Amazon CloudWatch vs Amazon Elastic Container Service (Amazon ECS)

Likelihood to Recommend

Cloud watch is great and essential if you decide to invest in AWS and have any need to monitor the health of all aspects of your VPC resources, or at the organizational level (multiple accounts). Another benefit of the service is constant upgrades at no additional costs; the software evolves to develop modules and interface improvements. For first-time users in AWS, this is going to take a bit to understand, so the learning curve to this metrics environment can seem overwhelming at first glance/use.

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Rob Domenico

Senior Systems Administrator

Bentek Inc.Computer Software, 51-200 employees

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Amazon Elastic Container Service (Amazon ECS) is well suited where you need the ease of managing the clusters by letting AWS do the stuff for you. Obviously, whenever you want to run the docker based workloads, it is always better to go for either AWS ECS or AWS EKS. If you are interested in staying at AWS only and don't want to be cloud-agnostic, then go for AWS ECS instead of AWS EKS. AWS ECS is cheaper than AWS EKS and also more managed by AWS and better integrated with other AWS services. If you want to run those workloads as serverless, then AWS ECS Fargate is the best option to go with. If you already have a Kubernetes based setup that you want to migrate to AWS, then go for AWS EKS instead of AWS ECS.

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Abdullah Khawer

DevOps Engineer

CallSign (Pvt.) Ltd.Information Technology & Services, 201-500 employees

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Pros

It provides lot many out of the box dashboard to observe the health and usage of your cloud deployments. Few examples are CPU usage, Disk read/write, Network in/out etc.
It is possible to stream CloudWatch log data to Amazon Elasticsearch to process them almost real time.
If you have setup your code pipeline and wants to see the status, CloudWatch really helps. It can trigger lambda function when certain cloudWatch event happens and lambda can store the data to S3 or Athena which Quicksight can represent.

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Apurv Doshi

Senior Solutions Architect

InfostretchInformation Technology and Services, 1001-5000 employees

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One of the biggest advantages is the flexibility to change underlying EC2 instances. As the traffic or demand increases, we can easily change EC2 instances without any issues.
Amazon ECS APIs are extremely robust and one can start and stop containers by firing one post request only. So, it is not mandatory to keep the demo solutions up for every time. Just at the time of demo fire the command - make the container up and running - do the demo - down the container with API. A simple portal can control every container which helps non-technical (sales, marketing) to do the demo without keeping the solutions up for the entire time frame.

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Apurv Doshi

Senior Solutions Architect

InfostretchInformation Technology and Services, 1001-5000 employees

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Cons

Memory metrics on EC2 are not available on CloudWatch. Depending on workloads if we need visibility on memory metrics we use Solarwinds Orion with the agent installed. For scalable workloads, this involves customization of images being used.
Visualization out of the box. But this can easily be addressed with other solutions such as Grafana.
By design, this is only used for AWS workloads so depending on your environment cannot be used as an all in one solution for your monitoring.

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Verified User

Professional in Finance and Accounting

Financial Services Company, 501-1000 employees

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A cleaner container service road map
It would be. nice to have more AI recommended cluster reductions
The UX could use some simplification

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Scott Kennedy

Director, eCommerce Analytics and Digital Marketing

Franklin SportsSporting Goods, 201-500 employees

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Pricing Details

General

Free Trial

Yes

Free/Freemium Version

Yes

Premium Consulting/Integration Services

Yes

Entry-level set up fee?

No

Starting Price

$0.0,012 per canary run

Amazon CloudWatch Editions & Modules

Edition

First 10,000 Metrics	$0.30¹
Next 240,000 Metrics	$0.10¹
Next 750,000 Metrics	$0.05¹
Over 1,000,000 Metrics	$0.02¹
Dashboard	$3.00²
Alarm - Standard Resolution (60 Sec)	$0.10³
Alarm - High Resolution (10 Sec)	$0.30³
Alarm - Composite	$0.50⁴
Logs - Collect (Data Ingestion)	$0.50⁵
Logs - Store (Archival)	$0.03⁵
Logs - Analyze (Logs Insights queries)	$0.005⁶
Events - Custom	$1.00⁷
Events - Cross-account	$1.00⁷
Contributor Insights	$0.50⁸
Contributor Insights - Matched Log Events	$0.02⁹
Canaries	$0.0012¹⁰
CloudWatch Evidently - Events	$5¹¹
CloudWatch Evidently - Analysis Units	$7.50¹²
CloudWatch RUM	$1¹³

per month
per month per dashboard
per month per alarm metric
per month per alarm
per GB
per GB of data scanned
per million events
per month per rule
per month per one million log events that match the rule
per canary run
per 1 million events
per 1 million analysis units
per 100k events

Additional Pricing Details

With Amazon CloudWatch, there is no up-front commitment or minimum fee; you simply pay for what you use. You will be charged at the end of the month for your usage.

