title: What impact does the size of SampleCount have on my metrics?
body: <p>Reading <a href="https://docs.aws.amazon.com/AmazonCloudWatch/latest/monitoring/publishingMetrics.html" rel="noreferrer">this doc</a> and its not clear to me what the impact of sampleCount is on my custom metrics I send as a statistical set.</p>
  
  <p>For example this:</p>
  
  <pre><code>aws cloudwatch put-metric-data --metric-name PageViewCount --namespace MyService --statistic-values Sum=11,MinimSampleCountSampleCountum=2,Maximum=5,SampleCount=3 --timestamp 2016-10-14T12:00:00.000Z
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>The SampleCount is 3, but cloudwatch doesn't have the actual points it just has the min,max,sum.</p>
  
  <p>So what if I put 10 for SampleCount or even 10000, what difference does that make?</p>