AWS CloudWatch Statistics and Facts (2026) -

Introduction

AWS CloudWatch Statistics: Visualise CloudWatch as the telemetry backbone of contemporary cloud activities: it is the monitor that gauges the pulse of your application, the detector that identifies the bottlenecks, and the item on the invoice that causes the finance departments to frown at the end of the month. In 2025, the use of Amazon CloudWatch by companies that implement AI at scale, process large volumes of data, and distribute services goes beyond being a mere “nice-to-have” utility.

It is regarded as a strategic tool whose patterns of use, cost drivers, and impact on operations are measurable; thus, it is maturing and undergoing increasing scrutiny. The content of this article is a combination of public pricing rules, market research, and 2025 usage studies that provide a clear view of CloudWatch at present — allowing the engineering, SRE, and FinOps teams to base their decisions on evidence rather than intuition.

Editor’s Choice

With a 30% global market share, AWS is the leading cloud provider, thereby strengthening CloudWatch’s position as a major monitoring solution in current cloud infrastructures.
By 2025, CloudWatch will have undergone a transformation, evolving from a simple monitoring utility into a strategic observability platform that is paramount for AI, distributed systems, and large-scale cloud operations.
CloudWatch has created an ecosystem of over a thousand metric types, and the use of high-resolution metrics with time intervals of less than a minute has surged by 41%, indicating increased demand for nearly real-time visibility.
The CloudWatch Agent has become widely adopted; therefore, we can now obtain 1-second EBS metrics for 62% of provisioned IOPS volumes and monitor more than 25 disk-level metrics.
The performance of the EBS has been consistently good, as it has been found that 95% of the monitored volumes have less than 1 ms read latency, and also the high-performance workloads have been able to reach more than 3,500 IOPS per volume.
CloudWatch Dashboards have now improved their metrics support by allowing 100 cross-region metrics, which means centralized global architecture monitoring has become possible.
According to statistics, 64% of AWS accounts use the Embedded Metric Format (EMF), which enables the retrieval of metrics in a structured form directly from logs.
The usage of CloudWatch Metrics Explorer went up by 46%, while 28% of the enterprise customers were found to be utilizing the Managed Grafana for advanced visualization purposes.
Centralized monitoring across multiple accounts gets easier due to the cross-account observability feature being enabled in 58% of AWS Organizations.
CloudWatch RUM has seen a tripling of its usage and is now covering 2.4 billion user sessions per month, which indicates the rising concern about the monitoring of real-user performance.

Global Cloud Market Share

(Reference: sqmagazine.co.uk)

The global cloud infrastructure market remains highly competitive, and AWS leads with a 30% market share, reinforcing its position as the cloud provider of choice worldwide.
Its wide range of services, global infrastructure, and mature ecosystem are the main reasons why enterprises and startups are still attracted to it.
Microsoft Azure has the second-largest market share, at 21%, owing to strong integration with enterprise software and hybrid cloud offerings.
Google Cloud ranks third with a 12% market share, supported by its strengths in data analytics, AI, and open-source technologies.
Alibaba Cloud has 4% of the global market, is strongly present in Asia, and is slowly making a mark in the emerging markets.
Oracle Cloud comes next with 3% backed by the need for enterprise databases and mission-critical workloads.
Other important players like Salesforce, IBM Cloud, and Tencent Cloud share about 2% of the total market, each catering to a specific need of enterprise, SaaS, or regional cloud applications.

