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If you’re setting up CloudWatch alarms on AWS and want to understand how the billing works, here’s what you need to know. Standard-resolution metric alarms are usually billed at about $0.10 per alarm metric each month. This cost is calculated on a pro-rated hourly basis based on how long the alarm has been active during the month.
One common question is whether the billing starts as soon as you create and activate an alarm, or only when the alarm moves into the ALARM state. The official information indicates that billing begins as soon as the alarm is active and monitoring the metric, regardless of whether it has triggered or not. So, you’ll incur costs once the alarm is active, whether or not it has transitioned to an alarm state.
If your alarm triggers an action, like sending an email through an SNS topic, additional charges may apply. These SNS charges are separate from the CloudWatch alarm costs and depend on AWS’s SNS pricing for messages sent.
To clarify and get official details, you can refer to the AWS documentation on CloudWatch pricing. It confirms that the cost depends on the number of metrics you are monitoring per alarm each month and that costs are not dependent on how many times an alarm triggers. Also, it mentions that actions like triggering SNS notifications can incur additional charges.
In our case, we’re planning to monitor around 40 CloudWatch alarms on our Aurora MySQL clusters, focusing on metrics like CPU usage, database connections, replica lag, and freeable memory. Understanding the billing helps us estimate the costs accurately and ensure everything is within budget.
If you’re managing similar setups, keep these points in mind to properly plan your AWS costs and avoid surprises.
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