title: Why am I unable to fetch metric values for EC2 instances from cloudwatch?
body: <p>I am trying to get the cloudwatch metric data for CPU Utilazation of an EC2 instance i-014448f54423cc0, but i am getting the following output without any metrics data</p>
  
  <p><strong>AWS CLI COMMAND</strong></p>
  
  <pre><code>$ aws cloudwatch get-metric-statistics --metric-name CPUUtilization --start-time 2017-03-20T23:18:00 --end-time 2017-03-25T23:18:00 --period 3600 --namespace AWS/EC2 --statistics Average --dimensions Name=i-014448f54423cc0,Value=i-abcdef
  </code></pre>
  
  <p><strong>OUTPUT</strong></p>
  
  <pre><code>-----------------------------
  |    GetMetricStatistics    |
  +--------+------------------+
  |  Label |  CPUUtilization  |
  +--------+------------------+
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>As per the following thread on AWS forum: <a href="https://forums.aws.amazon.com/message.jspa?messageID=249247" rel="nofollow noreferrer">Link</a>
  It is said that cloudwatch metrics data can be accessed through API's only if detailed monitoring is enabled, so I tried both scenarios of with &amp; without enabling detailed monitoring but still in both the cases the output is same</p>