CloudWatch waste check
Excessive Retention Log Group
excessive_retention_log_group
What it finds
Excessive Retention Log Group: one of the CloudWatch checks in the management & operations group. Checks in this group look for: logging, tracing and management resources that keep data longer than needed, hold nothing, or are no longer used.
Why it costs money
Log ingestion and retention, trails, keys and dashboards each carry a recurring charge that keeps running after anyone looks at them.
How it is detected
Log group with retention exceeding recommended baseline
Detection confidence: MEDIUM. This is the criterion from our public docs. It runs in a local scan with your own read-only credentials.
AWS's own tools
AWS has a check on the same resource, with narrower or different criteria.
Checked against the AWS documentation.
Run it yourself
Nothing leaves your machine. The local scan has no telemetry.