General

Free Trial

—

Free/Freemium Version

Yes

Premium Consulting/Integration Services

—

Entry-level set up fee?

No

Starting Price

$0.0,013,335 per hour per GB

Amazon Elastic Container Service (Amazon ECS) Editions & Modules

Edition

AWS Fargate Launch Type Model	Spot price: $0.0013335. Ephemeral Storage Pricing: $0.000111¹
Amazon EC2 Launch Type Model	Free
Amazon ECS on AWS Outposts	Free

per hour per storage
none

Additional Pricing Details

There is no additional charge for Amazon ECS. You pay for AWS resources (e.g., Amazon EC2 instances or Amazon EBS volumes) you create to store and run your application. You only pay for what you use, as you use it; there are no minimum fees and no upfront commitments.

Support Rating

Amazon CloudWatch 8.0

Based on 14 answers

Support is effective, and we were able to get any problems that we couldn't get solved through community discussion forums solved for us by the AWS support team. For example, we were assisted in one instance where we were not sure about the best metrics to use in order to optimize an auto-scaling group on EC2. The support team was able to look at our metrics and give a useful recommendation on which metrics to use.

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Ramindu Deshapriya

Lead Consultant - Technology

VirtusaComputer Software, 10,001+ employees

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Amazon Elastic Container Service (Amazon ECS) 8.6

Based on 7 answers

Support is relatively good, although the documentation sometimes is lacking, as well as outdated in our experience, especially when we initiated the process of using this service. But once we found how to assemble things, we haven't really required support from anyone at AWS, the service works without problems so we haven't had the need to contact support, which speaks well of how ECS is built.

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Francisco Javier Castaneda Marroquin

CEO (Chief Executive Officer)

Global Bestlogistics Systems S.A. de C.V.Computer Software, 11-50 employees

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Alternatives Considered

Amazon CloudWatch is efficient, reliable and has a high speed response as compared to its competitors and it maximizes an application's life at the same time giving you the best load balance and storage, the services that Amazon CloudWatch provides are way better and cheaper for the prices attached to them.

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muphulusi dzivhani

Network Engineer

JohannesburgInformation Technology & Services, 5001-10,000 employees

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If you are using AWS, you will be using Amazon ECS. I have also used Azure Container Instances and it works just as well in Azure as ECS does in AWS. It's really all a matter of what cloud provider you are utilizing. Because of the "Cloud Wars," it's difficult to measure cross-cloud connectivity, but I have had better luck remaining cloud agnostic in other cloud providers than AWS (Azure, GCP). Because of the sheer volume of tooling in AWS and inter-connectivity between them, it's almost easier to be fully AWS if you are using it in any kind of capacity.

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Verified User

Engineer in Engineering

Information Services Company, 501-1000 employees

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Return on Investment

We were able to set up log streaming, retention, and simple downtime alerts within a few hours, having no prior experience with CloudWatch, freeing up our engineers to focus on more important business goals.
CloudWatch log groups have made it relatively easy to detect and diagnose issues in production by allowing us to aggregate logs across servers, correlate failures, isolate misbehaving servers, etc. Thanks to CloudWatch, we are generally able to identify, understand and mitigate most production fires within 10-15 minutes.
Choosing CloudWatch to manage log aggregation has saved us quite a bit of time and money over the past year. Generally, 3rd-party log aggregation solutions tend to get quite expensive unless you self-host, in which case you typically need to spend a fair amount of time setting up, maintaining, and monitoring these services.

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Brian Dentino

Founder

finbox.ioInternet, 1-10 employees

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We achieved minimum downtime.
The autoscaling kept the performance of the services great.
We saved money by running the workloads on AWS ECS in Fargate mode by having different settings for different services to save on the hardware configuration side as well as having scheduled tasks.

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Abdullah Khawer

DevOps Engineer

CallSign (Pvt.) Ltd.Information Technology & Services, 201-500 employees

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Amazon CloudWatch vs Amazon Elastic Container Service (Amazon ECS)