Count the datapoints your OCI resources emit and price ingestion and retrieval above the generous free allowances.
Monitoring meters datapoints, not resources, so cost is driven by the product of resource count, metrics per resource and posting frequency. Moving from a 60-second to a 5-minute interval cuts the datapoint count by a factor of five, which is usually the cheapest lever available. The free allowances are large enough that most estates never pay for Monitoring at all, but a high-cardinality custom metric posted every minute across thousands of resources crosses the line quickly — and retrieval is metered too, so busy dashboards on wide time ranges count. Confirm the per-million prices and current allowances in the Oracle Cloud cost estimator for your region.
OCI Monitoring
datapoints = resources × metrics × (2,592,000 ÷ interval seconds); charge = max(0, datapoints − free allowance) × price per million, applied separately to ingestion and retrieval.
datapoints = resources × metrics × (2,592,000 ÷ interval seconds); charge = max(0, datapoints − free allowance) × price per million, applied separately to ingestion and retrieval. Monitoring meters datapoints, not resources, so cost is driven by the product of resource count, metrics per resource and posting frequency. Moving from a 60-second to a 5-minute interval cuts the datapoint count by a factor of five, which is usually the cheapest lever available.
The free allowances are large enough that most estates never pay for Monitoring at all, but a high-cardinality custom metric posted every minute across thousands of resources crosses the line quickly — and retrieval is metered too, so busy dashboards on wide time ranges count. Confirm the per-million prices and current allowances in the Oracle Cloud cost estimator for your region.
This calculator takes 8 inputs: Monitored resources, Metrics per resource, Posting interval, Free ingestion allowance, Ingestion price per million datapoints, Datapoints retrieved by queries and dashboards, Free retrieval allowance, Retrieval price per million datapoints. The pre-filled defaults are a realistic starting point — replace them with figures from your own environment for a result you can act on.