About
Amazon CloudWatch is AWS’s monitoring and observability service for applications, infrastructure, and operational data. It helps teams collect metrics, logs, and traces, visualize system health, and investigate issues across cloud and hybrid environments.
The service supports dashboards, alarms, anomaly detection, log analytics, application observability, infrastructure observability, and network monitoring. It also integrates with open standards such as OpenTelemetry and works with AWS-native and open-source observability tools to support troubleshooting at scale.
- Unified visibility across metrics, logs, and traces
- Dashboards, alarms, and anomaly detection for operations
- Application, infrastructure, and network observability features
- OpenTelemetry support and compatibility with open-source tools
- AI-assisted investigations and observability workflows
Free Tier Value
The pricing page explicitly says CloudWatch has no upfront commitment or minimum fee and that you pay for what you use, so the paid plan is usage-based rather than a fixed monthly subscription. The free tier is a bundle of capped recurring allowances across logs, metrics, dashboards, alarms, Application Observability, and Infrastructure Observability, but the page does not provide a single concrete dollar-equivalent cap that can be safely converted into one conservative monthly value without fabricating assumptions. Because the listing is free_tier and the free benefits are capped rather than unbounded, free_tier_value_usd_per_month is set to null and feature parity is 100% since the free tier covers the core CloudWatch feature set.
What's included in the free tier
- Logs: 5 GB of data per month for ingestion, archive storage, and Logs Insights data scanned.
- Live Tail: 1,800 minutes of usage per month.
- Contributor Insights for CloudWatch Logs: 1 rule per month, plus the first 1 million matching log events.
- Metrics: Basic monitoring metrics from AWS services by default, plus 10 custom or detailed monitoring metrics.
- Metrics API usage: 1 million API requests per month, excluding GetMetricData, GetInsightRuleReport, and GetMetricWidgetImage.
- Dashboards: 3 custom dashboards with up to 50 metrics each per month; automatic dashboards are free.
- Alarms: 10 alarm metrics for standard-resolution alarms that list metrics directly.
- Application Signals with transaction search: 3 months free, up to 100 GB ingested and 1 million spans indexed per account.
- Application Signals without transaction spans: 3 months free, up to 100 million signals per account.
- Cross-account observability: First trace copy sent from a source account to a monitoring account is free.
- X-Ray traces: First 100,000 traces recorded each month are free; first 1,000,000 traces retrieved or scanned each month are free.
- Synthetics: 100 canary runs per month.
- RUM: First 1 million web RUM events per account are free.
- Database Insights Standard Mode: Rolling 7 days of performance data history for the database load metric.
- Network Monitoring flow monitoring: 10 monitored resources free for the first 12 months, up to 7,300 resource-hours per month.
See Amazon CloudWatch pricing for current limits.
Paid plans
Amazon CloudWatch
- Logs ingestion/archive/scan
- Beyond 5 GB/month
- Live Tail
- Beyond 1,800 minutes/month
- Custom dashboards
- Beyond 3 dashboards/month
- Alarm metrics
- Beyond 10 standard-resolution alarm metrics
- Custom/detailed metrics
- Beyond 10 metrics
- API requests
- Beyond 1 million/month
- Logs
- Metrics
- Dashboards & Alarms
- Application Observability
- Infrastructure Observability
Pricing extracted from Amazon CloudWatch's pricing page. Always verify current pricing before committing.
