Metrics in Amazon CloudWatch
Metrics are data about the performance of your systems. Amazon CloudWatch collects metrics through two paths: AWS vended metrics from services such as Amazon EC2, Amazon EBS, and Amazon RDS, and custom metrics that you publish using the OpenTelemetry Protocol (OTLP) or the CloudWatch API.
Overview
OpenTelemetry: open-source native metrics in CloudWatch
CloudWatch supports OpenTelemetry as the recommended path for metric ingestion and querying. You can use vendor-agnostic, open-source instrumentation to send metrics to CloudWatch – the same OTel SDKs and collectors that work with Prometheus, Grafana, and other backends work with CloudWatch out of the box.
Two metric models
CloudWatch supports two metric models. Both are fully supported – choose based on your needs:
Ingestion |
OTLP endpoint (OTel SDKs, collectors) |
PutMetricData API, EMF |
Query language |
PromQL |
CloudWatch Metrics Insights (SQL) |
Labels / Dimensions |
Up to 150 labels per data point |
Up to 30 dimensions per metric |
Pricing model |
Per GB ingested |
Per metric per month |
Storage |
Up to 15 months |
Up to 15 months |
Metric names |
Open-source native |
Proprietary (CloudWatch-format) |
Best for |
New workloads, containers, high-cardinality |
Existing integrations, low-cardinality AWS service metrics |
Getting started
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New to CloudWatch metrics? Start with OpenTelemetry Metrics (Recommended).
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Already using PutMetricData or EMF? See CloudWatch Metrics (Classic).
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Want AWS service metrics in PromQL? Enable AWS vended metrics in OpenTelemetry format.
