Amazon Web Services Gets Free Cloud Instance Monitoring

I didn’t think there was anything left for cloud infrastructure megalith Amazon Web Services (AWS) to give away once it opened its free tier. But now users will be able to leverage Amazon CloudWatch to keep tabs on their Amazon EC2 cloud computing instances without spending a dime. Here’s a quick overview.

Like most other Amazon Web Services features, CloudWatch is accessed through the AWS Management Console. Just select an active EC2 instance, according to the official AWS blog entry, and you’ll have access to metrics including disk reads and writes, network traffic and CPU utilization. Unlike most other announcements of this kind, Amazon isn’t placing a maximum usage quota on free CloudWatch.

This free offering is limited to Basic Monitoring, which only updates every 5 minutes. For 1.5 cents per instance-hour, users can upgrade to Detailed Monitoring, with 1-minute granularity. If you need it that badly, it seems worth the cost.

From where The VAR Guy is standing, it looks like Amazon Web Services is refining its offering — and realizing that an integrated platform with free, basic versions of required cloud services will likely draw more customers than a nickel-and-dime approach.

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