# Get statistics for a specific resource
<a name="US_SingleMetricPerInstance"></a>

The following example shows you how to determine the maximum CPU utilization of a specific EC2 instance.

**Requirements**
+ You must have the ID of the instance. You can get the instance ID using the Amazon EC2 console or the [describe-instances](https://docs.aws.amazon.com/cli/latest/reference/ec2/describe-instances.html) command.
+ By default, basic monitoring is enabled, but you can enable detailed monitoring. For more information, see [Enable or Disable Detailed Monitoring for Your Instances](https://docs.aws.amazon.com/AWSEC2/latest/UserGuide/using-cloudwatch-new.html) in the *Amazon EC2 User Guide*.

**To display the average CPU utilization for a specific instance using the console**

1. Open the CloudWatch console at [https://console.aws.amazon.com/cloudwatch/](https://console.aws.amazon.com/cloudwatch/).

1. In the navigation pane, choose **Metrics**, **All metrics**.

1. Select the **EC2** metric namespace.  
![\[Select the EC2 metrics namespace\]](http://docs.aws.amazon.com/AmazonCloudWatch/latest/monitoring/images/metric_view_categories.png)

1. Select the **Per-Instance Metrics** dimension.  
![\[View the metric dimensions for Amazon EC2\]](http://docs.aws.amazon.com/AmazonCloudWatch/latest/monitoring/images/metric_view_metric_category.png)

1. In the search field, enter **CPUUtilization** and press Enter. Select the row for the specific instance, which displays a graph for the `CPUUtilization` metric for the instance. To change the name of the graph, choose the pencil icon. To change the time range, select one of the predefined values or choose **custom**.  
![\[Graph a single metric\]](http://docs.aws.amazon.com/AmazonCloudWatch/latest/monitoring/images/metric_statistics_ec2_instance.png)

1. To change the statistic, choose the **Graphed metrics** tab. Choose the column heading or an individual value and then choose one of the statistics or predefined percentiles, or specify a custom percentile (for example, **p99.999**).  
![\[Change the statistic for a metric\]](http://docs.aws.amazon.com/AmazonCloudWatch/latest/monitoring/images/metric_statistics_ec2_instance_statistic_period.png)

1. To change the period, choose the **Graphed metrics** tab. Choose the column heading or an individual value, and then choose a different value.

**To get the CPU utilization per EC2 instance using the AWS CLI**  
Use the [get-metric-statistics](https://docs.aws.amazon.com/cli/latest/reference/cloudwatch/get-metric-statistics.html) command as follows to get the `CPUUtilization` metric for the specified instance.

```
aws cloudwatch get-metric-statistics --namespace AWS/EC2 --metric-name CPUUtilization \
--dimensions Name=InstanceId,Value=i-1234567890abcdef0 --statistics Maximum \
--start-time 2016-10-18T23:18:00 --end-time 2016-10-19T23:18:00 --period 360
```

The returned statistics are 6-minute values for the requested 24-hour time interval. Each value represents the maximum CPU utilization percentage for the specified instance for a particular 6-minute time period. The data points aren't returned in chronological order. The following shows the beginning of the example output (the full output includes data points for every 6 minutes of the 24-hour period).

```
{
    "Datapoints": [
        {
            "Timestamp": "2016-10-19T00:18:00Z", 
            "Maximum": 0.33000000000000002, 
            "Unit": "Percent"
        }, 
        {
            "Timestamp": "2016-10-19T03:18:00Z", 
            "Maximum": 99.670000000000002, 
            "Unit": "Percent"
        }, 
        {
            "Timestamp": "2016-10-19T07:18:00Z", 
            "Maximum": 0.34000000000000002, 
            "Unit": "Percent"
        }, 
        ...
    ], 
    "Label": "CPUUtilization"
}
```