Ever wish you could use CloudWatch Metrics and all the accompanying tools (Dashboard & Alarms) to monitor your own custom data and not just the data from the AWS services you use?

I have good news for you! That is 100% possible. AWS allows you to create Custom Cloud Watch Metrics that you can then pipe into dashboards or set Alarms to inform you of important events.

Use Cases: You could pump your baseline sales data in. Or possibly inventory counts and get alerts on low inventory. I have clients that have Celery Workers and what to know what jobs are run and how often and what the min, max, and avg latency is for each type of job. All that can be piped in, recorded and monitored using the other various CW tools.

Pricing: This thing is far from free as I learned as a much younger dev. When I realized this was possible I thought this was the coolest thing. I started piping my own custom metrics into AWS without taking note of the price. I think I threw just a few hundred or so Custom CloudWatch Metrics into AWS only to find that at $0.30 per metric per month it adds up pretty quickly. Keep that in mind when you are deciding what to pump in and what not to.

Question For You: What use cases do you have for Custom CloudWatch Metrics?