Stop paying $1.19 per metric. We discovered that switching our CloudWatch dashboards from custom metrics to logs dropped costs to just $0.07 per metric. Here is how we did it.

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Switching CloudWatch dashboards from custom metrics to logs can reduce costs by 93%, from $1.19 to $0.07 per metric monthly. Custom metrics cost $0.30 per metric plus API request charges, while logs cost only $0.0025 for ingestion and $0.075 for queries. The logs approach works well for dashboards but has tradeoffs: slower widget loading (5-10 seconds vs 1 second), no native alarming capabilities, fewer widget types, and different query languages (SQL/PPL vs metric math expressions). Best suited for on-demand analysis rather than automated alerting.

AWS CloudWatch Dashboard Cost Efficiency: Logs vs. Custom Metrics

CloudWatch custom metrics pricing example