Moderate to move
CloudWatch on DigitalOcean: what it becomes and what it costs.
On DigitalOcean, CloudWatch becomes Prometheus + Grafana + Loki on DigitalOcean Droplets. Metrics, logs and alerts are well covered by open source; dashboards need rebuilding.
Effort grade
Moderate
Same software, self-hosted: you patch, back up and fix it
Cost after the move, before engineer time
30% of today
Logs ingest at $0.50/GB, custom metrics at $0.30 each and alarms dominate most bills; Prometheus, Loki and Grafana on a CX43 (€16) plus object storage for logs come to about 30%.
Engineer time
6 h a month
To run the replacement: patching, backups, on-call. Plus about 5 engineer days for the move itself.
In three modelled AWS accounts
What CloudWatch costs in the modelled accounts and what the estimator makes of it on DigitalOcean, with the default assumptions. Not customer data.
| Account | AWS /mo | DO /mo | Change | Priced by |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Early-stage SaaS$2,981/mo in total | $150 | $45 | −$105 | ratio |
| Scale-up on Kubernetes$24,950/mo in total | $800 | $240 | −$560 | ratio |
| Data-heavy platform$79,640/mo in total | $2,100 | $630 | −$1,470 | ratio |
Your own CloudWatch line, from your export
Drop one month of your AWS cost export and the report prices every service, CloudWatch included, on DigitalOcean list prices of 18 Oct 2026, net of the engineer time to run it. In your browser; nothing is uploaded.