Amazon CloudWatchPricing

CloudWatch Pricing 2021

AWS CloudWatch is an infrastructure and application management service for Amazon Web Services users. Anyone with an AWS account can access to CloudWatch’s free and paid plans. The appeal of CloudWatch is monitoring and controlling data related to the services and resources you use on AWS. This is essentially the universal remote for your entire house. You have the ability to control your project from every angle.

AWS CloudWatch is a powerful technical tool, and below is a detailed description of what the service is and how it works. If you already know or have experience with similar software feel free to go straight to pricing.

Before reading about CloudWatch, AWS has a great explanation video that can illustrate the product for you.

CloudWatch Explained

AWS CloudWatch is a metrics repository that you can use for monitoring your AWS resources. A metrics repository is a collection of data measuring the performance of your application or the progress of the resources you use. The main benefit of Amazon CloudWatch is the ability to track the metrics of your project and use the data for your needs.

You can gather information from AWS services, and on-premises applications, and pull it into CloudWatch in the form of logs and metrics. You will be able to report on the data from your entire stack of infrastructure and applications, and use alarms and automated actions to minimize unnecessary use and MTTR.

With real-time insight, you can perform calculations, make graphs, and make more accurate decisions on cost. The sooner you realize what costs can be cut down, the sooner you can save on your budget. For instructions for how to make a graph using CloudWatch see AWS’ instructions.

In the next section, we go over the pricing tiers and their intricate specifications.

CloudWatch Pricing

CloudWatch Pricing can be hard because it's a paid-as-you-go model. Here, what you will be paying for is your use of their metrics. They are also an AWS service which means you need an AWS account to use it. AWS accounts offer a free tier for 12 months, then they become paid accounts. AWS CloudWatch does have a free tier and it does not expire. You are charged if you go over the free tier limits. Fortunately, AWS provides pricing examples as well.

AWS offers a pricing calculator that you can adjust to your specific needs for a more personalized estimate. Any estimate with pay-as-you-go models can be more than you expect. This can be because you use it more than you thought. It can also be that you noticed add ons you wanted later, or found a very useful application that isn’t free. The region is also a major factor and you won’t be able to see region costs unless you go to the AWS calculator.

CloudWatch Free Tier

In the CloudWatch Free Tier, you have limits on how fast, how much, and how many tools you have to monitor your applications. You can access basic monitoring metrics every 5 minutes and 10 detailing monitoring metrics every 1 minute. They allow you to make as many as 1 million API requests and view the spec of your application with 3 dashboards.

You can also use 10 alarm metrics to monitor your applications, but high-resolution alarms are not allotted in that 10. When it comes to logs you have 5GB of data for your logs which could be archive storage or data scanned.

This kind of plan is great for small enterprises that do not need to spend a lot of time and money on analyzing their AWS applications. It’s more ideal for those that do not need to track a lot of AWS services at once. If you need AWS CloudWatch because you have a couple of important services you need to track usage of then you won’t need the paid tier.

CloudWatch Paid Tier

The paid tier for CloudWatch has some complex pricing and details to all the features it provides: metrics, dashboards, alarms, logs, events, contributor insights, canaries, evidently, RUM, Metrics Insights.

Metrics are the main rates we’ll go over. They’re charged by the hour, and your total usage is billed by the month. If you use Detailed Monitoring you’re charged based on the number of custom metrics. This can change based on the type of instance, so remember to see their instance documentation for Metrics. There you will find a list of available metrics options for your instance.

For API requests it’s based on the type of request sent and how many statistics per metric. You are allowed 5 stats per metric and then they get priced as an additional metric.

Metric Streams can incur extra charges in a few places. It’s based on the number of metric updates, but Amazon Kinesis Data Firehose can cause you to go over for certain actions. The Amazon Kinesis Data Firehose sounds very misleading but just focus on the word Kinesis, which is generally defined as the movement of something.

In this case, it’s the movement of your data into and out of AWS CloudWatch. Amazon Kinesis Data Firehose is the specific pricing model for the cost of data ingestion, conversion, delivery, and grouping of your data. It is highly recommended you see the separate pricing for Amazon Kinesis Data Firehose.

The general rate for Metric Streams is $0.003 per 1,000 metric updates, without any special factors added.

All this complicated pricing and features might be too much for your needs. The complexity of this pricing model means any calculation is a guide, not a rule. It is important to over budget for initial use, and many users will find easing into the use of this tool helpful.

There are alternatives to AWS CloudWatch, and in the next section, we consider similar and different options.

CloudWatch Alternatives

You may have noticed that AWS CloudWatch has a number of complex features to learn and keep track of. The pricing is especially dense and intricate to navigate. Not many people want to check if their instance type or data ingestion is extra money. All the while checking the region, rates, and making sure you don’t go over certain thresholds for every single action you perform on your metrics.

Unfortunately, this will be the same with a Microsoft or Google product. Azure Monitor has the same pay-as-you-go itemized pricing that can be overwhelming.

Google Stackdriver, now called Google Cloud Operations Manager, is a little less combobulating.

It’s still a pay-as-you-go model, but only after you pass your free allotment every month.The free option doesn’t disappear after you reach the limit, it starts over the next month. The features of the metrics are not charged individually to the same extent as CloudWatch, but you need to watch out for your usage of logs, monitoring data, data ingestion, and API calls. This is fantastic for those hesitant variable pricing models since even mistakes are contained to a monthly basis.

If you go over your allotted mebibytes (MiB) for monitoring data, you’re then charged at a specific rate for your usage. You are charged for your usage in mebibytes MiB instead of megabytes MB because MiB is to the power of 2 instead of 10 and is considered a more appropriate binary measurement (and it holds more bytes in its measurement).

There’s more, however, Google has a second pricing list that goes into more detail on log pricing, and the pricing on other Google operations products. For more information on the differences between CloudWatch and Google Operations you can see our comparison of reviews.

You may have wanted an option that is different CloudWatch. Elasticsearch is a highly rated option that isn’t as entangling as using Amazon, Google, or Microsoft. The pricing for Elastic is more transparent than the tech giants, but is still not a set rate.

Elastic offers Standard, Gold, Premium, and Enterprise plans with rates, but those exact rates are not guaranteed. The Standard plan says $16 per month on their Elastic Cloud platform, but with the catch that you could possibly have the Standard plan for “as low as” 16 per month. You still need to use their pricing calculator to find the actual cost of your specific needs. There plan costs are only estimates.

The Standard plan alone offers logging, alerts, and integrations. They even have a free version for download. It’s a version of Elastic Cloud on Kubernetes, but with just basic features. For more information about how Elasticsearch compares to AWS CloudWatch you can see our review comparison. They both have an 8.8/10 trScore and very positive reviews.

More Resources

Before you make any decisions on AWS CloudWatch, you may want to see their interface and how to use their console. Here is a walkthrough of the console.

You will also want to see the tools and features. Here is a 30 minute in-depth tutorial from Edureka going over AWS certification and how to use cloud monitoring tools.

Those of you who are still not sure about AWS CloudWatch can look through our list of their competitors on the alternatives page. If you haven’t already, you can sift through AWS CloudWatch’s reviews. The main issue users have is the cost, but many still recommend it and enjoy the features.

For software shoppers that need more information to understand CloudWatch and it’s terms, they have their own highlights of certain concepts such as namespaces, alarms, percentiles etc.

If any of you have used some of the software in the article, please consider leaving a review to help other buyers make informed decisions.