In this recipe, we posted data to a custom metric that we wanted to create using the aws cloudwatch put-metric-data command and the metric was created for us. We first created the metric without specifying any dimension and then posted data to the metric specifying the dimensions. We also verified both cases. You can also refer to the previous recipe for the basic theory behind CloudWatch metrics, if you have not already done this.

The minimum granularity to which CloudWatch can aggregate metric data is 1 minute. So even if we post data to a CloudWatch metric in shorter intervals than 1 minute, CloudWatch will only aggregate with a minimum granularity of 1 minute.