Back in 2011 I introduced you to Custom Metrics for CloudWatch and showed you how to publish them from your applications and scripts. At that time, the first ten custom metrics were free of charge and additional metrics were $0.50 per metric per month, regardless of the number of metrics that you published.

Today, I am happy to announce a price change and a quantity discount for CloudWatch metrics. Based on the number of metrics that you publish every month, you can realize savings of up to 96%. Here is the new pricing for the US East (N. Virginia) Region (the first ten metrics are still free of charge):

Tier From To Price Per Metric

Per Month

Discount Over

Current Price

First 10,000 Metrics 0 10,000 $0.30 40% Next 240,000 Metrics 10,001 250,000 $0.10 80% Next 750,000 Metrics 250,001 1,000,000 $0.05 90% All Remaining Metrics 1,000,001 – $0.02 96%

If you have EC2 Detailed Monitoring enabled you will also see a price reduction with per-month charges reduced from $3.50 per instance per month to $2.10 or lower based on the volume tier. The new prices will take effect on December 1, 2016 with no effort on your part. At that time, the updated prices will be published on the CloudWatch Pricing page.

By the way, if you are using CloudWatch Metrics, be sure to take advantage of other recently announced features such as Extended Metrics Retention, the CloudWatch Plugin for Collectd, CloudWatch Dashboards, and the new Metrics-to-Logs navigation feature.

— Jeff;