The CloudWatch alternative that doesn't stop at AWS

Last verified against published pricing on September 27, 2026.

TL;DR: base14 Scout is an OpenTelemetry-native observability platform with signal-based pricing ($250/month + $0.10/M metrics + $0.25/M logs & traces). One metrics price covers every metric, custom metrics included. CloudWatch charges $0.30 per custom metric per month for the first 10,000, which is about $6.94 per million points for a metric reporting every 60 seconds. CloudWatch bills log ingestion, log storage, queries, metrics, traces, dashboards and alarms on separate meters. For a 70-host team split across AWS and GCP, CloudWatch costs ~$5,786/month for the AWS hosts alone. Scout costs ~$3,838/month covering both clouds. Standard SQL across logs, metrics and traces, no per-seat charges.

A platform team ran their payments API on AWS and their fraud detection service on GCP. When checkout latency spiked on a Friday evening, they opened CloudWatch. The AWS services looked normal, with latency within bounds and error rates flat. Customers were still complaining.

It took the team a while to check the GCP console. The fraud detection service was timing out on a database connection pool, on infrastructure that wasn't reporting to CloudWatch.

If you're evaluating a CloudWatch alternative, it's probably not because CloudWatch doesn't work for the AWS resources it monitors. It works well there. It's usually because the stack now reaches past AWS, or because the bill has several meters that each grow on their own.

Why engineering teams outgrow CloudWatch​

CloudWatch collects basic metrics from AWS services automatically, at no charge and with no setup. Cross-account observability has no additional charge, and alarms drive Auto Scaling and other AWS actions directly. For a team fully on AWS at modest scale, it's a reasonable default. Teams outgrow it for a few structural reasons, usually once they need unified observability across the whole stack.

Automatic coverage stops at the AWS boundary​

CloudWatch monitors AWS resources natively. Outside AWS it can still take data: the CloudWatch agent runs on-premises and on other clouds, CloudWatch accepts OTLP for traces, logs and metrics, and it can query Azure Monitor and Prometheus through Lambda-based connectors. But outside AWS you deploy and run that collection yourself, and other clouds' managed services don't report in automatically.

When a problem crosses cloud boundaries, like the checkout outage above, engineers switch between CloudWatch, GCP's Cloud Monitoring and whatever they've assembled for on-prem services. Each has its own query language, dashboard conventions and retention policies. That is how teams end up with observability theatre: plenty of dashboards, no single view of the system.

Already know you need to move beyond CloudWatch? Book a walkthrough and we'll model your actual AWS usage against Scout pricing.

Separate meters for log ingestion, storage and queries​

CloudWatch Logs bills log data at several stages, and alarms add a fee of their own:

The first 5 GB of log data a month is free across ingestion, storage and data scanned. The Infrequent Access log class halves custom log ingestion to $0.25/GB, with a reduced feature set. Vended logs, the logs AWS services such as VPC Flow Logs publish, are priced at $0.50/GB for the first 10 TB a month, $0.25/GB for the next 20 TB, $0.10/GB for the next 20 TB and $0.05/GB above 50 TB. Logs your applications send are custom logs and stay at $0.50/GB at any volume.

Storage is charged on compressed data (AWS assumes about 0.15 bytes stored per byte ingested), so keeping logs costs far less per raw GB than ingesting them. Storage is cumulative, though. Log groups default to "Never expire", so each month's logs add to the bill until someone sets a retention policy.

For a team generating 100 GB of logs per day, here's what the CloudWatch bill looks like after six months:

• Ingestion: 100 GB × 30 days × $0.50 = $1,500/month.
• Storage (cumulative, ~3 TB compressed after 6 months): ~$90/month, rising each month.
• Queries (20 queries/day scanning 500 GB each): ~$1,500/month.
• Total: about $3,100/month for logs alone.

Logs Insights bills per GB scanned, so wide queries across large log groups during an incident carry a cost. Scout's signal-based pricing is a $250/month platform fee plus $0.10/M metrics and $0.25/M logs & traces, with storage and queries included.

Several products, each priced and queried separately​

AWS's observability stack is a set of products that share the CloudWatch console:

• CloudWatch Metrics for infrastructure and custom metrics.
• CloudWatch Logs for log management.
• AWS X-Ray and Transaction Search for distributed tracing.
• Application Signals for application performance monitoring (APM): service maps, latency and error metrics, and service level objectives (SLOs).
• CloudWatch RUM, Synthetics and Internet Monitor for user and connectivity monitoring.

