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Amazon CloudWatch Logs

Amazon CloudWatch Logs collects and stores logs from AWS resources and services, applications, on-premises resources, and other clouds. It supports log pipelines, structured parsing, archive export, and live log tailing, with web and API access. Logs Insights can filter and aggregate data, apply regular expressions, visualize time-series results, and export them to CloudWatch Dashboards. Standard logs support real-time monitoring and advanced analytics; Infrequent Access is for ad-hoc queries and forensic analysis. Live Tail provides an interactive view of streaming logs, and anomaly detection looks for patterns, trends, and unusual content. Teams can search logs across accounts from a central monitoring account. CloudWatch integrates with AWS services and supports Prometheus, Grafana, and OpenTelemetry. The free tier includes 5 GB for ingestion, archive storage, and Logs Insights scans, plus 1,800 Live Tail minutes per month. Usage is charged at month end without an upfront commitment or minimum fee; rates vary by region and usage.

Who it is for

CloudWatch Logs suits teams that need to collect and analyze logs across AWS, on-premises, or other cloud workloads. It may also fit teams seeking cross-account log views and integrations with monitoring tools.

What is good

  • Logs Insights filters, aggregates, and visualizes log data.
  • Live Tail supports interactive analysis of streaming logs.
  • Cross-account log search is available from a central account.
  • Free tier includes 5 GB for logs and query scans.
  • No upfront commitment or minimum fee.

What to know first

  • Usage charges vary by region and amount used.
  • Paid Live Tail costs $0.01 per minute.
  • Ingestion rates vary by region and tier.

Verdict

CloudWatch Logs combines collection, querying, live viewing, and cross-account analysis, with a stated free tier. Costs depend on usage and region, so account for ingestion and any paid Live Tail use.

Amazon CloudWatch Logs plans and pricing

All plans
Logs data ingestion $0.50/mo Published rate for the first 10 TB per month in US East (N. Virginia); rates vary by Region and tier. Pay-as-you-go ingestion pricing aws.amazon.com · 24 Sept 2026
Logs archive storage $0.03/mo Published rate; rates vary by Region. Pay-as-you-go archived log storage aws.amazon.com · 24 Sept 2026
Pay-as-you-go Not published Usage billed at the end of each month; rates vary by Region No upfront commitment or minimum fee · charges depend on usage aws.amazon.com · 28 Sept 2026
Free tier Free 5 GB of logs for ingestion, archive storage, and Logs Insights scans · 1,800 Live Tail minutes/month aws.amazon.com · 28 Sept 2026
Paid usage Not published charged at the end of the month aws.amazon.com · 27 Sept 2026

Compared on log management software

Free plan
No
Supported platforms
Amazon ECS; Amazon EKS; Red Hat OpenShift on AWS (ROSA); Kubernetes on Amazon EC2; AWS Fargate
Container metrics
Yes
Resource alerts
Yes
Runtime events
Yes
Container log collection
Yes

Best Amazon CloudWatch Logs alternatives

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ELK Stack Free plan apiLinuxMacself-hostedWin 8.2 Elastic Observability Free trial apiLinuxMacself-hostedWeb 8.1 Google Cloud Logging Web $0.01/mo7.8 Sumo Logic Free plan Web Free7.8 Oracle Cloud Infrastructure Logging Free plan $0.05/mo7.7 Oracle Log Analytics Web 7.7