It is not possible to delete metrics from Amazon CloudWatch. Metrics will eventually rotate out.
Yes, this will increase the list of metrics, but typically AWS users would ask for a specific filter of metrics, so it doesn't matter how many different metrics are actually being stored by CloudWatch.
From the CloudWatch FAQs:
- Data points with a period of less than 60 seconds are available for 3 hours. These data points are high-resolution custom metrics.
- Data points with a period of 60 seconds (1 minute) are available for 15 days
- Data points with a period of 300 seconds (5 minute) are available for 63 days
- Data points with a period of 3600 seconds (1 hour) are available for 455 days (15 months)
Data points that are initially published with a shorter period are aggregated together for long-term storage. For example, if you collect data using a period of 1 minute, the data remains available for 15 days with 1-minute resolution. After 15 days this data is still available, but is aggregated and is retrievable only with a resolution of 5 minutes. After 63 days, the data is further aggregated and is available with a resolution of 1 hour. If you need availability of metrics longer than these periods, you can use the GetMetricStatistics API to retrieve the datapoints for offline or different storage.