Amazon CloudWatch vs PagerDuty | TrustRadius

What users are saying about

Score 8.5 out of 10

Based on 109 reviews and ratings

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Score 9.2 out of 10

Based on 154 reviews and ratings

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Pros

Managing log retention periods is very simple with CloudWatch, and can be configured on a per-group basis.
Monitoring host performance is very easy when coupled with the CloudWatch Agent on an EC2 instance. A simple installation and configuration replaces an entire 3rd-party host monitoring stack.
CloudWatch is flexible enough for not just host monitoring, but application monitoring as well. It's easy to pipe local logs up to CloudWatch and extract structured data in order to monitor and set alerts on custom app metrics.

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Founder

finbox.ioInternet, 1-10 employees

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Great scheduling capability. You can define very precise schedules for your agents and PagerDuty will condense that down into a simple on-call schedule.
PagerDuty will integrate with just about anything. They have a fantastic API and a huge library of integrations already built, plus the ability to use good old email.
The live call routing feature, while an extra add-on, is an awesome extension to PagerDuty.

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Verified User

Administrator in Information Technology

Biotechnology Company, 51-200 employees

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Cons

CloudWatch doesn't monitor things outside of the cloud, it's not what it is intended for.
Billing is confusing as it bills on Dashboard, metrics called, custom metrics, etc. Hard to forecast the charge.
Paradigm is confusing sometimes and difficult to learn.

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Verified User

C-Level Executive in Information Technology

Retail Company, 1001-5000 employees

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PagerDuty lacks the ability to handle multiple environments across different teams.
I would like a feature in PagerDuty where a user can deactivate or disable an alert on demand even if you're not on call.
The email integration in PagerDuty a nice feature, however, there isn't much flexibility in terms of managing emails that are sent to and from PagerDuty.
I would like to see PagerDuty mobile app allow users to add and customize alerts with email, text or phone calls.

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Verified User

Professional in Information Technology

Investment Management Company, 1001-5000 employees

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Likelihood to Renew

No score

No answers yet

No answers on this topic

PagerDuty 9.2

Based on 4 answers

Understanding when the customer experience is degraded is essential to our business. Everyone understands how to use PagerDuty and it is integrated with our playbooks for responding to emergencies. PagerDuty is reliable, and provides the features we require.

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Verified User

Engineer in Engineering

Research Company, 11-50 employees

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Usability

Amazon CloudWatch 7.0

Based on 2 answers

The tool collects a great deal of data, and data that's not available many other places. But the data is hidden in obscure places, and the logs are hard to read and follow. The user interface could use a heavy rework, and several companies have made a business out of scraping the data and presenting it better.

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Verified User

Professional in Information Technology

Human Resources Company, 51-200 employees

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PagerDuty 10.0

Based on 3 answers

As I've been using this app for the last 3 years, I would like to see a few additions, like exposing the "create slack channel" option from the mobile app, rather than just from the PD website from the specific incident

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Incident Manager

Leadership for Customer Technical Escalation Management in the San Francisco Bay AreaInformation Technology & Services, 5001-10,000 employees

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Support Rating

Amazon CloudWatch 7.6

Based on 16 answers

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.

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Ramindu Deshapriya

Lead Consultant - Technology

VirtusaComputer Software, 10,001+ employees

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PagerDuty 8.9

Based on 102 answers

I can reach support via email or online chat functionality. It helped me in the initial configuration and also how to best setup. The response time is very fast for any question I brought forward. The support analysts were very knowledgeable about the products and its functionality. They were respectful of what stage of use the customer is at.

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Verified User

Manager in Information Technology

Hospital & Health Care Company, 5001-10,000 employees

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Alternatives Considered

I can only speak to how it's positively benefited my organization. The problem was that hosting in-house servers is no longer a cost-effective solution vs. containerization in the cloud. But once you rely on hosting servers in the cloud you need a tool to manage every aspect of that including log monitoring, resource utilization, and application performance. Amazon CloudWatch is exactly the tool you need.

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Verified User

Employee in Engineering

Information Services Company, 1001-5000 employees

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When we selected PagerDuty, we evaluated a few other solutions including Moogsoft, BigPanda, VictorOps and Splunk Enterprise. We decided on PagerDuty specifically for the automated on-call escalation capabilities. At the time when we subscribed to PagerDuty, event management was still very early and it was not a core strength. In comparison, event/alert management is a core competency of the other platforms. However, in the other platforms lacked automated on-call capabilities or partnered with PagerDuty to deliver the capability. To carry two solutions didn't make financial sense at the time. Therefore, we went down the path of PagerDuty leveraging the beta event management capabilities. Since then, the event management capabilities are very sound and exactly what we need.

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Verified User

Manager in Information Technology

Information Technology & Services Company, 1001-5000 employees

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Return on Investment

Scalability. Saving us cost when we can downgrade underperforming instances.
Great monitoring and peace of mine without always having to check logs to any services failure.
Support cost is high. It would be nicer if documentation would be easier to follow.

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Verified User

Engineer in Engineering

Computer Software Company, 51-200 employees

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Alerts can advise technology staff of an outage before users find out... this facilitates user productivity
User satisfaction... they have a sense they can reach support staff anytime and bypass service desk queues
Reduce cost of overtime for support staff by allowing us to rotate schedules and not have everyone on-call

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Verified User

Vice-President in Information Technology

Transportation/Trucking/Railroad Company, 201-500 employees

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Screenshots

See All (5) Amazon CloudWatch Screenshots

See All (6) PagerDuty Screenshots

Pricing Details

General

Free Trial

Yes

Free/Freemium Version

Yes

Premium Consulting/Integration Services

Yes

Entry-level set up fee?

No

Amazon CloudWatch Editions & Modules

Edition

First 10,000 Metrics	$0.30¹
Next 240,000 Metrics	$0.10¹
Next 750,000 Metrics	$0.05¹
Over 1,000,000 Metrics	$0.02¹

Per Metric

Additional Pricing 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.

General

Free Trial

Yes

Free/Freemium Version

Yes

Premium Consulting/Integration Services

Yes

Entry-level set up fee?

No

PagerDuty Editions & Modules

Edition

Free	$0¹
Professional	$19²
Business	$39³
Digital Operations	Contact sales team

per month
per 5 users/per month
per user/per month

Additional Pricing Details

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