Amazon CloudWatch
Cloud infrastructure monitoring software
Cloud cost management tools
Monitoring software
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What is Amazon CloudWatch
Amazon CloudWatch is a monitoring and observability service for AWS resources and applications that collects metrics, logs, and events to support operational visibility and alerting. It is primarily used by cloud operations, SRE, and development teams running workloads on AWS to monitor infrastructure health, application performance signals, and operational events. The service integrates natively with many AWS services and supports alarms, dashboards, log analytics, and event-driven automation through AWS integrations.
Native AWS service integration
CloudWatch integrates directly with a broad set of AWS services to collect metrics and events with minimal additional agents or connectors. This reduces setup effort for common AWS workloads and enables consistent monitoring patterns across accounts and regions. It also supports AWS-native actions (for example, triggering automation via AWS services) when alarms or events occur.
Unified metrics, logs, and alarms
The product supports core observability signals—metrics, logs, and events—within one AWS service family. Teams can build dashboards, set threshold-based alarms, and query logs for troubleshooting without deploying separate infrastructure. This is useful for operational monitoring where AWS resource telemetry is the primary data source.
Scales with AWS environments
CloudWatch is designed to operate across large AWS estates, including multi-account and multi-region deployments. It supports centralized visibility patterns (for example, cross-account observability features) that align with common AWS organizational structures. This makes it suitable for enterprises standardizing monitoring within AWS.
AWS-centric observability scope
CloudWatch is most effective for workloads running on AWS and for AWS service telemetry. Organizations with significant non-AWS infrastructure or multi-cloud requirements may need additional tooling or integrations to achieve consistent coverage. This can lead to fragmented observability practices across environments.
Cost can be hard to predict
Pricing depends on usage dimensions such as custom metrics, log ingestion and retention, alarms, and query volume. As telemetry volume grows, teams may experience unexpected increases without careful governance and retention policies. Cost optimization often requires ongoing tuning of log levels, metric cardinality, and retention settings.
Advanced APM features limited
While CloudWatch provides strong infrastructure monitoring and log-based troubleshooting, deeper application performance management capabilities can require additional AWS services or instrumentation choices. End-to-end transaction tracing, code-level diagnostics, and advanced analytics may not be as comprehensive out of the box for all use cases. This can increase implementation complexity for teams seeking full-stack observability in one place.
Plan & Pricing
Pricing model: Pay-as-you-go Free tier/trial (selected items): 5 GB logs (ingestion + archive + Logs Insights scan), 1,800 minutes Live Tail/month, 1 Contributor Insights rule (first 1M matched log events free), 10 custom metrics, 3 dashboards (up to 50 metrics each), 10 alarm metrics, 100 canary runs/month (Synthetics), 100,000 X‑Ray traces recorded/month, 1,000,000 X‑Ray traces retrieved/scanned/month. (See notes on feature-specific time-limited offers for Application Signals.)
Example costs / common billable items (US East / listed on official AWS CloudWatch pricing page):
- Custom Metrics (tiered):
- $0.30 per metric per month for first 10,000 metrics.
- $0.10 per metric per month for the next 10,001–250,000 metrics.
- $0.05 per metric per month for additional metrics (examples show 250,001+ at $0.05 in examples).
- Metrics APIs: First 1,000,000 API requests free; then $0.01 per 1,000 requests.
- Metric Streams: $0.003 per 1,000 metric updates.
- Dashboards: First 3 custom dashboards (up to 50 metrics each) free; additional dashboards $3.00 per dashboard per month.
- Alarms:
- Standard-resolution alarm metric: $0.10 per alarm-metric per month (billing is per metric used by alarm).
- Composite alarm: $0.50 per composite alarm per month.
- Anomaly-detection alarms: priced as alarm-metric(s) used (examples shown in pricing page).
- CloudWatch Logs (ingestion / vended logs tiered):
- Ingestion (example / vended logs tiers shown): 0–10 TB @ $0.50 per GB; 10–30 TB @ $0.25 per GB; 30–50 TB @ $0.10 per GB; 50–72 TB @ $0.05 per GB (volume tiers reset monthly; region and destination may vary).
- Archive storage: $0.03 per GB‑month (example on page).
- Logs Insights queries: $0.005 per GB scanned (examples on pricing page / Logs Insights section).
- Live Tail: 1,800 minutes free per month, then $0.01 per minute.
- Synthetics (canary runs): Example price $0.0012 per canary run (example used on pricing page: 44,640 runs × $0.0012 = $53.57).
- RUM (web & mobile): Example web events: $1 per 100,000 web RUM events; mobile RUM ingestion example $0.35 per GB.
- Application Signals (observability): Example tiering for signals (first 100M signals at $1.50 per 1M, next 900M at $0.75 per 1M, then $0.30 per 1M) — (complex feature-specific tiering available on pricing page).
Discounts / notes:
- Pricing varies by AWS Region; examples on the page are US East (N. Virginia). Volume/usage tiering applies for many items (metrics, vended logs, signals).
- No upfront commitment or minimum fee; billed monthly for actual usage.
- Many charges (e.g., canary runs) also generate use of other AWS services (Lambda, S3, Logs) which are billed separately per those services.
Key notes / caveats:
- The CloudWatch pricing page provides many feature-specific tables and examples. Exact tiers and some additional SKUs (e.g., additional metric tiers beyond examples, region‑specific prices, service-specific vended log tiering) are available on the official pricing page and associated feature pricing sections. Prices shown above are taken from the official AWS CloudWatch pricing page and examples.
Seller details
Amazon Web Services, Inc.
Seattle, Washington, USA
2006
Subsidiary
https://aws.amazon.com/
https://x.com/awscloud
https://www.linkedin.com/company/amazon-web-services/
