Amazon CloudWatch monitoring can be broadly categorized into two categories: basic monitoring and detailed monitoring.
- Basic monitoring: Basic monitoring is free and it collects data at a five-minute time interval. By default, when you provision AWS resources, all AWS resources except ELB and RDS start with a basic monitoring mode only. ELB and RDS monitors the resources at a one-minute interval. For other resources, optionally, you can switch the monitoring mode to detailed monitoring.
- Detailed monitoring: Detailed monitoring is chargeable and it makes data available at a one-minute time interval. Currently, AWS charges $0.015 per hour, per instance. Detailed monitoring does not change the monitoring on ELB and RDS which by default collates data at a one-minute interval. Similarly, detailed monitoring does not change the EBS volumes which are monitored at five-minute intervals.
You can enable detailed monitoring while launching an instance or after provisioning...