Types Of AWS CloudWatch Metrics

AWS CloudWatch offers a variety of metrics to monitor the performance, availability and health of cloud resources in the organization.
In 2025, standard metrics will be automatically enabled for more than 80 AWS services, so users can monitor basic metrics such as CPU usage, network traffic, and request counts without any additional setup.
The adoption of custom metrics has soared, up 23% compared to the previous year, mostly because of the advent of containerized apps and microservices, which in turn demand monitoring specific to the application.
There are more than 1,000 metric types in CloudWatch, classified by namespaces, which facilitates data management and analysis for mixed workloads.
The demand for high-resolution metrics, which provide data granularity of less than a minute, has increased by 41% over the past year, as companies seek faster insights and real-time alerting.
Approximately 30% of CloudWatch users mix built-in and custom metrics to get complete visibility across their infrastructure and applications.
Additionally, 14 AWS regions already provide enhanced metric data with latency under 5 seconds, thereby facilitating fast, responsive monitoring and incident resolution for mission-critical applications.

CloudWatch Agent Gives A Complete Picture Of EBS Performance

With the CloudWatch Agent in place, the Amazon EBS performance visibility is so deep and clear that it can even detect issues before they become noticeable by default monitoring.
Thanks to the agent, metrics for EBS like VolumeQueueLength, throughput and BurstBalance can be gathered every second, allowing the teams to spot performance issues almost in real-time.
This thorough monitoring is now applied to 62% of provisioned IOPS (io1/io2) volumes, showcasing the need for it in latency-sensitive workloads.
During the last twelve months, the CloudWatch Agent has increased its coverage by one disk-level EBS metric to a total of more than 25, up from 16.
The new metrics will enable teams to conduct a more detailed analysis of read/write behaviour, queue depth and throughput limits.
For workloads that require high performance, the median VolumeReadOps is over 3,500 IOPS per volume, which means there is robust and regular disk activity.
In the case of GP3 volumes, the monitoring of BurstBalance has become increasingly critical, with 48% of these volumes utilizing alarms to mitigate unexpected performance throttling and latency spikes.
In the case of hybrid environments, it is estimated that 71% of organizations are using CloudWatch Agent memory and disk metrics, thus providing visibility across on-premises and cloud infrastructure that is consistent.
Agent-based monitoring for both EC2 and EBS is now a major component of alerting strategies and is responsible for 40% of composite alarms in 2025.
The EBS latency is still under strict optimization, with 95% of monitored volumes keeping read latency under 1 millisecond.
In general, 55% of the performance-critical EC2 workloads depend on the metrics gathered by the agent, and the sharing of multi-volume dashboards that aggregate the agent data has increased by 31% per year in the DevOps teams.

Metric Query & Visualization Tools

CloudWatch’s querying and visualization features have significantly expanded and are now able to support complex multi-environment monitoring.
Cross-region metrics—100 of them, to be precise—can now be viewed on a single CloudWatch Dashboard, making it much simpler to keep an eye on the whole global architecture via a single interface.
The use of the CloudWatch Embedded Metric Format (EMF), which allows structured metrics to be extracted straight from application logs, has reached 64% of AWS accounts.
The CloudWatch Metrics Explorer usage has increased by 46% largely due to the introduction of improved tag-based filtering, which makes it very easy to discover metrics even when they are in large numbers.
To meet the more advanced visualization requirements, 28% of enterprise AWS customers are using Amazon Managed Grafana, which is connected to CloudWatch for creating richer dashboards and doing analytics.
AWS Console Dashboards are rendering metrics close to real-time now, with the refresh intervals being less than five seconds, thereby enhancing operational responsiveness.
CloudWatch Logs Insights is now fully integrated with the dashboards across all commercial regions, enabling teams to easily correlate logs and metrics.
Among the features for visualization of alarm heatmaps introduced in 2025 is one that illustrates incident frequency and problem areas across environments.
Moreover, 33% of organizations employ CloudWatch Contributor Insights for top-N analysis of high-volume log and metric data.
The feature of exporting dashboards as PDFs or email snapshots has also been well received, with adoption growing 39% year on year, thereby aiding in reporting and communicating with stakeholders.

