Amazon CloudWatch is a native AWS monitoring tool for AWS programs. It provides data collection and resource monitoring capabilities.
$0
per canary run
Datadog
Score 8.6 out of 10
N/A
Datadog is a monitoring service for IT, Dev and Ops teams who write and run applications at scale, and want to turn the massive amounts of data produced by their apps, tools and services into actionable insight.
$18
per month per host
Join.me (discontinued)
Score 9.8 out of 10
N/A
Join.me, once acquired by LogMeIn in 2019, was an audio, video, and web conferencing tool targeted at SMBs. Its software can be used across various devices and includes features such as one-click scheduling, personal links, interactive whiteboards, and presenter swapping. It has since been discontinued.
$10
per month
Pricing
Amazon CloudWatch
Datadog
Join.me (discontinued)
Editions & Modules
Canaries
$0.0012
per canary run
Logs - Analyze (Logs Insights queries)
$0.005
per GB of data scanned
Over 1,000,000 Metrics
$0.02
per month
Contributor Insights - Matched Log Events
$0.02
per month per one million log events that match the rule
Logs - Store (Archival)
$0.03
per GB
Next 750,000 Metrics
$0.05
per month
Next 240,000 Metrics
$0.10
per month
Alarm - Standard Resolution (60 Sec)
$0.10
per month per alarm metric
First 10,000 Metrics
$0.30
per month
Alarm - High Resolution (10 Sec)
$0.30
per month per alarm metric
Alarm - Composite
$0.50
per month per alarm
Logs - Collect (Data Ingestion)
$0.50
per GB
Contributor Insights
$0.50
per month per rule
Events - Custom
$1.00
per million events
Events - Cross-account
$1.00
per million events
CloudWatch RUM
$1
per 100k events
Dashboard
$3.00
per month per dashboard
CloudWatch Evidently - Events
$5
per 1 million events
CloudWatch Evidently - Analysis Units
$7.50
per 1 million analysis units
Log Management
$1.27
per month (billed annually) per host
Infrastructure
$15.00
per month (billed annually) per host
Standard
$18
per month per host
Enterprise
$27
per month per host
DevSecOps Pro
$27
per month per host
APM
$31.00
per month (billed annually) per host
DevSecOps Enterprise
$41
per month per host
Lite
$10.00
Month
Pro
$10.00
Month
Business
$10.00
Month
Offerings
Pricing Offerings
Amazon CloudWatch
Datadog
Join.me (discontinued)
Free Trial
Yes
Yes
Yes
Free/Freemium Version
Yes
Yes
No
Premium Consulting/Integration Services
Yes
No
No
Entry-level Setup Fee
No setup fee
Optional
No setup fee
Additional 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.
Discount available for annual pricing. Multi-Year/Volume discounts available (500+ hosts/mo).
CloudWatch's log search features are impoverished compared to PaperTrail's or Loggly's. However, CloudWatch aggregates logs from Lambda, ECS, API Gateway and more out-of-the-box. You do not need to manage anything. You do not need to worry about an errant logging configuration …
As CloudWatch is integrated into AWS already, its ready to go. External products such as Nagios require a fair bit of work to actually get the metrics into the dashboards. Products like SolarWinds and Datadog provide quite a high level of very easy integration which allows for …
Amazon CloudWatch is fully integrated into your existing AWS account, and provides easy hooks into several different services to make a cohesive infrastructure. Unfortunately, using other services will not allow you to get into the weeds to do everything Amazon CloudWatch can …
I feel that CloudWatch will always remain the backbone of log analytics, events, and alarms. However, we can use other products in conjunction with it for better log analytics and monitoring. In my organization, we also ingest logs from CloudWatch to Splunk and ELK. This way we …
First think first - it's easy to use, and very easy to implement in any infrastructure. It provides a custom dashboard and monitors. I’ve used or evaluated Grafana, Prometheus, Amazon CloudWatch, and Dynatrace, and each tool has strong capabilities. Prometheus + Grafana provide …
Datadog is significantly more user-friendly than CloudWatch.In terms of capabilities, they're similar. I would not call either of the best-in-class for any single feature, but Datadog feels more polished and ready to use overall.Multi-cloud monitoring is a clear differentiator …
Datadog seems to be the most feature-rich of all the alternatives we've considered, however due to problems outlined earlier, some of the others have benefits. OpenTel can give us a way to make our platforms compatible with a variety of vendors, and can be done without …
Datadog is a more complex but complete solution than any of the other Log Aggregation, monitoring, or general observabilty tools that we have trialed. I found it easier to setup following useful and up-to-date documentation provided directly by Datadog instead of scattered …
UI of the Datadog is easy to understand and integration steps are easy to understand. It also provides the troubleshooting steps which are easy to understand. Supports multi cloud integrations which is very important for all the customers to know about the cloud service's …
Verified User
Engineer
Chose Datadog
I selected Datadog because of its features and the wide range of integration support. As I already told it supports more that 600+ integrations which helps and organization to keep everything in a single place and also its AI feature which is reducing the time for root cause …
For out business we find that AWS Cloudwatch is good at providing real-time metrics for monitoring and analysing the performance and usage of our platform by customers. It is possible to create custom metrics from log events, such people adding items to a basket, checking out or abandoning their orders.
