Amazon CloudWatch vs Foglight

We found that CloudWatch provides great value in terms of cost and maintenance time. It is cheap and requires virtually 0 upkeep. Of the other solutions we evaluated, Loggly and New Relic get quite expensive when you reach the volume of log data that we are processing even though in terms of set up and maintenance effort they are on par with CloudWatch. As dedicated log aggregation (Loggly) and application monitoring (New Relic) solutions, they do offer great features that are not exactly easy to replicate with CloudWatch, but we found that CloudWatch does more than enough to meet our needs. PaperTrail is also a relatively cheap option but has a very limited feature set. Finally, we have successfully used Graylog as part of a log aggregation stack (in tandem with fluentd and elasticsearch), and the dashboards you can create with this combination are simply spectacular. Unfortunately, even though the cost if self-hosting is relatively cheap, we found that maintaining that stack was difficult without having a dedicated engineer for it.

We were previously using Oracle to monitor resources across servers and networks. In general, that product was alright but the Foglight alerts are far superior to Oracle. The business goal of using Foglight is really to minimize business interruption costs so the faster and more noticeable the alerts, the better the product is at solving our problems.