CloudWatch Costs Associated with Monitoring
Last updated on 15 May, 2023LogicMonitor’s AWS DataSources leverage the CloudWatch API to collect data for your AWS resources. Depending on which AWS services and how many resources you monitor, you may see CloudWatch costs associated with LogicMonitor’s AWS Cloud Monitoring. LogicMonitor makes one API call per DataSource per Resource. Since the AWS charge is based on the number of datapoints the data is requested for, the CloudWatch costs are dependent on the number of datapoints, polling interval, and how many resources the DataSource applies to. For more information, see the Amazon CloudWatch Pricing information from AWS.
The CloudWatch DataSources poll every one to five minutes (60 min/hour, 24 hours/day, 30 days/month), depending on how often CloudWatch metrics are published for the particular service. You can estimate the costs that LogicMonitor contributes to your CloudWatch Costs (after you surpass the free tier). The following table displays example cost estimates for an AWS service contributed by LogicMonitor for a month:
| AWS Service | Number of Datapoints | Polling Interval (min) | Total Number of Metrics Request per Month (60 min/hour, 24 hours/day, 30 days/month) | CloudWatch Charge Rate | Estimated Additional Cost per Resource per Month |
| API Gateway | 7 | 3 | 100,800 | $0.01 per 1,000 metrics requested | $1.01 |
| CloudFront | 7 | 2 | 151,200 | $1.50 | |
| DynamoDB | 10 | 5 | 86,400 | $0.86 | |
| EBS | 8 | 5 | 69,120 | $0.69 | |
| EC2 | 11 | 5 | 95,404 | $0.95 | |
| EFS | 24 | 3 | 345,600 | $3.46 | |
| S3 | 3 | 1440 | 90 | $0.0009 |
Recommendations to Optimize CloudWatch Costs
The following table lists the recommendations to help manage the contributing costs from LogicMonitor for your CloudWatch costs:
| Recommendation | Description |
| (Applies to monitoring EC2 instances) Use Collector DataSources where possible | Install a Collector in your AWS environment and rely on Collector DataSources instead of the AWS_EC2 CloudWatch DataSource. Disabling monitoring for the AWS_EC2 DataSource reduces costs per instance per month in CloudWatch costs. Note: Any cloud resource monitored with a Collector counts towards a normal device license and not a cloud license. For more information, see Enabling Monitoring via Local Collector. |
| Increase polling intervals | You can increase CloudWatch DataSources polling intervals to poll less frequently, which reduces the number of CloudWatch API calls. Increasing the polling interval impacts alert evaluation. For example, if you change all polling intervals to every ten minutes, you may not know about a possible alert condition for longer. Polling intervals can be changed in the DataSource definition. For more information, see Creating a DataSource. |
| Determine which datapoints are meaningful to you | AWS DataSources can have over 20 datapoints (for example, EFS). If some of those datapoints are not meaningful, you can remove them from the DataSource definition, resulting in fewer CloudWatch API calls. You can clone the existing DataSource, set the appliesTo function to “false()” to prevent duplicated CloudWatch calls, and then remove the unwanted datapoints from the clone. This prevents your changes from being overridden when updating DataSource definitions. |
| Deselect AWS regions to monitor | Deselect the regions that you do not want to monitor. Note: Deselecting the AWS regions deletes the monitoring data. |
| Use tag filter | You can set up tag filtering to allow LogicMonitor to only discover AWS resources with a particular tag applied to them. |