Elastic Load Balancing publishes data points to Amazon CloudWatch for your load balancers and your targets. CloudWatch enables you to retrieve statistics about those data points as an ordered set of time-series data, known as metrics. Think of a metric as a variable to monitor, and the data points as the values of that variable over time. For example, you can monitor the total number of healthy targets for a load balancer over a specified time period. Each data point has an associated time stamp and an optional unit of measurement.
You can use metrics to verify that your system is performing as expected. For example, you can create a CloudWatch alarm to monitor a specified metric and initiate an action (such as sending a notification to an email address) if the metric goes outside what you consider an acceptable range.
Elastic Load Balancing reports metrics to CloudWatch only when requests are flowing through the load balancer. If there are requests flowing through the load balancer, Elastic Load Balancing measures and sends its metrics in 60-second intervals. If there are no requests flowing through the load balancer or no data for a metric, the metric is not reported.