Amazon CloudWatch vs AWS Config

Likelihood to Recommend

Ideal for monitoring AWS services and workloads. We have several of our websites entirely hosted on AWS and we're able to get a Grafana dashboard of all the relevant metrics from CloudFront, S3, EC2, RDS, and Elastic Beanstalk. This can be set up within the hour or templated on your code for infrastructure (we do this with terraform & cloud formation). By design, it isn't suited for non-AWS workloads.

Read full review

Verified User

Professional in Finance and Accounting

Financial Services Company, 501-1000 employees

View all 34 answers on this topic

It's really good if your infrastructure services is all in AWS, that means everything could be audited and monitored using AWS config. You also can create alarms to notify you or your team about any changes on your AWS resources which is very useful to prevent abuse if you have a fairly large team. It's also very useful whenever some third party wants to audit your AWS resources, if you have a fairly comprehensive AWS config configured, the auditing process will be easy since they only need to look at your AWS config setup.

Read full review

Verified User

Engineer in Information Technology

Professional Training & Coaching Company, 11-50 employees

View all 3 answers on this topic

Pros

Managing log retention periods is very simple with CloudWatch, and can be configured on a per-group basis.
Monitoring host performance is very easy when coupled with the CloudWatch Agent on an EC2 instance. A simple installation and configuration replaces an entire 3rd-party host monitoring stack.
CloudWatch is flexible enough for not just host monitoring, but application monitoring as well. It's easy to pipe local logs up to CloudWatch and extract structured data in order to monitor and set alerts on custom app metrics.

Read full review

Brian Dentino

Founder

finbox.ioInternet, 1-10 employees

View all 34 answers on this topic

It can help you define rules for provisioning and configuring of your AWS. We use it for this purpose.
It maintains configuration history. So you can use the AWS Management Console, API, or CLI to obtain details of past configurations
It gives you a configuration snapshot of all of your AWS resources and you can store it in AWS S3.
You can integrate it with AWS CloudTrail to correlate configuration changes to particular events in your account.

Read full review

Verified User

Team Lead in Engineering

Financial Services Company, 10,001+ employees

View all 3 answers on this topic

Cons

CloudWatch doesn't monitor things outside of the cloud, it's not what it is intended for.
Billing is confusing as it bills on Dashboard, metrics called, custom metrics, etc. Hard to forecast the charge.
Paradigm is confusing sometimes and difficult to learn.

Read full review

Verified User

C-Level Executive in Information Technology

Retail Company, 1001-5000 employees

View all 34 answers on this topic

Vendor lock-in, no easy migration path for example if you want to move some workloads to Azure, you'd not be able to lift and shift.
Only at an AWS resource perspective - cannot do desired state configuration at an OS level (which makes sense but be good if you could even as a separate feature within AWS Config).

Read full review

Verified User

Professional in Finance and Accounting

Information Services Company, 501-1000 employees

View all 3 answers on this topic

Usability

Amazon CloudWatch 7.0

Based on 2 answers

The tool collects a great deal of data, and data that's not available many other places. But the data is hidden in obscure places, and the logs are hard to read and follow. The user interface could use a heavy rework, and several companies have made a business out of scraping the data and presenting it better.

Read full review

Verified User

Professional in Information Technology

Human Resources Company, 51-200 employees

View all 2 answers on this topic

No score

No answers yet

No answers on this topic

Performance

No score

No answers yet

No answers on this topic

AWS Config 9.6

Based on 4 answers

The performance has never been an issue for us, the dashboard gives us real-time monitoring and the alert sends us the notification within less than a minute of it happening, this applies to all of the monitored resources on AWS. However we can't (or probably haven't figured out how to) integrate with any other third party services, so we can't really evaluate how it integrates with other services

Read full review

Verified User

Engineer in Information Technology

Professional Training & Coaching Company, 11-50 employees

View all 4 answers on this topic

Support Rating

Amazon CloudWatch 7.6

Based on 16 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.

Read full review

Ramindu Deshapriya

Lead Consultant - Technology

VirtusaComputer Software, 10,001+ employees

View all 16 answers on this topic

No score

No answers yet

No answers on this topic

Alternatives Considered

I can only speak to how it's positively benefited my organization. The problem was that hosting in-house servers is no longer a cost-effective solution vs. containerization in the cloud. But once you rely on hosting servers in the cloud you need a tool to manage every aspect of that including log monitoring, resource utilization, and application performance. Amazon CloudWatch is exactly the tool you need.

Read full review

Verified User

Employee in Engineering

Information Services Company, 1001-5000 employees

View all 34 answers on this topic

I do not know or have used any other product in AWS cloud space that matches what AWS Config provides. We have some custom built monitoring and governance, however that is there because AWS Config does not provide it currently.

Read full review

Verified User

Team Lead in Engineering

Financial Services Company, 10,001+ employees

View all 3 answers on this topic

Return on Investment

Scalability. Saving us cost when we can downgrade underperforming instances.
Great monitoring and peace of mine without always having to check logs to any services failure.
Support cost is high. It would be nicer if documentation would be easier to follow.

Read full review

Verified User

Engineer in Engineering

Computer Software Company, 51-200 employees

View all 34 answers on this topic

Security awareness. With multiple teams deploying provides easy visibility on any security risks. Security breaches would have a substantial impact on business so a vital investment with little costs.

Read full review

Verified User

Professional in Finance and Accounting

Information Services Company, 501-1000 employees

View all 3 answers on this topic

Pricing Details

General

Free Trial

Yes

Free/Freemium Version

Yes

Premium Consulting/Integration Services

Yes

Entry-level set up fee?

No

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

Per Metric

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

—

Premium Consulting/Integration Services

Yes

Entry-level set up fee?

No

AWS Config Editions & Modules

—

Additional Pricing Details

With AWS Config, you are charged based on the number of configuration items recorded, the number of active AWS Config rule evaluations and the number of conformance pack evaluations in your account. A configuration item is a record of the configuration state of a resource in your AWS account. An AWS Config rule evaluation is a compliance state evaluation of a resource by an AWS Config rule in your AWS account, and a conformance pack evaluation is the evaluation of a resource by an AWS Config rule within the conformance pack.

Amazon CloudWatch vs AWS Config