Application Signals links traces, metrics and logs for instrumented services, so AWS does have an APM. Each product is still priced on its own meter, and queries are split across Logs Insights, Metrics Insights, PromQL for OpenTelemetry metrics, and X-Ray's trace filters. Correlating data outside what Application Signals covers means matching timestamps and trace IDs across those surfaces.

Custom metrics priced per series​

CloudWatch charges custom metrics per metric per month: $0.30 each for the first 10,000, $0.10 for the next 240,000, $0.05 for the next 750,000 and $0.02 above 1,000,000. Every unique combination of namespace, metric name and dimension values is a separate billable metric. Adding a single high-cardinality dimension like user_id or request_id turns one metric into thousands.

Converted to data points, a metric reporting every 60 seconds sends about 43,200 points in a 30-day month. At $0.30 that is about $6.94 per million points, falling to about $2.31, $1.16 and $0.46 per million at the lower tiers. A metric reporting every 10 seconds sends 259,200 points for the same monthly charge, about $1.16 per million at the first tier. Metrics published with PutMetricData also pay for API requests beyond the first million a month, and metrics sent as Embedded Metric Format log lines pay $0.50/GB log ingestion on top. Scout charges $0.10 per million points for every metric.

A team with 50 services emitting 20 metrics each across 5 environments and 3 regions reaches 15,000 custom metrics. At $0.30 for the first 10,000 and $0.10 after that, the metric charge alone is $3,500/month.

CloudWatch now has a second path. OpenTelemetry metrics sent over OTLP, generally available since June 2026, are billed at $0.50 per GB ingested with no per-series charge and 15 months of storage included. AWS puts a typical data point at 300-600 bytes, which works out to about $0.15-$0.30 per million points. PromQL queries through the API cost $0.01 per million samples scanned; console and dashboard queries are free.

Dashboards and alarms​

CloudWatch dashboards cost $3 per dashboard per month after the first three. Basic monitoring for AWS services reports every 5 minutes; detailed monitoring reports every minute and is billed at custom metric rates. Custom metrics can report down to 1 second.

Alarms cost $0.10 per alarm metric per month at standard resolution, $0.30 at high resolution and $0.50 per composite alarm. CloudWatch supports anomaly detection alarms, billed as three alarm metrics each to cover the model's upper and lower bands. Log query and PromQL alarms add query charges on each evaluation.

What to look for in a CloudWatch alternative​

Before comparing tools, decide what AWS monitoring beyond CloudWatch means for your team. A CloudWatch replacement should provide:

• Multi-cloud visibility: AWS, GCP, Azure and on-prem infrastructure in one view.
• Unified signals: Logs, metrics and traces in a single query surface.
• APM: Transaction tracing, service maps and error tracking in the same place as logs and metrics.
• Predictable pricing: A bill you can forecast before the month starts, without a per-GB charge on queries.
• OpenTelemetry support: Vendor-neutral instrumentation that keeps your telemetry portable.
• Meaningful retention: At least 30 days of full-resolution data, with options for longer.

base14 Scout: the CloudWatch alternative built on OpenTelemetry​

Scout is a unified observability platform that replaces CloudWatch, X-Ray and the custom dashboards your team has assembled. Logs, metrics, traces, APM and LLM telemetry go into a single data lake with one query surface.

Signal-based pricing​

$250/month platform fee. $0.10 per million metrics, $0.25 per million logs and traces. No per-host pricing, no per-seat pricing, and no separate storage or query charges.

One metrics price covers infrastructure, Kubernetes, custom application and business metrics, whether counter or histogram. A custom metric reporting every 60 seconds costs about $0.004 a month in Scout (43,200 points at $0.10 per million), against $0.30 a month at CloudWatch's first tier.

A signal is a single telemetry event: a log line, a metric point or a trace span. The price depends on signal type, not size. Adding context like stack traces and request metadata doesn't increase the cost.

Unified data lake​

Standard SQL for every signal type. Traces correlate with logs and metrics, so an incident doesn't mean switching between CloudWatch Metrics, CloudWatch Logs and X-Ray.

No backend sampling, 30-day retention​

Every trace, metric and log line you send is stored and queryable. Scout keeps 30 days of full-resolution data by default, with extended retention available.

Multi-cloud by design​

Scout ingests telemetry from any source that speaks OpenTelemetry: AWS, GCP, Azure, on-premises servers and Kubernetes clusters on any provider, with the same pricing and query surface for each. For teams adopting multi-cloud architecture, that keeps the observability layer independent of the cloud.