Top 10 AWS CloudWatch Log Groups By Storage (GB)

(Source: sqmagazine.co.uk)

The team is now in a position to comprehend the cost factors related to logging and the chances for optimization.
The log group /aws/containerinsights/PetSite/application accounts for the largest share of the storage, with 15.28 GB, representing 34.81% of the total logging volume.
This reveals that a lot of logging at the application level is going on with the containerized workloads, which is most likely due to either the verbose logs or the high traffic coming in.
The cloudtrail-logs-management log group is ranked second, consuming 10.92 GB (24.87% of the total storage).
This indicates the substantial volume of logs generated by governance, audit, and security that must be tracked across the AWS environment.
The Container Insights-related log groups are also contributing significantly to the logging volumes. The /aws/containerinsights/PetSite/performance logs consume 3.50 GB (7.98%), and /aws/containerinsights/PetSite/prometheus consumes 3.15 GB (7.17%), reflecting the impact of performance metrics and Prometheus monitoring data on storage.
The execution logs of the API Gateway for the production traffic (API-Gateway-Execution -Logs_cf6mj5riej/prod), which is 2.58 GB or 5.89% of the storage, reflect logging at the request level for the APIs.
The application logs, such as/aws/PetSite/adoptions, consume 1.65 GB (3.79%), indicating moderate usage by business workflows.
Lambda monitoring and execution have also produced logs that have a significant amount of storage. /aws/lambda-insights is taking 1.62 GB (3.69%), whereas /aws/PayForAdoption is contributing 1.46 GB (3.32%).
Additionally, the smaller Lambda log groups include /aws/lambda/Services-statusupdater…and /aws/lambda/cwsyn-ui-canary… which store 1.00 GB (2.27%) and 0.81 GB (1.84%) respectively.

Recent Trends & Developments

At the beginning of 2025, AWS CloudWatch Logs Data Protection was updated to include automatically applied PII redaction, which helped companies to mask their confidential data in log files without intervention at all.
In the first quarter of 2025, AWS introduced six new CloudWatch metric namespaces, including AWS/Bedrock and AWS/SupplyChain, thereby increasing monitoring coverage for new AWS services.
The feature of cross-account observability has gained a lot of popularity and is currently activated in 58% of AWS Organizations, making it so much easier to have one centralized monitoring system for all the different accounts.
In the meantime, AWS rolled out a project to test AI-based alarm recommendations in five preview regions starting in the second quarter of 2025, with the goal of eliminating alert noise and improving incident response accuracy.
CloudWatch Real User Monitoring (RUM) has also experienced a significant increase in usage, with monthly user sessions supported tripling to approximately 2.4 billion due to growing demand for user performance insights.
Midway through 2025, AWS introduced the Observability Access Manager, which not only simplified permissions management but also enabled secure sharing of metrics, logs, and traces within teams.
In fact, one of the main reasons Metric Streams was introduced for Amazon OpenSearch was to achieve a 44% increase in monitoring via streaming, thereby supporting real-time analytics at scale.
Moreover, AWS presents another service: Application Signals, a preview feature under development to correlate metrics from multi-tier, distributed applications, thereby supporting teams’ efforts to gain end-to-end visibility.
Furthermore, the redundancy of CloudWatch dashboards across regions is being implemented in stages, with full availability expected by the end of 2025, which will significantly improve the resilience and availability of the monitoring sites.

Conclusion

AWS CloudWatch Statistics: In 2025, AWS CloudWatch has evolved to the point that it is now considered a pivotal component of cloud observability rather than merely a basic monitoring tool. Its widespread use, the variety of available metrics, and its deep integration with AI, containers, and distributed architectures demonstrate that it is a major player in engineering, SRE, and FinOps.

Improved monitoring using agents, quicker metric transfer, and state-of-the-art visualization tools are opening up the possibility of detecting issues at an earlier stage, as well as being able to handle large-scale operations with assurance. However, the increase in log volumes, as well as the introduction of new features, indicates a strong need for cost-effective monitoring strategies. All in all, CloudWatch is a good example of the transition to data-driven, proactive, and application-centric cloud operational models.