Watching a few courses right now and one of them is the AWS SysOp - Associate course.
I am at the episodes talking about metrics/monitoring etc. To get the RAM usage, you need to install perl, and use a script.
Couldn't this be done for every metric, and the data stored into a csv somewhere, which is then accesible. Basically, couldn't you just bypass the entire extra CloudWatch costs? Surely there is something open source out there.
@MichaelS
You could set up a custom script to a CSV if that fulfilled your monitoring solution. However, the robustness of that solution can be difficult to characterize as keeping track of those files can be a nightmare. A few such questions is "How do you ensure that you always have those logs?" and "How do I utilize the information to make valuable decisions?" (think of visualizations).
Concerning open source solutions, one such solution is the ELK stack (or Elasticsearch, Logstash, and Kibana). One thing with those open source solutions is that you have to consider the infrastructure that you would have to run to implement those solutions. If you are hosting the ELK stack on AWS, then you may very surpass the cost of the cloud watch metrics.
Thanks Justin!