wall.

KSWAPD LHWM

Counts how often the reclaim daemon woke and immediately found memory below the low watermark. Read together with KSWAPD Steal, this tells you whether the kernel is doing its job calmly or fire-fighting.

Swap Total / Swap Free

Capacity context for the swap activity panels above. Confirms whether swap is configured and how much headroom remains.

System Load Average — Last 1 / 5 / 15 Minutes

Standard Linux load averages from inside the guest, over three time windows. Useful as a high-level sanity check, but not sufficient on its own — load includes processes in uninterruptible sleep, so a high load number can mean either CPU saturation or I/O saturation. Read it together with the CPU and disk panels.

API Reference

All instance metrics use DescribeInstanceMonitorData with the metricType values below.

Console Panel	metricType
Memory Utilization — Utilization	MEM_UTIL
Memory Utilization — Real Utilization	REALMEM_UTIL
Swap Total	SWAP_TOTAL
Swap Free	SWAP_FREE
Swap In	SWAP_IN
Swap Out	SWAP_OUT
KSWAPD Steal	KSWAPD_STEAL
KSWAPD LHWM	KSWAPD_LHWM
System Load Average — Last 1 Minute	LOAD1
System Load Average — Last 5 Minutes	LOAD5
System Load Average — Last 15 Minutes	LOAD15