Amazon CloudWatch vs. Splunk Enterprise

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 Enterprise
Score 8.3 out of 10
N/A
Splunk is software for searching, monitoring, and analyzing machine-generated big data, via a web-style interface. It captures, indexes and correlates real-time data in a searchable repository from which it can generate graphs, reports, alerts, dashboards and visualizations.N/A
Pricing
Amazon CloudWatchSplunk Enterprise
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 Enterprise
Free Trial
YesYes
Free/Freemium Version
YesYes
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 Enterprise
Considered Both Products
Amazon CloudWatch
Chose Amazon CloudWatch
I feel that CloudWatch will always remain the backbone of log analytics, events, and alarms. However, we can use other products in conjunction with it for better log analytics and monitoring. In my organization, we also ingest logs from CloudWatch to Splunk and ELK. This way we …
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 Enterprise

No answer on this topic

Top Pros
Top Cons
Features
Amazon CloudWatchSplunk Enterprise
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 Enterprise
7.4
54 Ratings
5% below category average
Centralized event and log data collection00 Ratings6.553 Ratings
Correlation00 Ratings6.052 Ratings
Event and log normalization/management00 Ratings6.153 Ratings
Deployment flexibility00 Ratings7.549 Ratings
Integration with Identity and Access Management Tools00 Ratings7.549 Ratings
Custom dashboards and workspaces00 Ratings8.554 Ratings
Host and network-based intrusion detection00 Ratings7.037 Ratings
Data integration/API management00 Ratings8.35 Ratings
Behavioral analytics and baselining00 Ratings7.74 Ratings
Rules-based and algorithmic detection thresholds00 Ratings7.84 Ratings
Response orchestration and automation00 Ratings6.94 Ratings
Reporting and compliance management00 Ratings7.94 Ratings
Incident indexing/searching00 Ratings8.95 Ratings
Best Alternatives
Amazon CloudWatchSplunk Enterprise
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
InsightIDR
InsightIDR
Score 8.5 out of 10
Enterprises
IBM Instana
IBM Instana
Score 9.0 out of 10
Microsoft Sentinel
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Score 8.5 out of 10
All AlternativesView all alternativesView all alternatives
User Ratings
Amazon CloudWatchSplunk Enterprise
Likelihood to Recommend
8.5
(38 ratings)
7.0
(70 ratings)
Likelihood to Renew
-
(0 ratings)
10.0
(17 ratings)
Usability
-
(0 ratings)
9.0
(3 ratings)
Availability
-
(0 ratings)
10.0
(1 ratings)
Support Rating
8.4
(8 ratings)
8.4
(17 ratings)
Online Training
-
(0 ratings)
8.0
(1 ratings)
Implementation Rating
-
(0 ratings)
9.0
(2 ratings)
Product Scalability
-
(0 ratings)
9.1
(1 ratings)
User Testimonials
Amazon CloudWatchSplunk Enterprise
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
Pros: Splunk is very well suited if you have multiple log sources of related data. All of them can be correlated and tasks can be automated based on the requirement. Other than alerts, Splunk can also run a specific script of your choice, based on some defined conditions. Cons: If you have a few logs but a large number of log sources, Splunk can be very expensive.
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
  • Real-time + Scheduled alerts - i-e you can set up alerts which are actively monitoring your logs
  • Pretty good response time for search results. With our key/value logging, Splunk makes it blazing fast to query the data.
  • Dashboards provide insights into historical data
  • Love how Splunk indexes all of the data and provides keys to search on
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
  • At times some queries can run slowly if indices are not on a portion of the query you use.
  • Setup time initially can be difficult if your logs aren't stored in common locations or in a common way to write the log.
  • Ability to ingest logs from different locations without having to change code to put logs in a certain place (pro and con).
  • Searches can be a bit more difficult to look through if your log isn't pulled in a manner that is easy to read through splunk.
Read full review
Likelihood to Renew
Amazon AWS
No answers on this topic
Splunk
We are using Splunk extensively in our projects and we have recently upgraded to Splunk version 6.0 which is quite efficient and giving expected results. We keep track of updates and new features Splunk introduces periodically and try to introduce those features in our day to day activities for improvement in our reporting system and other tasks.
Read full review
Usability
Amazon AWS
No answers on this topic
Splunk
You can literally throw in a single word into Splunk and it will pull back all instances of that word across all of your logs for the time span you select (provided you have permission to see that data). We have several users who have taken a few of the free courses from Splunk that are able to pull data out of it everyday with little help at all.
Read full review
Reliability and Availability
Amazon AWS
No answers on this topic
Splunk
When properly setup and configured, Splunk is extremely reliable.
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 maintains a well resourced support system that has been consistent since we purchased the product. They help out in a timely manner and provide expert level information as needed. We typically open cases online and communicate when possible via e-mail and are able to resolve most issues with that method.
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Online Training
Amazon AWS
No answers on this topic
Splunk
The online course was simple clear and described the main capabilities of the solution. There is also an initial module that can be done for free so anyone can familiarize themselves with the functionality of this solution. On the other hand, however, there could be more free online courses. Maybe even with a certificate, this would broaden the group of people who are familiar with the platform while increasing familiarity with the solution itself.
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Implementation Rating
Amazon AWS
No answers on this topic
Splunk
Smooth without too many major issues.
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
I wanted to learn a new language that I can quickly master and implement. Splunk is easy, fun to use and best of all, it can be developed in hours not days or weeks. Splunk is fundamentally a programming language that is minimal but yet powerful enough to collect, analyze and visualize data.
Read full review
Scalability
Amazon AWS
No answers on this topic
Splunk
Splunk can scale in to the petabyte per day range which of course is awesome
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
  • Overall very positive. It has provided visibility to what is going on within our network.
  • One drawback is the time it takes to get up to speed with the application, but this is up to the user, and Splunk education is excellent.
  • In my field, IT Security, there are few other friends to have in your back pocket better than Splunk. They are just that good.
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