Amazon CloudWatch Cost for a log group

Question

Hello, what's the opinion on saving costs for an Amazon CloudWatch log group that runs close to a TB and is queried once in a month, which makes it a very expensive query. The CloudWatch log group is storing all the logs and is constantly growing. The logs can not be purged for posterity and at times the queries have to be run so logs have to be available. Thanks in advance for the help.

Leo K · Accepted Answer

Since you're saying the amount of log data is constantly growing, have you considered exporting the logs to S3 (https://docs.aws.amazon.com/AmazonCloudWatch/latest/logs/S3Export.html) and analysing them with Athena?

I appreciate that preferences vary, but personally, I much prefer Athena and SQL in general for querying and reporting on data, and S3 tends to be much more flexible than CW Logs for storing and processing data in a cost-conscious manner.

Victor_W · Answer

This sounds like a good use-case for the Cloudwatch infrequent access log class. Take a look at our blog-post on this topic [here](https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/new-amazon-cloudwatch-log-class-for-infrequent-access-logs-at-a-reduced-price/).

Amazon CloudWatch Cost for a log group

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