What is Amazon CloudWatch used for?

Amazon CloudWatch is an AWS service for collecting metrics and logs, setting alarms and building dashboards for AWS resources and applications. It is a good fit for monitoring AWS infrastructure, and alerting on application errors and latency.

Is Amazon CloudWatch free?

Yes. Amazon CloudWatch has a free plan. Pay-as-you-go with a free tier. Custom metrics cost $0.30 each per month for the first 10,000, log ingestion $0.50 per GB, and Live Tail $0.01 per minute after the free minutes.

Is Amazon CloudWatch open source?

No. Amazon CloudWatch is proprietary (closed-source) software and can't be self-hosted. Open-source alternatives to Amazon CloudWatch include Grafana, SigNoz and Netdata.

What are some alternatives to Amazon CloudWatch?

Amazon CloudWatch competes with Azure Monitor, Google Cloud Observability and Datadog. For open-source options, see Enlisted's ranked list of open-source Amazon CloudWatch alternatives.

Amazon CloudWatch: features, pricing and alternatives

About Amazon CloudWatch

Amazon CloudWatch is the monitoring and observability service built into Amazon Web Services. It collects metrics and logs from AWS resources and applications, lets teams define alarms on them, and presents the results on dashboards so operators can see the health of their workloads.

CloudWatch is a proprietary AWS service with no self-hosted edition, billed on usage. Most AWS services publish metrics to it by default, which makes it a common starting point for monitoring on AWS. Current capabilities, limits and pricing are documented by AWS.

Key features

Metrics collection for AWS resources
Log storage and search
Alarms that trigger notifications or actions
Dashboards for operational visibility
Native integration with AWS services

Good fit for

→Monitoring AWS infrastructure
→Alerting on application errors and latency

Tags: aws; monitoring; metrics; logs; alarms; dashboards; observability

Amazon CloudWatch: questions and answers

What is Amazon CloudWatch used for?: Amazon CloudWatch is an AWS service for collecting metrics and logs, setting alarms and building dashboards for AWS resources and applications. It is a good fit for monitoring AWS infrastructure, and alerting on application errors and latency.
Is Amazon CloudWatch free?: Yes. Amazon CloudWatch has a free plan. Pay-as-you-go with a free tier. Custom metrics cost $0.30 each per month for the first 10,000, log ingestion $0.50 per GB, and Live Tail $0.01 per minute after the free minutes.
Is Amazon CloudWatch open source?: No. Amazon CloudWatch is proprietary (closed-source) software and can't be self-hosted. Open-source alternatives to Amazon CloudWatch include Grafana, SigNoz and Netdata.
What are some alternatives to Amazon CloudWatch?: Amazon CloudWatch competes with Azure Monitor, Google Cloud Observability and Datadog. For open-source options, see Enlisted's ranked list of open-source Amazon CloudWatch alternatives.