Amazon CloudWatch is a native AWS monitoring tool for AWS programs. It provides data collection and resource monitoring capabilities.
$0
per canary run
Scout APM
Score 10.0 out of 10
Mid-Size Companies (51-1,000 employees)
Scout APM is offered to enable software developers to spend their time building products customers love by minimizing the effort required to identify and resolve performance issues. As a provider of Application Performance Monitoring (APM) tools, Scout states that their developer-centric approach pinpoints issues such as memory bloat, N+1 queries and other abnormalities, enabling customers to quickly resolve performance issues.
$129
per month
Pricing
Amazon CloudWatch
Scout APM
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
Small
$129.00
per month
Medium
$199.00
per month
Large
$399.00
per month
Offerings
Pricing Offerings
Amazon CloudWatch
Scout APM
Free Trial
Yes
Yes
Free/Freemium Version
Yes
No
Premium Consulting/Integration Services
Yes
No
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.
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.
To me, it's the best APM out there for a Rails application. It is really easy to set up, configure and start debugging any kind of bad-performing endpoint. We have solved issues going from High Response Time to Memory Leaks/Bloats. All of this can be achieved even if you are hosting your app in a PaaS like Heroku. (Where sometimes is difficult to install an agent like in other vendors).
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.
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.
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.
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 have preferred Scout APM over Datadog due to: - Easy to configure and install on Heroku Platform (Datadog's agent can give some trouble when installing it on Heroku's Dynos) - Easy to monitor normal behavior and be actionable on endpoints who are out of normal - It has an easier pricing which facilitates to make predictions on budget
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.
