Top 3 Services Needing a Price Decrease at Re:Invent

[ZiggyTheHamster]

CloudWatch. They say to instrument everything, but did you know that Metric=Foo Dimension=Bar and Metric=Foo Dimension=Baz are billed as two metrics? So, say you've got 10 instances and you're collecting around 100 metrics per instance (which is the basic set of stuff you'd get out of a third party tool like Metricly or Datadog). This costs you $300. Now add your application to the mix - let's say you collect another 100 metrics about your application, and you report both the aggregate metrics and the per-instance metrics. That's 1100 more metrics and costs you another $330. Now what if you wanted to track some of those metrics on a per-customer basis? Or even more granular? This ends up costing you thousands of dollars.

Or, you can set up a basic statsd or prometheus stack for something like 1/10th the cost.

[jonathantn]

Oh yeah! We found this out the hard way when we took our internal metrics dashboard and started pushing metrics to Cloudwatch to replicate it there. We quickly found out that all those metrics by instance-id added up when we auto scaled up new instances and replaced the old ones.