Amazon CloudWatch vs. Grafana

Overview
ProductRatingMost Used ByProduct SummaryStarting Price
Amazon CloudWatch
Score 8.3 out of 10
N/A
Amazon CloudWatch is a native AWS monitoring tool for AWS programs. It provides data collection and resource monitoring capabilities.
$0
per canary run
Grafana
Score 8.7 out of 10
N/A
Grafana is a data visualization tool developed by Grafana Labs in New York. It is available open source, managed (Grafana Cloud), or via an enterprise edition with enhanced features. Grafana has pluggable data source model and comes bundled with support for popular time series databases like Graphite. It also has built-in support for cloud monitoring vendors like Amazon Cloudwatch, Microsoft Azure and SQL databases like MySQL. Grafana can combine data from many places into a single dashboard.
$0
Pricing
Amazon CloudWatchGrafana
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
Grafana Cloud - Pro
$8
per month up to 1 active user
Grafana Cloud - Free
Free
10k metrics + 50GB logs + 50GB traces up to 3 active users
Grafana Cloud - Advanced
Volume Discounts
custom data usage custom active users
Grafana - Enterprise Stack
Custom Pricing
Offerings
Pricing Offerings
Amazon CloudWatchGrafana
Free Trial
YesYes
Free/Freemium Version
YesYes
Premium Consulting/Integration Services
YesNo
Entry-level Setup FeeNo setup feeNo setup fee
Additional DetailsWith 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.
More Pricing Information
Community Pulse
Amazon CloudWatchGrafana
Considered Both Products
Amazon CloudWatch
Chose Amazon CloudWatch
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 …
Chose Amazon CloudWatch
You can create very easily particular alarms.
Grafana

No answer on this topic

Top Pros
Top Cons
Features
Amazon CloudWatchGrafana
BI Standard Reporting
Comparison of BI Standard Reporting features of Product A and Product B
Amazon CloudWatch
-
Ratings
Grafana
8.0
5 Ratings
5% below category average
Pixel Perfect reports00 Ratings6.45 Ratings
Customizable dashboards00 Ratings10.05 Ratings
Report Formatting Templates00 Ratings7.65 Ratings
Ad-hoc Reporting
Comparison of Ad-hoc Reporting features of Product A and Product B
Amazon CloudWatch
-
Ratings
Grafana
7.3
4 Ratings
9% below category average
Drill-down analysis00 Ratings6.84 Ratings
Formatting capabilities00 Ratings8.04 Ratings
Integration with R or other statistical packages00 Ratings6.24 Ratings
Report sharing and collaboration00 Ratings8.44 Ratings
Report Output and Scheduling
Comparison of Report Output and Scheduling features of Product A and Product B
Amazon CloudWatch
-
Ratings
Grafana
8.7
4 Ratings
3% above category average
Publish to Web00 Ratings7.84 Ratings
Publish to PDF00 Ratings9.04 Ratings
Report Versioning00 Ratings9.04 Ratings
Report Delivery Scheduling00 Ratings8.44 Ratings
Delivery to Remote Servers00 Ratings9.44 Ratings
Data Discovery and Visualization
Comparison of Data Discovery and Visualization features of Product A and Product B
Amazon CloudWatch
-
Ratings
Grafana
7.7
4 Ratings
6% below category average
Pre-built visualization formats (heatmaps, scatter plots etc.)00 Ratings8.24 Ratings
Location Analytics / Geographic Visualization00 Ratings8.64 Ratings
Predictive Analytics00 Ratings7.04 Ratings
Pattern Recognition and Data Mining00 Ratings6.82 Ratings
Best Alternatives
Amazon CloudWatchGrafana
Small Businesses
InfluxDB
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Score 8.7 out of 10
Supermetrics
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Score 9.4 out of 10
Medium-sized Companies
GitLab
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Score 8.6 out of 10
Supermetrics
Supermetrics
Score 9.4 out of 10
Enterprises
NetBrain Technologies
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Score 8.9 out of 10
Sigma
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Score 9.2 out of 10
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User Ratings
Amazon CloudWatchGrafana
Likelihood to Recommend
7.7
(40 ratings)
10.0
(5 ratings)
Usability
7.0
(3 ratings)
10.0
(1 ratings)
Support Rating
8.4
(8 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
User Testimonials
Amazon CloudWatchGrafana
Likelihood to Recommend
Amazon AWS
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.
Read full review
Grafana Labs
If I was starting over on an Observability platform, Grafana would be my number 1 choice due to the flexibility and ability to act as a single platform either on its own or combining multiple data sources. The trick however, is that it can be fairly complex to learn and setup, so time is needed to make it a successful implementation. There is a level of cognitive load required
Read full review
Pros
Amazon AWS
  • 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.
Read full review
Grafana Labs
  • Alerting through many different medium as Slack, Email, Webhook etc
  • Beautiful and unlimited number of dashboards to view your metrics and tweak them as you please
  • Log aggregation and powerful Logql to filter and view your logs
  • Microservices monitoring
  • Large number of plugins and data sources to collect your metrics from almost anywhere
Read full review
Cons
Amazon AWS
  • 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.
Read full review
Grafana Labs
  • There are some settings which we can't configure from UI (Web Console).
  • We've open[ed] up configuration files in command line text editors and manually do the settings e.g. LDAP/SSO configuration.
  • In terms of visualization, it's best, but it doesn't support log analysis otherwise it could destroy business of all other visualization tools.
Read full review
Usability
Amazon AWS
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.
Read full review
Grafana Labs
It is infinitely flexible. If you can imagine it, Grafana can almost certainly do it. Usability may be in the eye of the beholder however, as there is time needed to curate the experience and get the dashboards customized to how it makes sense to you. I know one thing they are working on are more templates, based on data sources
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Support Rating
Amazon AWS
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
Grafana Labs
No answers on this topic
Alternatives Considered
Amazon AWS
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
Read full review
Grafana Labs
Grafana blows Nagios out of the water when it comes to customization. The ability to feed almost any data source makes it very versatile and the cost is great.
Read full review
Return on Investment
Amazon AWS
  • Positive for alarms and alert notifications once configured/customized.
  • Has upfront learning curve, and cost can increase as does the alarm activity and monitoring details you may require.
  • Cost-effective for any size organization keeping with AWS and utilizing its native tools is a savings in long-term ROI.
Read full review
Grafana Labs
  • Time-consuming reports reduced
  • Spotting trends in services
  • Preventive maintenance
Read full review
ScreenShots

Amazon CloudWatch Screenshots

Screenshot of How Amazon CloudWatch works - high-level overviewScreenshot of CloudWatch Application MonitoringScreenshot of CloudWatch ServiceLens and Contributor Insights - expedite resolution timeScreenshot of Improve Observability with Amazon CloudWatchScreenshot of Visual overview of Amazon CloudWatch