Overview

When Datadog queries metrics in CloudWatch on your behalf, it can lead to increased CloudWatch cost due to GetMetricData (GMD) API calls.

Adaptive Polling helps you save costs by reducing the polling frequency of metrics that haven’t been queried (used in monitors, dashboards, notebooks, or metric queries) for at least 30 days. Polling of unqueried metrics is automatically throttled to one-hour intervals.

To see which metrics are unqueried, go to the Metric Summary page and filter by the Query Activity facet in the facet panel.

Note: Newly added metrics are unqueried by default.

Considerations

Multiple AWS accounts

Adaptive Polling applies across all AWS accounts monitored by Datadog.

A previously unqueried metric is queried

If a previously unqueried metric is newly queried, datapoints may initially be missing for up to one hour until polling resumes at the default frequency.

Unopened dashboards and notebooks

Dashboards and notebooks only run their metric queries when opened. If unopened, the metrics in their queries may become classified as unqueried.

Additional helpful documentation, links, and articles:

AWS IntegrationDOCUMENTATION