Amazon CloudWatch Announces Custom Metrics, Lower Prices for Amazon EC2 Monitoring

Posted on: May 10, 2011

We’re excited to announce that you can now use Amazon CloudWatch to monitor your own custom application metrics. In addition, we are lowering the price of Detailed Monitoring for Amazon EC2 instances.

Prior to today, Amazon CloudWatch provided monitoring for AWS cloud resources such as Amazon EC2 instances, Amazon EBS volumes, Elastic Load Balancers, and Amazon RDS DB instances. Starting today, you can also use Amazon CloudWatch to monitor your custom application metrics for $0.50 per metric per month. With Amazon CloudWatch, there’s no need to set up, maintain, or scale your own monitoring infrastructure. Using a simple API call, you can now provide any metrics that are important to your business, such as application performance, system health, or customer usage. Within moments, you will be able to retrieve statistics, view graphs, or set alarms on your metrics. All this functionality is available immediately via API, the AWS Management Console, and the AWS SDKs.

For Amazon EC2, Free Basic Monitoring provides metric data at five-minute frequency. You can also choose to enable Detailed Monitoring for Amazon EC2 instances, which provides metric data at one-minute frequency for $3.50 per instance per month. This new pricing is effective June 1, 2011, and represents a 68% decrease from the current price of $0.015 per instance-hour.

Metric data for Amazon EBS volumes, RDS DB instances, and Elastic Load Balancers remain free of charge. Alarms are available for $0.10 per alarm per month. As part of the AWS Free Tier, you also receive ten metrics and ten alarms per month, free of charge. To learn more, visit: aws.amazon.com/cloudwatch.