Datadog may be better suited for teams that have a more out-of-the-box infrastructure, on the primary platforms Datadog supports. You may also have better results if you have a bigger team dedicated to devops and/or a bigger budget. We found that trying to adapt it to our use case (small team, .NET on AWS Fargate) wasn't feasible. We continually ran into roadblocks that required us to dig through documentation (and at times, having to figure out some documentation was wrong), go back and forth with support, and in my opinion, waste money on excessive and unintended usages due to opaque pricing models and inaccurate usage reports, as well as broken/non-functional rate sampling controls.
I would neither recommend nor dissuade anyone from using Join.Me. When it first came on the scene, it was a game-changer as far as providing remote access to other authorized individuals and helped save a great deal of time trying to walk someone less proficient through all the detailed steps of computer repair. However, with the proliferation of Zoom and other conferencing products that also provide built-in remote access through its service, the need for a separate application is now limited and not as essential as its own product.
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.
The thing which Datadog does really well, one of them are its broad range of services integrations and features which makes it one step observability solution for all. We can monitor all types of our application, infrastructure, hosts, databases etc with Datadog.
Its custom dashboard feature which helps us to visualize the data in a better way . It supports different types of charts through those charts we can create our dashboard more attractive.
Its AI powered alerting capability though that we can easily identify the root cause and also it has a low noise alerting capability which means it correlated the similar type of issues.
No need to download anything to get started. Once you sign up you can get started from within your browser. This is probably the single best feature, its a get up and go solution for video conferencing and you do not need any software for it to work.
The one click join a meeting URL is genius. Users who struggle with remembering passwords or invites can just click a link and immediately participate in a meeting which means one email and a couple of clicks and a meeting can start.
Good control features - As the main user, you have many control features including deciding who can speak, annotations, screen sharing easily.
Screen Recordings to the Cloud - This can save on time when you have had a long conference, you can save a recording to the cloud and download it later.
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.
Alert windows cause lag in notifications (e.g. if the alert window is X errors in 1 hour, we won't get alerted until the end of the 1 hour range)
I would appreciate more supportive examples for how to filter and view metrics in the explorer
I would like a more clear interface for metrics that are missing in a time frame, rather than only showing tags/etc. for metrics that were collected within the currently viewed time frame
There should be a complete guide to understand its features before installation because if one feature will be missed then, we can’t get them working properly.
Furthermore, there should be high-quality internet for getting its function and it won’t work without good network coverage.
I think its interface is a little hard for beginners and is not that user friendly.
It's excellent at collecting logs. It's easy to set up. The viewing & querying part could be much better, though. The query syntax takes some time to get used to, & the examples are not helpful. Also, while being great, Log Insights requires manual picking of log streams to query across every time.
There are so many features that it can be hard to figure out where you need to go for your own use case. For example, RUM monitoring us buried in a "Digital Experience" sidebar setting when this is one of our key use cases that I sometimes struggle to find in the application. It appears that ECS + Fargate monitoring was recently released which is great because we had to build a lambda reporting solution for ephemeral task monitoring. But this new feature was never on my radar until I starting clicking around the application.
Join.me is one of the easiest programs I've ever used. It's so easy to get it set up and installed and even easier for someone to join a meeting. The controls are very intuitive and labeled appropriately. The UIX makes sense. It's been a reliable product in my app stack-I love it!
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.
The support team usually gets it right. We did have a rather complicate issue setting up monitoring on a domain controller. However, they are usually responsive and helpful over chat. The downside would be I don’t think they have any phone support. If that is important to you this might not be a good fit.
I honestly haven't reached out to their Support team. I get notifications of what they are working on which is good to see, but I haven't directly spoken with any of them. I think my main reason for this is that join.me gives me just what I need (not much more and not much less).
Grafana is definitely a lot better and flexible in comparison with Amazon CloudWatch for visualisation, as it offers much more options and is versatile. VictoriaMetrics and Prometheus are time-series databases which can do almost everything cloudwatch can do in a better and cheaper way. Integrating Grafana with them will make it more capable Elasticsearch for log retention and querying will surpass cloudwatch log monitoring in both performance and speed
Our logs are very important, and Datadog manages them exceptionally well. We frequently use Datadog services for our investigations. Use case: Monitor your apps, infrastructure, APIs, and user experience.
Key features:
Logs, metrics, and APM (Application Performance Monitoring)
Real-time alerting and dashboards
Supports Kubernetes, AWS, GCP, and other integrations
RUM (Real User Monitoring) and Synthetics
✅ Best for backend, server, and distributed systems monitoring.
If you're looking for something basic that handles a little bit of everything when it comes to meetings, screen shares and remote desktop control join.me is a great options. If you're a super user and really wanting a lot of detailed features and rich user interfaces and money is not an issue you may want to consider use specific options.
Customer support solution - join.me has made it so much easier to quickly get with a customer and see their trouble and show them a solution. This saves lots of back and forth time and gives the customer more power over owning their solution.
More efficient communication - without join.me we would waste time going back and forth on emails or slack trying to get our message across. Join.me lets us quickly show AND tell others what's going on. I honestly don't know how we ever functioned without it.
