CloudWatch pricing at a glance
CloudWatch charges for usage at the end of the month, with no upfront commitment or minimum fee. Rates vary by AWS region. Free allowances reduce specific charges; they do not make every API operation free.
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| Component | Price and scope |
|---|---|
Free tier | $0 within allowances: 10 custom/detailed-monitoring metrics; 5 GB of logs ingestion, archive storage and Logs Insights scans; 1 million eligible API requests; 3 dashboards; 10 eligible alarm metrics; 1,800 Live Tail minutes per month. |
OpenTelemetry metrics | $0.50/GB ingested, including 15 months of storage; no separate ingestion API, metric-storage or unique-series charge. |
PromQL queries | $0.01/million samples scanned through the API. Console and dashboard queries are free; PromQL alarms incur query charges per evaluation. |
Classic custom metrics | AWS's US East (N. Virginia) example uses $0.30/metric-month for the first 10,000, $0.10 for the next 240,000, then $0.05 for the next 5,000 in its 255,000-metric workload. Check regional tiers for your volume. |
Live Tail | $0.01/session-minute after 1,800 free minutes per month in AWS's pricing example. |
Metric centralization | First copy to a destination account free; subsequent copies $0.05/GB copied. |
Cross-account observability | No additional charge to view and query metrics and logs across accounts without copying them. |
Free-tier limits matter: GetMetricData, GetInsightRuleReport and GetMetricWidgetImage are always charged. Each free custom dashboard can reference up to 50 metrics. The 10 free alarm metrics apply only to standard-resolution alarms listing metrics directly, without a Metrics Insights query. Usage beyond allowances is billed.
Confirm PutMetricData pricing before budgeting. AWS's pricing text says $0.01 per million requests, but its classic-metrics worked example uses $0.01 per 1,000 requests. Both describe a request charge alongside metric charges; the conflicting units need confirmation for your region.
Which billing model fits your telemetry?
Use the free allowances to test a scoped workload, then budget by telemetry type. Classic metrics charge by metric count; OpenTelemetry ingestion charges by bytes, with storage included. Choose around the data you send and how you query it, rather than team size.
Verified billing details
AWS's ECS high-resolution metrics example also illustrates a lowest classic-metric tier of $0.02/metric-month. That example does not specify the volume threshold; confirm the applicable regional bands before applying this rate to a larger deployment.
Show full plan details
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| Component | Billing detail |
|---|---|
Classic metrics | Hourly proration; charged only in hours when metrics are sent. Each unique dimension combination counts separately. Detailed Monitoring has metric charges but no API charge for sending those metrics. |
OTel ingestion | Uncompressed OTLP payload: values, names, timestamps, attributes and resource metadata. Excludes HTTP headers, compression overhead and metadata CloudWatch adds after ingestion. |
PromQL sample | One data point for one metric series at one timestamp. |
- Vendor source · Observed · Stored official pricing capture for amazon-cloudwatch. Claim-focused literal span 4000:8000 of 128556 characters; omitted text is not evidence. Review retained billing conditions against these excerpts.
What moves the bill?
Watch dimension combinations for classic metrics and uncompressed payload size for OTel. Logs introduce separate ingestion, storage and scanning charges; retaining less data and narrowing query scope are useful controls. Alarms are billed separately: AWS's ECS example uses $0.30 per high-resolution alarm-month and $0.10 per standard-resolution alarm-month. PromQL alarms also add query work each time they evaluate.
Budget beyond collection
Metric Streams also incur Firehose ingestion charges. Depending on the destination and configuration, data transfer and format conversion can add charges. Distinguish cross-account viewing from physical metric copies when planning a central monitoring account.
Our take
CloudWatch's lack of a minimum fee makes a small trial practical, but the free tier is not a budget. Measure metrics, bytes, queries and copying separately before expanding collection. Price the workload you intend to keep, including retrieval and delivery, rather than assuming a larger team needs a particular monthly package.
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Pricing source
AWS CloudWatch pricing provides the allowances, billing definitions and regional examples used here. Confirm your region's current rates in the AWS Pricing Calculator.