Introducing Amazon CloudWatch publishing for S3 Storage Lens

As we move on from AWS re:Invent 2021 and the news and announcement dust settles, we’re left with so many new services, functionalities, and toys to play with. But one announcement that may have slipped under the radar that I’d like to talk about is the addition of Amazon CloudWatch publishing for S3 Storage Lens.

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What is S3 Storage Lens?

Amazon S3 Storage Lens is a storage analytics tool that gives visibility into object storage usage and activity. And it now includes support for Amazon CloudWatch. (Check out the AWS blog for more info.)

When your S3 usage and costs becomes more and more difficult to monitor and understand, you’re going to want to start using S3 Storage Lens.S3 Storage Lens is helpful for gaining insight into visibility into your usage and activity trends, and it makes actionable recommendations to ensure that you’re using S3 in a cost-effective way that follows best practices.

CloudWatch support added to S3 Storage Lens

Storage Lens allows you to use interactive dashboards to compile your data from the whole organizaion, specific accounts, regions, or buckets. Up until now, you weren’t able to bring any of those dashboards into CloudWatch and had to go between both dashboard options.

Well, AWS has delivered what the people want: one-stop dashboard viewing!

S3 Storage Lens is now able to connect to CloudWatch so that your dashboards are all in one place. No more jumping back and forth between dashboard views!

Prefix-level reporting

Along with this new functionality, there’s a new way to drill down even further on your data. You’ll be able to utilze S3’s first-and-only prefix-level reporting! This is helpful for generatiing your insights to specific groups of objects that may be in the same bucket but are for different projects and are separated by prefix.

This new merge will allow for a total of 29 usage and activity metrics, 15 month historical trends, and interactive charting.

You’ll be able to enjoy CloudWatch’s alarms and triggered actions based on the metrics you set as well as share your dashboards by SSO, email address, or publicly. And you’ll be able to access Storage Lens metrics using the CloudWatch API.

“But won’t that generate more costs to use S3 Storage Lens AND CloudWatch, Jess?” you might ask. (And I’ll remind you I can’t hear you via blog post, but that is a good question!) No!

When you enable CloudWatch publishing in Storage Lens, the costs of CloudWatch are included in the Storage Lens costs. See the diagram below for a bit more clarification.

In order to have the option to use CloudWatch publishing, you’ll have to upgrade to Storage Lens advanced. But it’s well worth it, in my opinion.

All in all, this is a great announcement and will help you monitor, manage, and maintain your S3 usage. Cue the standing ovation! For full details, dive into the AWS documentation here.

For more S3-related news, check out our deep dive on the new S3 Glacier Instant Retrieval storage class. And keep being awesome, cloud gurus!

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