CloudWatch vs base14 Scout: detailed comparison​

Pricing: separate meters vs one rate per signal​

CloudWatch charges to ingest logs, store them and query them, and prices custom metrics per series per month. A custom metric reporting every 60 seconds costs about $6.94 per million points at the first tier, or about $0.15-$0.30 per million points through the OTLP path.

Signal-based pricing uses two rates: $0.10 per million metrics, custom metrics included, and $0.25 per million logs and traces. Storage and queries are included.

Retention: longer for metrics​

CloudWatch keeps metrics for 15 months, at 1-minute resolution for 15 days, 5-minute for 63 days and 1-hour for 455 days. Log retention is set per log group and defaults to never expire, billed per GB stored. X-Ray keeps traces for 30 days. Scout keeps 30 days of full-resolution data for logs, metrics and traces alike, with extended retention on request. If long metric history at no extra cost matters most, that favors CloudWatch.

Scope: automatic coverage stops at the AWS boundary​

CloudWatch covers AWS services automatically. Other clouds and on-prem can send data through agents or OTLP senders you run, but their managed services don't report in on their own. Scout ingests from any OpenTelemetry source, with the same pricing and query surface for every environment.

Tracing: X-Ray vs native distributed tracing​

X-Ray and Transaction Search are priced apart from CloudWatch Logs and Metrics. X-Ray bills $5 per million traces recorded. With Transaction Search, spans are billed at $0.35/GB ingested for the first 10 TB, and 1% are indexed as trace summaries at no charge, with $0.75 per million beyond that. Application Signals links traces to logs and metrics for instrumented services.

AWS is moving X-Ray to OpenTelemetry. The X-Ray SDKs and daemon entered maintenance mode on February 25, 2026 and reach end of support on February 25, 2027. Instrumenting with OpenTelemetry now means no rework later, whichever backend you choose.

In Scout, traces, logs and metrics share a single data lake. A slow trace shows the associated log entries and infrastructure metrics in the same view.

Support: AWS support plans vs SRE partnership​

AWS Basic Support is included for all customers. Paid plans start at $29/month per account for Business Support+, $5,000/month for Enterprise Support and $50,000/month for Unified Operations. Those plans support AWS services, not your observability practice.

base14's SRE partnership includes fortnightly reliability reviews with a senior SRE, assisted onboarding (first month free), custom training, and 24/7 on-call support with response times under 15 minutes via Slack.

APM and RUM​

AWS offers APM through Application Signals, at $1.50 per million signals, and real user monitoring through CloudWatch RUM, at $0.01 per 1,000 events. Both are separate products on their own meters.

Scout includes APM as an app over your OpenTelemetry traces and metrics: RED metrics per service and operation, a service map, trace drill-down, grouped errors, database and messaging operations, and host and node health beside each service. RUM covers mobile apps (crashes, ANRs, app startup, screens, network calls and session timelines), and the React and Flutter web SDKs send browser telemetry, including Core Web Vitals, as spans that join backend traces. APM is included in the platform price. RUM is available on the Enterprise plan; talk to us for pricing. We're building session replay and code profiling with design partners, and teams that need them are welcome to join.

CloudWatch vs base14 Scout cost comparison​

Scenario: 70 hosts running Kubernetes, ~50 on AWS and ~20 on GCP, 300 GB logs/day, 5.25B trace spans/month, 5.25B metric data points/month, 30 engineers, 6 months of log accumulation on CloudWatch. AWS has no seat component.

Signal volume ratio: 40% logs, 30% metrics, 30% traces (~17.5B total signals/month).

This uses the same signal mix as our other comparisons, scaled to 70 hosts.

Metrics assumption: on the AWS side, we assume 5,000 custom metric series in CloudWatch. Basic AWS service metrics aren't charged. The split is an illustration, not a measurement. Check it against your own metric inventory.

CloudWatch estimate (AWS portion only)​

CloudWatch only sees the AWS side of the stack in this scenario. The numbers below cover ~50 AWS hosts. GCP monitoring is an additional cost.

Log volumes (AWS portion): ~180 GB/day (60% of total, the rest is on GCP). Monthly: 180 × 30 = 5,400 GB.

X-Ray traces: 5.25B spans total across both clouds, roughly 15 spans per trace = ~350M traces. AWS portion (~70%): ~250M traces/month.

Pricing as of September 2026. Published rates at aws.amazon.com/cloudwatch/pricing, US East (N. Virginia). Other regions may vary. Enterprise agreements may discount these rates. Free tier allowances (5 GB of log data, 10 custom metrics, 3 dashboards, 10 alarm metrics, 100,000 traces) are worth under $20 a month here and are left out.

