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, and 1 million API requests each month at no additional 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.
* Please refer to Regional Products and Services for details of CloudWatch Logs service availability by region
** 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 West (Oregon), US West (N. California), South America (São Paulo), EU (Ireland), EU (Frankfurt), Asia Pacific (Singapore), Asia Pacific (Tokyo), Asia Pacific (Sydney), Asia Pacific (Seoul), and Asia Pacific (Mumbai).
***** 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.
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.
As an example, a developer may want Detailed Monitoring for 10 Amazon EC2 instances. The cost for Detailed Monitoring is $3.50 per instance, per month. Monthly Amazon CloudWatch charges would equal $35 (10 instances x $3.50.) Monthly prices are prorated by the hour. If Detailed Monitoring was enabled on all 10 instance for 18 days of a 30 day month, total charges would equal $21.00 (10 instances x $3.50 x 18 of 30 days). API requests used by the Amazon EC2 service to store your metrics are free of charge.
In addition, the same 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, she may provide the following five web server metrics to Amazon CloudWatch in a PutMetricData API request every minute from each instance: completed requests, failed requests, request latency, errors, and bytes per request. For this case, the Amazon CloudWatch charges would be $25 (or $0.50 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 432,000 (10 instances x 1 Put per minute x 43,200 minutes per month), which falls within the Free Tier quantity of 1 million API requests per month.
A developer may wish to monitor HTTP response codes using his web application access logs 24x7 for one 30-day month. For example, he 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.
