Cloudwatch pricing is based on the number of custom metrics, with no API charge for sending metrics. The number of metrics sent by an EC2 instance is dependent on the instance type.

CloudWatch Logs, CloudWatch Events, Custom Metrics, Vended Logs and Custom Dashboards all mean different things internally to CloudWatch from what you'd expect, compared to metrics solutions that ...

In the first step, CloudWatch collects metrics and logs from all your AWS services (for example, AWS EC2 instances). CloudWatch retrieves these metrics from the repository.