Is your AWS invoice getting bigger and bigger because of CloudWatch Logs? Here's why

If when you look at your invoice you see that the amount you have to pay because of CloudWatch Logs keeps growing, this tip will definitely interest you.

One of the main items that make the monthly CloudWatch Logs charge increase is PutLogEvents, which is the ingestion of logs into log groups.

But the problem now is to find how much each log group is getting charged to know how to reduce the costs. It might seem that there is not a straightforward way to do this. However, there is a relatively easy workaround. With CloudWatch Metrics you can build a graphic that shows how much was ingested to each log group every 30 days.

Go to CloudWatch Dashboard and select Metrics:

Then search for “logs” in the “All metrics” section and select “Logs > Log Group Metrics”:

Search for “incomingbytes”:

Then select all the log groups you want to analyze or select all of them and choose the number of months you want to check:

Finally change to the “Graphed metrics” section and change the Statistics field to “Sum” and Period to “30 days”:

And if you hover over the dates you will see the sum of the logs every 30 days:

Despite the fact that sometimes AWS Billing is not very straightforward, there are some workarounds like this one that aids us to reduce the invoice. Also, this solution is quite simple and easy to implement and doesn't require any third-party solutions.