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I have an Application Load Balancer whose data transfer cost I want to monitor.

In Cost Explorer, I can filter on usage type "DataTransfer-Out-Bytes", and see how many GB of data it is sending, and how much that costs. However, it only shows the total for each day, and the data is delayed by several hours. In order to see how the amount of traffic is affected by changes I make, I'd like to see that same number in CloudWatch, but I can't find any corresponding metric.

The Per-AppELB "ProcessedBytes" metric sounded promising, but that number is slightly more than half the number I see in Cost Explorer. (My best guess is that TLS handshake overhead isn't included.)

Is there any metric or combination of metrics that matches what I end up getting billed for?

legoscia
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  • When inspecting the `ProcessedBytes` metric in CloudWatch, which statistic are you using? The default statistic is `Average`, while for this metric, you want the `Sum` statistic. – markusk Jul 30 '19 at 00:28

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If your main objective is to monitor costs, and it's not crucial that CloudWatch is involved, you could create an AWS Budget with a suitable budget filter. Budgets provide dashboards and notifications for actual and forecasted spend.

markusk
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  • Thanks, I didn't know about that! It seems like budgets have the same drawbacks as Cost Explorer: data is delayed, and presented in daily granularity. As CloudWatch can display ProcessedBytes with minute granularity, I was hoping that it could display the number I'm actually billed on in the same way. – legoscia Aug 08 '19 at 11:16