AWS Cloudwatch ELB monitoring active connections - amazon-cloudwatch

Question

I would like to monitor the maximum number of active connections that my ApplicationELB is managing over a 5-minute period.
The ApplicationELB publishes a metric called ActiveConnectionCount. The documentation describes this in part as:
The total number of concurrent TCP connections active from clients to the load balancer and from the load balancer to targets.
And further states:
The most useful statistic is Sum.
I believe that Sum would total all the active connections reported within the time frame. E.g. Let's say the ELB is maintaining 10 connections and it reports this number every second, then the Sum would be 3000 over a 5-minute period. This is not what I want. Furthermore, when I use SUM over a 5-minute period I'm getting 20k or so -- far more than the number of real concurrent connections which are at most a few hundred.
If I aggregate using Maximum then the number reported by AWS is zero (!?).
If I aggregate using Average then the number appears to be reasonable (ranging from 80 - 200), but also wildly inaccurate. That is, it is almost inversely correlates with new connections and response time. That is, during time so of the day when response time is low and new connections is low, average active connections is higher.
So, I guess, here are my questions:
(1) How can I achieve seeing maximum number of concurrent connections between ELB and clients/app server? (Ideally, I could separate these two, but it doesn't look like the ELB does that).
Less important, but I'm curious:
(2) Why does MAXIMUM yield zero, while AVERAGE yields 80-200?
(3) Why does the documentation say that SUM should be used?
Thanks for any help / insight!

Answer 1

How can I achieve seeing maximum number of concurrent connections
between ELB and clients/app server? (Ideally, I could separate these
two, but it doesn't look like the ELB does that).
Why does MAXIMUM yield zero, while AVERAGE yields 80-200?
As you said, the ELB does not do that. From the metrics you can also see something called "SampleCount" which is the number of samples taken during a period of time, by default 1 minute. If we could somehow access the counts in these samples, we could get a min and max sample. For whatever reason, it's currently broken or not implemented and min/max show as 0. Therefore, the most useful metric, in my opinion at least, is the average which takes the sum (of counts) and divides it by the SampleCount.
Why does the documentation say that SUM should be used?
Good question because if you think about it it doesn't make much sense and doesn't give you much information since it's just a sum of the count in all samples.