I find the cost a bit prohibitive for CloudWatch - 0.015$ per instance per hour. If you monitor 24/24 7/7 (and why wouldnt you?) it adds up to ~120$ per year per instance.
Wouldn't it be smarter to run something like Cacti instead?
$10 per month is prohibitive? How many additional hours of effort will the alternative cost you?
Per box - it all depends on the number of boxes you have, but once its setup for one, its setup for all.
This is great except one still has to manage on a machine by machine basis. Not scalable. Why do we move the ball forward with cloud computing only to go right back to old habits?