Amazon CloudWatch vs. Splunk Cloud

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
Splunk Cloud
Score 8.3 out of 10
N/A
A data platform service thats help users search, analyze, visualize and act on data. The service can go live in as little as two days, and with an IT backend managed by Splunk experts, users can focus on acting on data. Search any kind of data in real-time to detect and prevent issues before they happen with access to streaming and machine learning capabilities. Search any kind of data in real-time to detect and prevent issues before they happen with access to the latest streaming and machine…N/A
Pricing
Amazon CloudWatchSplunk Cloud
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 CloudWatchSplunk Cloud
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
Community Pulse
Amazon CloudWatchSplunk Cloud
Considered Both Products
Amazon CloudWatch
Chose Amazon CloudWatch
Ultimately because we are in the AWS cloud we need a tool to report, alert, and hold our logs in AWS, and AWS cloudwatch has great integrations with all existing AWS products. There are some UX quirks and I wish the dashboarding tools could stack up against some of the …
Splunk Cloud
Chose Splunk Cloud
We selected Splunk Cloud due to the simplicity to use and get data in. We found that Splunk Cloud gives a unified simple searching and dashboarding interface which can be used to search and visualise data from multiple systems with ease.
Top Pros
Top Cons
Features
Amazon CloudWatchSplunk Cloud
Security Information and Event Management (SIEM)
Comparison of Security Information and Event Management (SIEM) features of Product A and Product B
Amazon CloudWatch
-
Ratings
Splunk Cloud
9.0
15 Ratings
14% above category average
Centralized event and log data collection00 Ratings9.015 Ratings
Correlation00 Ratings9.715 Ratings
Event and log normalization/management00 Ratings9.715 Ratings
Deployment flexibility00 Ratings9.015 Ratings
Integration with Identity and Access Management Tools00 Ratings9.313 Ratings
Custom dashboards and workspaces00 Ratings9.715 Ratings
Host and network-based intrusion detection00 Ratings8.713 Ratings
Data integration/API management00 Ratings8.75 Ratings
Behavioral analytics and baselining00 Ratings9.04 Ratings
Rules-based and algorithmic detection thresholds00 Ratings8.36 Ratings
Response orchestration and automation00 Ratings8.04 Ratings
Reporting and compliance management00 Ratings8.76 Ratings
Incident indexing/searching00 Ratings9.36 Ratings
Best Alternatives
Amazon CloudWatchSplunk Cloud
Small Businesses
InfluxDB
InfluxDB
Score 8.5 out of 10
AlienVault USM
AlienVault USM
Score 8.0 out of 10
Medium-sized Companies
IBM Instana
IBM Instana
Score 9.0 out of 10
Splunk Enterprise
Splunk Enterprise
Score 8.3 out of 10
Enterprises
IBM Instana
IBM Instana
Score 9.0 out of 10
Microsoft Sentinel
Microsoft Sentinel
Score 8.5 out of 10
All AlternativesView all alternativesView all alternatives
User Ratings
Amazon CloudWatchSplunk Cloud
Likelihood to Recommend
8.5
(38 ratings)
8.9
(15 ratings)
Usability
-
(0 ratings)
8.0
(1 ratings)
Support Rating
8.4
(8 ratings)
7.2
(4 ratings)
User Testimonials
Amazon CloudWatchSplunk Cloud
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
Splunk
Splunk is excellent when all your data is in one location. Its ability to correlate all that data is intuitive (once the hurdle of learning the query language is overcome). It is also easy to standardize the presentation of information to the company. When data is siloed/standalone, other systems can be cheaper and faster to implement.
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
Splunk
  • This SIEM consolidates multiple data points and offers several features and benefits, creating custom dashboards and managing alert workflows.
  • Splunk Cloud provides a simple way to have a central monitoring and security solution. Though it does not have a huge learning curve, you should spend some time learning the basics.
  • Splunk Cloud enables me to create and schedule statistical reports on network use for Management.
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
Splunk
  • The SPL programming language that the queries are built in is not very intuitive.
  • There should be a better repository of pre-built queries for what I would think of as common Active Directory usage monitoring.
  • I would like to see more free training/familiarization information made available.
Read full review
Usability
Amazon AWS
No answers on this topic
Splunk
Overall, it is very usable. I would like if recent searches were saved for longer because I always have to refer to my notes when I'm looking for something specific and it's been a few weeks. But that's a small issue, and the actual search and browsing interface is easy to use and powerful.
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
Splunk
Splunk Cloud support is sorely lacking unfortunately. The portal where you submit tickets is not very good and is lacking polish. Tickets are left for days without any updates and when chased it is only sometimes you get a reply back. I get the feeling the support team are very understaffed and have far too much going on. From what I know, Splunk is aware of this and seem to be trying to remedy it.
Read full review
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
Splunk
Splunk Cloud blows Sumo Logic out of the water. The experience is night and day. We went from several highly stressed IT security professionals who were unsure if the data they were getting was valuable, to very happy IT security professionals who can now be more proactive and get all the information they need.
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
Splunk
  • End-end visibility across your departmental silos
  • Strengthen the overall global monitoring posture
  • Move from Reactive to Proactive Monitoring
  • Highly secure environment at your finger-tips
  • Takes you away from managing infrastructure/administration, allows saving time & money. Reduce the overall TCO (Total Cost of Ownership)
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