Amazon CloudWatch pricing

With Amazon CloudWatch, there is no up-front commitment or minimum fee; you simply pay for what you use. You will be charged at the end of the month for your usage.

Free tier

You can get started with Amazon CloudWatch for free. Most AWS Services (EC2, S3, Kinesis, etc.) vend metrics automatically for free to CloudWatch. Many applications should be able to operate within these free tier limits. You can learn more about AWS Free Tier here.

Metrics	Basic Monitoring Metrics (at 5-minute frequency) 10 Detailed Monitoring Metrics (at 1-minute frequency) 1 Million API requests (not applicable to GetMetricData and GetMetricWidgetImage)
Dashboard	3 Dashboards for up to 50 metrics per month
Alarms	10 Alarm metrics (not applicable to high-resolution alarms)
Logs	5GB Data (ingestion, archive storage, and data scanned by Logs Insights queries)
Events	All events except custom events are included

Paid tier

There is no up-front commitment or minimum fee. You simply pay for what you use and will be charged at the end of the month for your usage.

Note: Pricing varies by region. Estimate your monthly bill using the AWS Simple Monthly Calculator.

Metrics
Dashboards
Alarms
Logs
Events

Metrics
Dashboards
Alarms
Logs
Events

Pricing examples

Note: Pricing values displayed here are meant to be examples only. Please refer to pricing tabs for most current pricing information for your respective region(s).

Example 1 - EC2 Detailed Monitoring

If your application runs on 10 Amazon EC2 instances 24x7 for a 30-day month, and you published 5 custom metrics every 5 minutes via the PutMetricData API, your charges would be as follows:

Total number of metrics = 5 metrics per instance * 10 instances = 50 metrics
Monthly CloudWatch Metrics Charges @$0.30 per custom metric = 50 * $0.30 = $15

Total number of minutes in the month = 60 * 24 * 30 = 42,300 minutes
Total Number of API requests = 10 instances * (42,300 minutes/5 minutes) = 84,600 requests
First 1,000,000 API requests = $0

Monthly CloudWatch charges = $15 + $0 = $15 per month
Example 2 - Custom metrics

If your application runs on 51,000 Amazon EC2 instances 24x7 for a 30-day month, and you published 5 custom metrics via the PutMetricData API, your charges would be as follows:

Total number of metrics = 5 metrics per instance * 51,000 instances = 255,000 metrics
First 10,000 custom metrics @$0.30 per metric = 10,000 * $0.30 = $3,000
10,001 to 250,000 custom metrics @$0.10 per metric = 240,000 * $0.10 = $24,000
250,001 to 255,000 custom metrics @0.05 per metric = 5000 * $0.05 = $250
Monthly CloudWatch custom metrics charges = $3000 + $24000 + $250 = $27,250 per month

Total number of API requests = 51,000 instances * (43,200 minutes/5 minutes) = 440,640,000 requests
First 1,000,000 API requests = $0
1,000,001 to 440,640,000 API requests = 439,640,000/1,000 * $0.01 = $4,396.40

Monthly CloudWatch charges = $27,250 + $4,396.40 = $31,646.40 per month
Example 3 - Monitoring with logs

If you are monitoring HTTP 2xx, 3xx & 4xx response codes using web application access logs 24x7 for one 30-day month, by sending 1GB per day of ingested log data, monitoring for HTTP responses, and archiving the data for one month, your charges would be as follows:

Monthly Ingested Log Charges
Total log data ingested = 1GB * 30 days = 30GB
0 to 5GB = $0
5 to 30GB = $0.50 * 25 = $12.50

Monthly Monitoring Charges
3 CloudWatch Metrics @$0 = 3 * $0 = $0

Monthly Archived Log Charges (assume log data compresses to 6GB)
0 to 5GB = $0
5GB to 6GB = $0.03 * 1 = $0.03

Monthly CloudWatch Charges = $12.50 + $0 + $0.03 = $12.53
Example 4 - Monitoring VPC flow logs

If you are monitoring VPCs that send 72TB of ingested VPC flow logs per month and archiving the data for one month, your charges would be as follows:

Monthly Log Ingestion Charges
0 to 10TB @$0.50 per GB = 10 * 1,024 * $0.50 = $5,120.00
10TB to 30TB @$0.25 per GB = 20 * 1,024 * $0.25 = $5,120.00
30TB to 50TB @$0.10 per GB = 20 * 1,024 * $0.10 = $2,048.00
50TB to 72TB @$0.05 per GB = 22 * 1024 * $0.05 = $1,126.40
Total Ingestion Charges = $5,120 + $5,120 + $2,048 + $1126.40 = $13,414.40

Monthly Log Archival Charges (Assume log data compresses to 30TB)
30TB @ $0.033 per GB = 30 * 1024 * 0.033 = $1,013.76

Monthly CloudWatch Charges = $13,414.40 + $1,013.76 = $14,428.16
Example 5 - Alarming with Anomaly Detection

If you enable Amazon CloudWatch Anomaly Detection on 10 metrics per month and only want to alarm on 5 of those metrics, you will create 5 anomaly detection alarms. Anomaly Detection is available with standard resolution alarms only. Your monthly bill is calculated as follows:

Total number of anomaly detection alarms = 5
Alarms are billed based on the number of metrics per alarm. For every anomaly detection alarm, there are three standard resolution metrics per alarm. One is the actual metric being evaluated, the second is the upper bound of expected behavior, and the third is the lower bound of the expected behavior.

One anomaly detection alarm = $0.10 * 3 standard resolution metrics per alarm = $0.30 per month
Five anomaly detection alarms = $0.30 per anomaly detection alarm * 5 alarms = $1.50 per month

Monthly CloudWatch charges = $1.50 per month

Pricing values displayed here are based on US East Regions. Please refer to pricing tabs for most current pricing information for your respective region(s). Anomaly Detection is currently available in preview in all AWS Regions except Asia Pacific (Hong Kong), GovCloud, and China Regions.