Amazon CloudWatch vs. Kubernetes

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
Kubernetes
Score 8.9 out of 10
N/A
Kubernetes is an open-source container cluster manager.N/A
Pricing
Amazon CloudWatchKubernetes
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
No answers on this topic
Offerings
Pricing Offerings
Amazon CloudWatchKubernetes
Free Trial
YesNo
Free/Freemium Version
YesNo
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
Features
Amazon CloudWatchKubernetes
Container Management
Comparison of Container Management features of Product A and Product B
Amazon CloudWatch
-
Ratings
Kubernetes
7.8
1 Ratings
0% above category average
Security and Isolation00 Ratings10.01 Ratings
Container Orchestration00 Ratings7.01 Ratings
Cluster Management00 Ratings9.01 Ratings
Storage Management00 Ratings9.01 Ratings
Resource Allocation and Optimization00 Ratings8.01 Ratings
Discovery Tools00 Ratings5.01 Ratings
Update Rollouts and Rollbacks00 Ratings5.01 Ratings
Analytics, Monitoring, and Logging00 Ratings9.01 Ratings
Best Alternatives
Amazon CloudWatchKubernetes
Small Businesses
InfluxDB
InfluxDB
Score 8.5 out of 10
Portainer
Portainer
Score 9.3 out of 10
Medium-sized Companies
IBM Instana
IBM Instana
Score 9.0 out of 10
Docker
Docker
Score 9.2 out of 10
Enterprises
IBM Instana
IBM Instana
Score 9.0 out of 10
Docker
Docker
Score 9.2 out of 10
All AlternativesView all alternativesView all alternatives
User Ratings
Amazon CloudWatchKubernetes
Likelihood to Recommend
8.5
(38 ratings)
8.9
(16 ratings)
Support Rating
8.4
(8 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
User Testimonials
Amazon CloudWatchKubernetes
Likelihood to Recommend
Amazon AWS
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.
Read full review
Kubernetes
K8s should be avoided - If your application works well without being converted into microservices-based architecture & fits correctly in a VM, needs less scaling, have a fixed traffic pattern then it is better to keep away from Kubernetes. Otherwise, the operational challenges & technical expertise will add a lot to the OPEX. Also, if you're the one who thinks that containers consume fewer resources as compared to VMs then this is not true. As soon as you convert your application to a microservice-based architecture, a lot of components will add up, shooting your resource consumption even higher than VMs so, please beware. Kubernetes is a good choice - When the application needs quick scaling, is already in microservice-based architecture, has no fixed traffic pattern, most of the employees already have desired skills.
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
Kubernetes
  • Complex cluster management can be done with simple commands with strong authentication and authorization schemes
  • Exhaustive documentation and open community smoothens the learning process
  • As a user a few concepts like pod, deployment and service are sufficient to go a long way
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
Kubernetes
  • Local development, Kubernetes does tend to be a bit complicated and unnecessary in environments where all development is done locally.
  • The need for add-ons, Helm is almost required when running Kubernetes. This brings a whole new tool to manage and learn before a developer can really start to use Kubernetes effectively.
  • Finicy configmap schemes. Kubernetes configmaps often have environment breaking hangups. The fail safes surrounding configmaps are sadly lacking.
Read full review
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
Kubernetes
No answers on this topic
Alternatives Considered
Amazon AWS
I believe that CloudWatch is a better solution to use with AWS services and resources in terms of cost and ease of integration with AWS infrastructure services. But keep in mind that Elasticsearch is better at aggregating application-level metrics. We chose CloudWatch because of its capabilities to integrate and monitor AWS services in almost real-time.
Read full review
Kubernetes
Most of the required features for any orchestration tool or framework, which is provided by Kubernetes. After understanding all modules and features of the K8S, it is the best fit for us as compared with others out there.
Read full review
Return on Investment
Amazon AWS
  • 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.
Read full review
Kubernetes
  • Because of microservices, Kubernetes makes it easy to find the cost of each application easily.
  • Like every new technology, initially, it took more resources to educate ourselves but over a period of time, I believe it's going to be worth it.
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