You can get started with Amazon CloudWatch for free. Many applications should be able to operate within these free tier limits.
- New and existing customers also receive 3 dashboards of up to 50 metrics each per month at no additional charge.
- Basic Monitoring metrics (at five-minute frequency) for Amazon EC2 instances are free of charge, as are all metrics for Amazon EBS volumes, Elastic Load Balancers, and Amazon RDS DB instances.
- New and existing customers also receive 10 metrics (applicable to Detailed Monitoring for Amazon EC2 instances, Custom Metrics, or CloudWatch Logs*), 10 alarms (not applicable to high-resolution alarms), and 1 million API requests each month at no additional charge.
- High-resolution alarms and GetMetricData API requests are not included in the free tier.
- New and existing customers receive extended retention of metrics free of charge.
- New and existing customers also receive 5 GB of data ingestion and 5 GB of archived storage per month at no additional charge.
Pay only for what you use. There is no minimum fee. You will be charged at the end of the month for your usage. Estimate your monthly bill using the AWS Simple Monthly Calculator.
Get Started with AWS for Free
Create a Free AccountAWS Free Tier includes 10 Metrics, 10 Alarms, and 1,000,000 API requests with Amazon Cloudwatch.
** There is no Data Transfer IN charge for any of CloudWatch.
*** Data archived by CloudWatch Logs includes 26 bytes of metadata per log event and is compressed using gzip level 6 compression. Archived data charges are based on the sum of the metadata and compressed log data size.
**** CloudWatch Events is currently available in US East (N. Virginia), US East (Ohio), US West (Oregon), US West (N. California), GovCloud (US), Canada (Central), South America (São Paulo), EU (Ireland), EU (Frankfurt), EU (London), Asia Pacific (Singapore), Asia Pacific (Tokyo), Asia Pacific (Sydney), Asia Pacific (Seoul), Asia Pacific (Mumbai), and China (Beijing).
***** Each 64KB of payload (rounded up) is billed as one custom event. For example, a single custom event with with a 256KB payload will be billed as four custom events. A single custom event with a 65KB payload will be billed as two custom events.
****** Detailed Monitoring is priced as 7 custom metrics per EC2 instance, prorated by the hour and metered only when the instance sends metrics to CloudWatch.
******* Vended logs are logs that are natively published by AWS services on behalf of the customer. VPC Flow logs is the first Vended log type that will benefit from this tiered model. However, more AWS Service log types will be added to Vended Log type in the future.
*******You can request up to five statistics for the same metric in a single GetMetricData API without additional charges.
Note: Your free usage is calculated each month across all regions and automatically applied to your bill — free usage does not accumulate.
AWS GovCloud is an AWS Region designed to allow U.S. government agencies and contractors to move more sensitive workloads into the cloud by addressing their specific regulatory and compliance requirements. For pricing and more information on the new AWS GovCloud Region, please visit the AWS GovCloud Web Page.
Detailed Monitoring is priced as 7 custom metrics per EC2 instance, prorated by the hour and metered only when the instance sends metrics to CloudWatch. The price of EC2 Detailed Monitoring depends on how many metrics you use, ranging from $2.10 to as low as $0.14 per instance per month. This means that your first EC2 Detailed Monitoring instance will cost $2.10 per instance per month. Once you use over 10,000 total metrics (across both custom and detailed metrics), additional instances will be $0.70 per month (7 x $0.10 per metric). Once your total usage exceeds 250,000 metrics, then the price for monitoring additional instances will be $0.35 per instance per month (7 x $0.05 per metric). Similarly, if your total usage exceeds 1,000,000 metrics, then the price for monitoring any additional instances will be $0.14 per instance per month (7 x $0.02 per metric).
A developer may wish to monitor performance metrics for an application that runs on a group of 10 Amazon EC2 instances, 24x7 for one 30-day month. For example, the developer may provide the following five web server metrics to Amazon CloudWatch in a PutMetricData API request every 5 minutes from each instance: completed requests, failed requests, request latency, errors, and bytes per request. For this case, CloudWatch Metrics charges would be $15 (or $0.30 per metric x 5 metrics per instance x 10 instances). In this case, there are no API request charges since the total number of Put API requests is 86,400 (10 instances x 43,200 minutes per month/1 Put every 5 minutes), which falls within the Free Tier quantity of 1 million API requests per month. As the number of instances grow and the number of metrics increases, the price per metric will decrease with more usage. For example, if the number of instances scales to 51,000 instances, then the total number of metrics is 255,000 (5 metrics per instance x 51,000 instances). The first 10,000 metrics will be priced at $0.30, totaling $3,000. Then from 10,001 to 250,000 metrics, it will cost $0.10 per metric, totaling $24,000. The remaining metrics from 250,001 to 255,000 is priced at $0.05 per metric, totaling $250. The monthly bill for 255,000 custom metrics is $27,250 per month. The total number of Put API requests is 440,640,000 (51,000 instances x 43,200 minutes per month/1 Put every 5 minutes), and totals $4,396.40 per month, including 1,000,000 free API requests.
A developer may wish to monitor HTTP response codes using his web application access logs 24x7 for one 30-day month. For example, the developer may send 1GB of ingested log data per day to CloudWatch, monitor for HTTP 200-level, 400-level and 500 level response codes (three metrics) and archive the data for 1 month. The first 5GB of ingested log volume and first 5GB of archived log data is free every month as a part of the free tier. Assuming the archived log data compresses to 6GB, for this case, the Amazon CloudWatch charges would be $12.53. This includes $12.50 in charges for ingestion (30GB minus 5GB of ingested data for the Free Tier) and $0.03 in charges for archived volume (6GB minus 5GB of archived storage for the Free Tier.) Three CloudWatch metrics falls within the Free Tier.
A developer may also wish to monitor VPCs that generate Flow Logs for security breaches or compliance. For example, the developer may send 72TB of ingested VPC Flow log data per month in US East N. Virginia to CloudWatch. Assuming the archived log data compresses to 30TB, for this case, the Amazon CloudWatch charges would be $10,485.76 for both Ingestion and Archival. The first 10TB will be priced at $0.50 per GB, totaling $5,120. Then the next 20TB, will cost $0.25 per GB, totaling $2,560, followed by the next 20TB at $0.10 per GB, totaling $1,280. The remaining 22TB at $0.05 per GB, totaling $512. Archival charges are $1,013.76 (30,720 GB x $0.033 per GB).
The GetMetricData API is priced based on the number of metrics you request per API call. GetMetricData API can support retrieving up to 100 metrics per call. The total cost of the one GetMetricData API retrieving 100 metrics is $0.001 (100 * $0.00001) or $1.0 per 1,000 calls with 100 metrics per call. Let’s say you would like to retrieve 5 EC2 metrics for your 1,000 EC2 instances and you would like to retrieve the data every 5 minutes. The total number of metrics you need to retrieve is 5,000 (5 metrics/instance * 1,000 instances) and you need to make 50 GetMetricData calls (5,000 metrics/100 metrics per call) every 5 minutes. Each one of these API calls request 100 metrics at a price of $0.001. You will make a total of 432,000 (12 * 24 * 30 * 50) GetMetricData calls in a month, requesting 100 metrics in each GetMetricData call. Hence the total monthly cost for GetMetricData is $432.