AWS charges for these too, but they aren't in the estimate:

• GetMetricData API calls, at $0.01 per 1,000 metrics requested, including calls from third-party tools and shared dashboards.
• PutMetricData and other API requests beyond the first million a month.
• X-Ray traces retrieved or scanned, at $0.50 per million after the first million.
• EC2 detailed monitoring and Container Insights, billed at custom metric or per-observation rates.
• Application Signals, at $1.50 per million signals for the first 100 million.
• Metric streams, at $0.003 per 1,000 metric updates plus Amazon Data Firehose charges.
• Data transfer out for log exports and subscriptions, at EC2 data transfer rates.
• Live Tail beyond 1,800 free minutes, at $0.01 per minute.
• Log storage growth beyond six months.

Log storage keeps growing while log groups use the default "Never expire" setting. At this volume it reaches ~$324/month after 12 months and ~$648/month after 24 months.

base14 Scout estimate​

Scout covers both clouds in a single bill. Every telemetry signal is metered, including infrastructure metrics from both AWS and GCP hosts.

• Logs: 300 GB/day at an assumed ~1.3 KB average per record = ~231M logs/day = ~7,000M log signals/month.
• Metrics: ~1,185 time series per host × 70 hosts at blended 60s/30s scrape = ~5,250M data points/month.
• Traces: 5,250M trace spans/month.

Scout meters all 5.25B metric points, including basic AWS service metrics that CloudWatch doesn't charge for. Pulling AWS-native metrics into Scout still goes through CloudWatch metric streams or GetMetricData polling, which AWS bills. Telemetry sent from AWS to Scout's hosted service also incurs AWS data transfer out charges.

For the AWS hosts alone, CloudWatch comes to ~$69,432 a year. Scout comes to ~$46,056 a year for both clouds, about $23,400 less, before any GCP monitoring costs for the other 20 hosts.

Ready to see the comparison for your infrastructure? Book a walkthrough and we'll build a cost model using your actual usage.

Migration: from CloudWatch to base14 Scout​

Migrating to a CloudWatch alternative doesn't require a flag-day cutover. OpenTelemetry makes it a gradual process.

Deploy OpenTelemetry collectors​

Install OpenTelemetry Collectors on your infrastructure. They run alongside existing CloudWatch agents. Nothing changes for your current monitoring. For a detailed setup guide, see building a production-ready OTel collector.

Point the collector at Scout​

Configure the collectors to export to Scout. Keep a copy flowing to CloudWatch during the transition; the collector supports multiple exporters. For AWS-native metrics, see AWS CloudWatch to Scout.

Run both in parallel​

Run both platforms side by side for 2-4 weeks. Rebuild the dashboards and alert rules your team relies on, and confirm Scout answers the questions CloudWatch, X-Ray and GCP monitoring answer today. base14's onboarding team works with your engineers during the first month, at no cost.

Decommission the CloudWatch agent and X-Ray daemon​

Once confident, remove redundant agents and scale down CloudWatch spend. If you still run the X-Ray SDKs or daemon, this is the point to retire them instead of migrating twice. Your OpenTelemetry instrumentation stays yours either way.

The migration takes 4-6 weeks for a mid-size team (~100 services). Teams that already use OpenTelemetry move faster because the instrumentation is in place.

Who should switch (and who shouldn't)​

Switch to base14 Scout if​

• You run multi-cloud or hybrid infrastructure. CloudWatch's automatic coverage stops at AWS. Scout treats every environment the same way.
• Your CloudWatch bill keeps growing. Log storage accumulates, queries bill per GB scanned, and custom metrics bill per series. Scout bills per signal.
• You want standard SQL across traces, logs and metrics. On AWS they are spread across X-Ray, Logs Insights and Metrics Insights or PromQL.
• You still run the X-Ray SDKs or daemon. They reach end of support on February 25, 2027, so the move to OpenTelemetry is coming either way.
• You want portable instrumentation. OpenTelemetry works with any OTLP-compatible backend.

Stay on CloudWatch if​

• You're fully on AWS, at small scale, and the free tier covers you. It includes 10 custom metrics, 5 GB of log data, 3 dashboards and 10 alarm metrics a month.
• You already send metrics to CloudWatch over OTLP. At $0.50/GB, about $0.15-$0.30 per million points with 15 months of storage, the case for switching is then the query surface and multi-cloud coverage, not metric price.
• You need long metric history without paying for it. CloudWatch keeps metrics for 15 months.
• You depend on CloudWatch alarms for Auto Scaling and EventBridge. Alarms act on AWS services directly. If these integrations are critical, keep CloudWatch for the trigger mechanism and use Scout for observability. They can coexist.
• Your team has deep CloudWatch Logs Insights expertise. Switching has a retraining cost. If your runbooks and on-call workflows reference specific CloudWatch queries, factor in the time to rebuild them.

