Docs » Monitor services and hosts in Splunk Infrastructure Monitoring » Monitor Amazon Web Services » Costs for AWS monitoring

Costs for AWS monitoring 🔗

To understand the costs derived from monitoring AWS with Splunk Observability Cloud, see:

Costs derived from Splunk Observability Cloud 🔗

Your subscription plan determines how you’ll be charged for sending AWS metrics to Splunk Observability Cloud. See more in Infrastructure Monitoring subscription usage (Host and metric plans).

  • In MTS-based subscription plans, all metrics are custom, and you’re therefore charged for them.

  • In host-based subscription plans, most AWS metrics are categorized as bundled, and are part of your plan.

Bundled metrics include all metrics from supported namespaces as well as metrics from the following services:

  • CWAgent

  • Glue

  • MediaLive

  • System/Linux

  • WAF

For a complete list of Observability Cloud metrics, see Metric categories.

Costs derived from AWS 🔗

You can send AWS data to Splunk Observability Cloud with one of two methods, which have different associated costs:

  1. Streaming data with Metric Streams.

  2. Polling CloudWatch APIs:

    • First, the list of metrics is retrieved with ListMetrics.

    • Next, data points are fetched with GetMetricData. Note that the GetMetricStatistics API is deprecated, see more in GetMetricStatistics API deprecation notice.

Learn more at Connect AWS to Splunk Observability Cloud.

AWS pricing 🔗

AWS pricing is based on the amount of requested metrics, not the number of requests. Therefore the cost of obtaining Cloudwatch metrics for a service is based on three factors: frequency of pulling data, number of metrics for a given service, and number of cloud resources.

Generally speaking, Metric Streams costs the same as polling if the integration is synced every 5 minutes, and is cheaper (up to 5 times) when synced every minute.

However, when using Metric Stream you can’t control costs, while you can configure the polling frequency of the APIs. See how to limit the metrics to collect, the resources, or the collection frequently.

Example: Cost scenarios using polling APIs 🔗

Let’s imagine a user with the following configuration:

  • 100,000 SQS queues

  • 9 available CloudWatch metrics per queue

First, you need to retrieve your list of metrics using the ListMetrics API at a cost of USD 0.01 per 1,000 API calls:

Scenario

Number of API calls per day

Cost/day

Metrics are listed every 15 minutes, and a list contains up to 500 items

1440 (number of minutes in a day)/15 (pull interval) * 100k / 500 (items) = 19200

USD 0.192

Next, you retrieve the data using the GetMetricData API at a cost of USD 0.01 per 1,000 metrics requested:

Scenario

Number of requested metrics per day

Cost/day

The user wants to retrieve all metrics every 1 minute

1440 (number of minutes in a day) * 9 (number of metrics) * 100k (number of SQS resources) = 1.296B

USD 12,960

The user wants to retrieve all metrics every 5 minutes

1440 (number of minutes in a day)/5 (pull interval) * 9 (number of metrics) * 100k (number of SQS resources) = 259.2M

USD 2,592

The user wants to retrieve ONLY 4 metrics for a 1,000 queues (because they’re the production instances) every 10 minutes

1440 (number of minutes in a day)/10 (pull interval) * 4 (number of metrics) * 1000 (number of SQS resources) = 576k

USD 5.76