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Metrics in Amazon CloudWatch - Amazon CloudWatch
Overview

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:

OpenTelemetry Metrics (Recommended)

CloudWatch Metrics (Classic)

Identity

Metric name, up to 150 labels

Namespace, metric name, up to 30 dimensions

Metric types

Gauge, sum, histogram, exponential histogram

Single values, statistic sets

Ingestion

OTLP endpoint (OTel SDKs, collectors)

PutMetricData API, EMF

Query APIs

PromQL query API

GetMetricData, GetMetricStatistics, ListMetrics, CloudWatch Metrics Insights (SQL)

Alarms

PromQL-based CloudWatch alarms

Standard CloudWatch alarms

Console

CloudWatch Query Studio

CloudWatch Metrics console

Pricing model

Per GB ingested

Per metric per month

Storage

Up to 15 months

Up to 15 months (with automatic rollup)

Metric names

Open-source native

Proprietary (CloudWatch-format)

Best for

New workloads, containers, high-cardinality

Existing integrations, low-cardinality AWS service metrics

GetMetricData, GetMetricStatistics, ListMetrics, and CloudWatch Metrics Insights operate only on CloudWatch Metrics (Classic). Use the PromQL query API for OpenTelemetry Metrics.

Getting started