The hybrid approach​

Many teams keep CloudWatch for AWS-native integrations, such as alarms that trigger Auto Scaling or EventBridge rules, and route application telemetry, other clouds and LLM telemetry through Scout. OpenTelemetry instrumentation makes running both straightforward.

Why growing teams move beyond CloudWatch​

Budget predictability​

Cumulative log storage, per-GB query charges and custom metric cardinality each move the CloudWatch bill on their own. Scout's $250/month base plus per-signal rates is a line item you can forecast before the quarter starts.

Compliance readiness​

base14's SOC 2 Type II and ISO 27001 compliance, bring-your-own-cloud (BYOC) deployment and data residency controls mean you don't need a separate compliance project to adopt a new observability platform. Understanding what factors influence MTTR helps set realistic expectations for the operational changes that follow.

FAQ​

Can base14 pull existing CloudWatch metrics?​

Yes. CloudWatch metric streams can deliver metrics through Amazon Data Firehose to the OpenTelemetry Collector, or the Prometheus CloudWatch exporter can poll CloudWatch. Scout can also query CloudWatch directly as a datasource, including existing history, without ingesting it. See AWS CloudWatch to Scout for the trade-offs.

How long does migration from CloudWatch take?​

4-6 weeks for a typical mid-size team. base14's onboarding team handles dashboard recreation, alert setup, and collector configuration during the first month (free).

What about CloudWatch Alarms and Auto Scaling triggers?​

Keep CloudWatch for AWS-native triggers and use Scout for observability. CloudWatch Alarms firing Auto Scaling actions don't require CloudWatch to be your primary monitoring tool.

Does CloudWatch accept OpenTelemetry data?​

Yes. CloudWatch has OTLP endpoints for traces, logs and metrics. OpenTelemetry metrics became generally available in June 2026, billed at $0.50 per GB ingested. The X-Ray SDKs and daemon reach end of support on February 25, 2027, and AWS recommends OpenTelemetry in their place.

Is base14 Scout enterprise-ready?​

Yes. SOC 2 Type II and ISO 27001 compliant. Bring-your-own-cloud (BYOC) deployment on AWS, GCP, and Azure. Data residency options and custom SLAs available.

How does Scout pricing work?​

You pay a $250/month platform fee plus usage: $0.10 per million metrics and $0.25 per million logs and traces. The metrics rate covers every metric, custom metrics included. On CloudWatch a custom metric reporting every 60 seconds costs about $6.94 per million points at the first tier ($0.30 per metric per month over 43,200 points), or about $0.15-$0.30 per million points over OTLP at $0.50/GB. Scout has no throttling and no sampling tied to price tiers.

What is the best CloudWatch alternative for multi-cloud teams?​

base14 Scout is built for teams running infrastructure across AWS, GCP, Azure, or on-prem. It replaces CloudWatch, X-Ray, and GCP Cloud Monitoring with one platform. It's OpenTelemetry-native, so your instrumentation works on any cloud provider.

How much cheaper is base14 Scout than CloudWatch?​

For a 70-host multi-cloud team (50 AWS + 20 GCP) with 300 GB/day of logs, 5.25B trace spans, and 5.25B metric data points/month, CloudWatch costs ~$5,786/month for the AWS portion alone, and log storage grows each month. Scout costs ~$3,838/month covering both clouds. That's about $23,400 a year less before GCP monitoring costs.

Start evaluating your CloudWatch alternative​

1. Book a demo to see Scout with your AWS setup.
2. Get a cost comparison using your actual CloudWatch usage. We'll show you the signal math for your infrastructure.
3. Run both in parallel with OpenTelemetry instrumentation. Keep CloudWatch for triggers while you validate Scout.

See how Scout works.

• No long-term contracts. Month-to-month.
• Assisted onboarding included at no extra cost.
• OpenTelemetry-native. Keep your instrumentation if you leave.

Related reading​

• How to evaluate an observability platform
• The Datadog alternative that doesn't charge per host
• The New Relic alternative that doesn't charge per seat
• The GCP monitoring alternative that doesn't price metrics by type
• Observability cost optimization: why the pricing model matters more than your data volume
• The problem with observability theatre
• Multi-cloud design and vendor neutrality