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I'm new and am trying to work with AWS. I develop small lambda functions and have created some dynamodb tables. I don't expect there to be any costs, because I should be in the free-tier, but since last month I am seeing costs for "Cloud Watch Alarms". Not high costs, but I got billed $0.53. Why I am getting this bill even though I am using AWS free tier.

Billing info:

$0.00 per alarm-month - first 10 alarms 10 Alarms $0.00
$0.10 per alarm-month 4.277 Alarms 0.43$

I don't want these cloudwatch metrics right now. I only want to store log files. How can I to disable these cloudwatch metrics.

enter image description here

Thanks,

David Buck
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Arun
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4 Answers4

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You have configured, maybe unintentionally, a Cloud Watch Alarm.

Fortunately it's quite easy to remove it.

Go to your AWS Dashboard and select Cloud Watch:

enter image description here

On the left-hand side, click on Alarms. Select the Alarm which you want to remove and delete it.

enter image description here

Thales Minussi
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  • Hi @Thales, but the alarm field is disabled, I updated the question. – Arun Feb 26 '19 at 10:49
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    Hello, @Arun. On my example the alarm type was ALARM. But on yours they're all OK. You have 20 alarms in OK state. You need to remove them to stop being charged – Thales Minussi Feb 26 '19 at 11:14
  • Thanks @Tahles. Why these 20 alarms were created and why AWS is charged for these 20 alarms even it is in OK state. – Arun Feb 26 '19 at 18:45
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    They charge for the alarms because it doesn't matter what state they are. They charge for alarms, not for states. Why you have 20 alarms? That I'm afraid you have to dig deeper – Thales Minussi Feb 26 '19 at 20:06
  • Thanks Thales, I just want to know, how to avoid these alarms in the future? – Arun Feb 27 '19 at 13:49
  • @Arun sorry for the late response. Some services, like DynamoDB, automatically create alarms for you. You'll have to watch out for these types of services for yourself, as I don't believe there's a way to prevent it for good. – Thales Minussi Mar 01 '19 at 08:02
  • I got the same charge and I assumed I am in free tier...any problem that I removed those alarms? – WLiu Dec 03 '20 at 05:18
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This is what I got from AWS Support:

CloudWatch collects and processes raw data from DynamoDB into readable, near real-time metrics. These statistics are recorded for a period of two weeks, so that you can access historical information for a better perspective on how your web application or service is performing. By default, DynamoDB metric data is sent to CloudWatch automatically.

When you interact with DynamoDB, it sends the following metrics and dimensions to CloudWatch. Note that Amazon CloudWatch aggregates the following DynamoDB metrics at one-minute intervals:

> ConditionalCheckFailedRequests
> ConsumedReadCapacityUnits
> ConsumedWriteCapacityUnits
> ReadThrottleEvents
> ReturnedBytes
> ReturnedItemCount
> ReturnedRecordsCount
> SuccessfulRequestLatency
> SystemErrors
> TimeToLiveDeletedItemCount
> ThrottledRequests
> TransactionConflict
> UserErrors
> WriteThrottleEvents

I'm trying to find out if there is a way to turn this off and will update my answer when I get it

zooter
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This might not be an answer to the original question, but since this post is the first result on Google (and apparently the only result inherent to CloudWatch billing) I feel like posting this here.

One year ago, I started using AWS for the first time for a game jam, fortunately they gave free credit to users and that's how I managed not to get billed a random amount every month. This is my billing dashboard:

AmazonCloudWatch Billing

I've looked for "AmazonCloudWatch DashboardHour" several times in the last year and I always come back to this post (but Alarms weren't my issue obviously), so I hope to be helpful to other people posting how I solved my issue.

Today I finally noticed that in the "Dashboards" section of CloudWatch I had four custom dashboards (2 in EU-Paris and 2 in US-West Oregon) that Unreal Engine automatically created while configuring the AWS GameKit (I've already deleted them in the picture below, but they were listed in the bigger red rectangle, and you have to delete them one by one)

CloudWatch Dashboards

This has been really tricky to find out because these dashboards were not listed in the AWS global view of active services. I really hope I got rid of them once and for all!

EDIT: Also remember to look for active DynamoDB tables! Even if you don't use them they are still billed! enter image description here

And apparently they are also connected to CloudWatch Alarms: enter image description here

Ares9323
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Well you can do that via SCP's to sit a generic policy to deny such api

Abdelrahman Salem
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    This is not an answer but a comment please visit and check [how to answer a question](https://stackoverflow.com/help/how-to-answer). – Yunus Temurlenk Feb 12 '20 at 10:39