---
title: "Metric cost calculation | Grafana Cloud documentation"
description: "Explanation of how costs of metrics are calculated for CloudWatch metrics"
---

> For a curated documentation index, see [llms.txt](/llms.txt). For the complete documentation index, see [llms-full.txt](/llms-full.txt).

# Metric cost calculation

By connecting your CloudWatch metrics instance to Grafana Cloud, you might incur charges. To view information on the number of active series that your Grafana Cloud account uses for metrics included in each Cloud tier, refer to [Active series and dpm usage](/docs/grafana-cloud/fundamentals/active-series-and-dpm/) and [Grafana Cloud tier pricing](/pricing/).

To list and retrieve metrics, the CloudWatch API calls `ListMetrics` and `GetMetricData`. To discover resources, the Resource Groups tagging API uses `GetResources`.

Each service configured in a job is scraped independently. The following call counts assume we are scraping lambda:

- `GetResources` is called once.
- `ListMetrics` is called four times, once per metric.

Assuming `ListMetrics` returned five values for each metric, `GetMetricData` would be called a single time requesting 30 metrics, one per metric plus statistic combination.

For cost information associated with CloudWatch APIs, refer to [CloudWatch Pricing](https://aws.amazon.com/cloudwatch/pricing/).