Amazon CloudWatch is a native AWS monitoring tool for AWS programs. It provides data collection and resource monitoring capabilities.
$0
per canary run
SolarWinds Loggly
Score 9.4 out of 10
Mid-Size Companies (51-1,000 employees)
Loggly is a cloud-based log management service provider. It does not require the use of proprietary software agents to collect log data. The service uses open source technologies, including ElasticSearch, Apache Lucene 4 and Apache Kafka.
$79
per month/billed annually
Pricing
Amazon CloudWatch
SolarWinds Loggly
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
Standard
$79
per month/billed annually
Pro
$159
per month/billed annually
Enterprise
$279
per month/billed annually
Offerings
Pricing Offerings
Amazon CloudWatch
SolarWinds Loggly
Free Trial
Yes
Yes
Free/Freemium Version
Yes
Yes
Premium Consulting/Integration Services
Yes
Yes
Entry-level Setup Fee
No setup fee
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.
Free trial for Standard and Pro plans for 14 days with all features.
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 …
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 …
Loggly was the easiest to use and the one that really allowed us to get a full view of what's going on with our services, and proactively solve problems.
With Loggly we can manage not only AWS apps but all the apps we have (not only Cloud-based apps). It is also very convenient to add users that need to have access to a given log streams: we do not need to manage an AWS IAM role/user. And the search engine is way more easy and …
We initially setup New Relic to monitor our servers/performance as well as look into the potential of having our servers log data into there as a "single source" of our data monitoring. However, we found that the logging needs in New Relic were not in line with the application …
I actually couldn't get anybody from Datadog to engage with me, the main problem we had was that our devices couldn't connect to an encrypted port, but we didn't want to send our logs in plain text over the internet. We implemented an on-net log aggregator which then connects …
Loggly was a mistake. We selected it to get a cheap vendor-hosted solution up and running quickly but have come to regret the decision and should have spent the effort to set up the right tool from the beginning.
Loggly is at another level at indexing and search experience. However, since CloudWatch has the full history with least cost it is always the fallback. So if Loggly has something like S3 glacier kind of feature for keeping old logs which are least accessed with less cost, that …
I honestly didn't shop around that much. I came from CloudWatch, which though it has been improving, was very frustrating when it came to just setting up a simple alarm when a specific log message is found, or extracting useful metrics from logs. Loggly was recommended to me by …
Loggly had the best parsing and also UI was very easy for the beginner that wants to track some logs and patterns. Anomaly pattern was very good feature. Also, alerting on Loggly was very easy to setup. The Logsense setup was very bad and painful. Sematext had very good UI, but …
The log aggregation software environment is very competitive. Many offer close to the same services and it's very hard to differentiate between the two. Loggly is easy to use and easy to manage and the reason why we went with them for this specific project. Also not having a …
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.
SolarWinds Loggly is great for capturing and organizing logs from 3rd party sources such as NGINX. Without SolarWinds Loggly it's really difficult to manage the logs overtime, find traffic patterns, and identify issues before they become a problem. Anyone who is routinely searching through massive log files could quickly benefit from the SolarWinds Loggly and it's capabilities.
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.
Putting our logs in one place and making them searchable. We use AWS, and CloudWatch has always been a little frustrating in this regard (though it has gotten better recently).
Deriving metrics from our logs. I think log-based metrics is such a good idea because your logs are the ultimate source for truth in regards to what the hell is going on inside your app. I have really loved the simplicity with which I can just count certain statements and call that a metric because just through the normal course of development certain log statements just naturally become a straightforward recording of an event having occurred.
Alerts. I actually have a few complaints about email alerts, but just the way I was able to set them up so easily has been huge. Since we started using Loggly, there have been at least 3 bugs that Loggly exposed that were frankly very bad. And withoutt Loggly or without a user reporting them, we would have never known they were happening! This is stuff I tried to set up in CloudWatch in various ways, but because of my own ignorance or perhaps the complexity/limitations of CloudWatch (or the complexity of my stack?), I wasn't getting the information that I needed until I was able to just tell Loggly to send me an email whenever the word "error" showed up.
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.
We have to use a log aggregating device to ship our logs to Loggly as our network devices can not connect on an encrypted protocol. I would prefer if we could use some sort of VPN-based connector to ship logs securely.
Sometimes when drilled down, it can be difficult to fully reset a search term to back all the way out of a drill down.
Loggly's easy setup, very good customer support, and intuitive interface make Loggly very easy to use. User access management is also very easy as we can tailor the experience for each of our developers to access the information they need without having to wade through other information. While there was a slight learning curve in how to view the logs the way some specifically wanted, everything was possible and quite easy to do.
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 have been great when we have logged tickets or had issues, most of the time it is down to user training, however we have had a couple of bugs that they have been able to iron out for us.
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.
We were using Zabbix. While it is an open-source solution that you can install for free the following things were limitations of the solution. 1) The scale and uptime of the solution are now your own problem. Since we were hosting at AWS this meant we still had a cost of the AWS solution. 2) The product is complicated from a configuration standpoint. In order to get anything meaningful out of it, you had to invest a lot of time and effort. We did consider NewRelic. I have experience with that product and do think that it is a solid alternative. Ultimately experience with the simplicity and speed of deployment with Loggly encouraged me to suggest using this again.
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.
Unfortunately, we hit our logging cap on a weekly basis and we lose logs after that.
We have lost logs after hitting the maximum during service outages. We have become accustomed to not being able to rely on having them, then things go poorly.
