When you start on AWS, you use CloudWatch. It's there, it's integrated, it works. But as your infrastructure grows, something paradoxical often happens: The bill for "Monitoring & Logs" climbs into the top 3 of your monthly AWS costs – often higher than the actual databases.

The reason: CloudWatch punishes you for looking closely. You pay for Custom Metrics, for Log Ingest, and for querying the data. This creates a dangerous incentive: "Log less to save money" – the opposite of good observability.

When doing an AWS Exit to Proxmox/Bare Metal, we replace CloudWatch with the modern gold standard of the open-source world: The Grafana Stack (often called LGTM: Loki, Grafana, Tempo, Mimir).

In this article, we show with hard numbers why this stack is not only cheaper but technically superior.

1) The Stack Explained: What Replaces What?
2) The Cost Shock: Variable vs. Fixed Costs
3) Technical Superiority: More Than Just "Cheaper"
4) How OutaCloud Handles the Migration
5) Conclusion: Free Your Data
Further Reading
Don't Want to Do This Yourself?
Sources
- AWS CloudWatch Pricing
- Prometheus & Grafana

1) The Stack Explained: What Replaces What?

We don't build a "DIY stack" for our customers – we build an integrated enterprise solution. Here's the mapping from AWS to Open Source:

The Dashboard: Grafana (replaces CloudWatch Dashboards)

Grafana is the "face" of your observability.

The difference: CloudWatch can primarily only display AWS data. Grafana is data-source agnostic. It visualizes data from your Proxmox cluster, SQL databases, Jira, and even remaining AWS resources in a single-pane-of-glass.

The Metrics: Prometheus (replaces CloudWatch Metrics)

This is where numeric time series land (CPU, RAM, Request Rates).

The difference: Prometheus uses a "Pull Model" and the powerful query language PromQL. This allows complex mathematical operations across thousands of servers to be calculated in milliseconds – something that's often cumbersome and expensive with CloudWatch Metric Math.

The Logs: Grafana Loki (replaces CloudWatch Logs)

Loki is the highlight for developers. It's like "grep for the cloud."

The difference: CloudWatch Logs indexes the entire text of every log line. This makes ingestion expensive and searching slow. Loki indexes only the metadata (labels) like app=frontend, error=500. The actual log text is stored compressed (similar to S3). The result: Massively faster write access and tiny storage costs.

2) The Cost Shock: Variable vs. Fixed Costs

The strongest argument for switching is the pricing model. Let's compare AWS CloudWatch prices in the EU (Frankfurt) region.

Scenario: A medium-sized SaaS company.

Logs: 1 TB ingest per month (about 33 GB/day – easily reached with microservices)
Metrics: 2,000 Custom Metrics (e.g., business KPIs, detailed app metrics)
Dashboards: 5 dashboards for the team

Cost Factor	AWS CloudWatch (Variable)	Grafana Stack on Proxmox (Fixed)
Log Ingest	$570.00 ($0.57 per GB)	$0. Limited only by Disk I/O.
Log Archival	$33.00 ($0.033 per GB)	Included (on server NVMe/HDD).
Custom Metrics	$600.00 ($0.30 per metric)	$0. Limited only by RAM.
Dashboards	$15.00 ($3.00 per dashboard)	$0. Unlimited dashboards.
Alarms	$0.10 per alarm	$0. Unlimited alert rules.
TOTAL / Month	~$1,218.00	~$0 (part of infrastructure flat)

The reality: With AWS, costs scale linearly with your growth. On your own infrastructure (managed by OutaCloud), costs are flat. Whether you send 100 or 10,000 metrics costs us the same – it just uses a bit more RAM on the server you already have.

Want to calculate your savings potential? Use our Cloud Cost Calculator.

3) Technical Superiority: More Than Just "Cheaper"

A common objection is: "Will I lose the deep integration?"

No. In fact, you gain features that AWS doesn't offer like this.

Feature 1: Correlation (The Split-Screen)

In Grafana, you can see a spike in CPU load in one panel (Prometheus) and with one click display exactly the logs (Loki) for exactly that time period and that pod. This seamless connection is often missing in CloudWatch or requires switching between "Metrics" and "Log Insights."

Feature 2: Data Ownership & Retention

CloudWatch data belongs to Amazon. Exporting is expensive (egress fees).

Your Prometheus/Loki data lives on your ZFS volumes.

AWS: Standard retention costs extra.
Grafana/Loki: You decide. Want to keep compliance logs for 10 years? Just store them on cheap HDDs or Hetzner Storage Boxes.

Feature 3: Alerting Manager

The Prometheus Alertmanager is extremely flexible. It offers:

Deduplication: Grouping similar alarms
Intelligent Routing: Database alarms → DB team, Frontend → Slack channel #frontend

With CloudWatch, you pay for each alarm individually and the logic is often rigid.

4) How OutaCloud Handles the Migration

We know nobody wants to write YAML configs. That's why our Proxmox Monitoring is a "Batteries Included" service.

Deployment

We roll out the complete stack (Loki, Prometheus, Grafana, Alertmanager) containerized on your cluster.

Agents

We install node_exporter (for hardware metrics) and promtail (for logs) on your VMs and hosts.

Dashboards

We create individual and customized dashboards for your infrastructure – Linux, Docker, Postgres, Nginx, and your specific applications. You have full visibility from day 1.

AWS Bridge

During the migration, we use the cloudwatch-exporter. This lets Grafana pull data from AWS. So you see your old and new world in one dashboard until the move is complete.

5) Conclusion: Free Your Data

Observability should help you find bugs – not blow holes in your budget. Switching from CloudWatch to Grafana/Prometheus is one of the most satisfying steps in a cloud exit: The tools are faster, look better, and cost a fraction.

Want to see what your infrastructure looks like in Grafana?

As part of our migration analysis, we'll happily show you demo dashboards and calculate how much you'll save just from eliminating CloudWatch fees.

Don't Want to Do This Yourself?

At OutaCloud, we handle the complete migration for you – including observability stack setup.

Start here:

Exit AWS – Overview of our AWS migration services
Proxmox Monitoring – Our monitoring service
Calculate Your Savings – See how much you could save

Or contact us directly for a free migration analysis.

Sources

AWS CloudWatch Pricing

Amazon CloudWatch Pricing – Official AWS pricing page with breakdown of components (Logs, Metrics, Dashboards, Alarms)
How AWS CloudWatch Pricing Works – Lumigo: Detailed explanation of CloudWatch cost structure
AWS CloudWatch Logs & Metrics Cost Optimization – CloudKeeper: Cost optimization strategies
AWS CloudWatch Pricing Tiers & Rates – ShadhinLab: Pricing overview with concrete numbers
New Amazon CloudWatch Log Class – AWS Blog: Introduction of Infrequent Access Log Class
Determine which log group is causing a bill increase – AWS re:Post: Identifying cost drivers
Understanding AWS CloudWatch Pricing – AWS Fundamentals: Comprehensive pricing guide

Prometheus & Grafana

Prometheus Overview – Official Prometheus documentation on Pull Model and TSDB
Is Prometheus Monitoring Push or Pull? – SigNoz: Technical explanation of the Pull Model
Grafana Loki Documentation – Official Loki documentation
Understand Labels in Loki – Grafana Labs: Label-based indexing explained
Loki Overview – Grafana Labs: Architecture overview with focus on efficiency

CloudWatch vs. Grafana: Why Good Observability Doesn't Have to Cost a Fortune

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