Amazon CloudWatch vs Retrace

Likelihood to Recommend

Ideal for monitoring AWS services and workloads. We have several of our websites entirely hosted on AWS and we're able to get a Grafana dashboard of all the relevant metrics from CloudFront, S3, EC2, RDS, and Elastic Beanstalk. This can be set up within the hour or templated on your code for infrastructure (we do this with terraform & cloud formation). By design, it isn't suited for non-AWS workloads.

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Verified User

Professional in Finance and Accounting

Financial Services Company, 501-1000 employees

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If I need to change a logo design on the invoice, the new logo is slightly larger or smaller so the type below the logo is in a different area than before. In this case, you would need to load the new version of the document into APM Plus and redo the mapping of the field areas to properly grab the information needed to process the document. Without doing this, the document could fail or go to the wrong archive based on the fields.

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Verified User

Employee in Information Technology

Industrial Automation Company, 201-500 employees

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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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Brian Dentino

Founder

finbox.ioInternet, 1-10 employees

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It combines code profiling with application logger.
It is safe for production usage.

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Verified User

Employee in Information Technology

Information Technology and Services Company, 10,001+ 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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Need to improve their mobile support
Documentation improvment

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Verified User

Manager in Engineering

Computer Software Company, 1001-5000 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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No score

No answers yet

No answers on this topic

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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Retrace 7.3

Based on 2 answers

Submitting a ticket to Stackify Retrace support team is very easy and the response is always within a few hours. In case of some serious problems they are able to provide assistance coming directly from one of their developers what decreases significantly the amount of time needed to figure out what is causing the issue.

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Verified User

Employee in Information Technology

Information Technology and Services Company, 10,001+ 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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APM Plus does a better job of archiving documents than DocSend and makes it easier to find the documents when you need them. DocSend seemed to be more of a marketing tool than a business tool. APM Plus is all business and consistently does what you need on a daily basis. We selected APM Plus because of the great support on setup and after implementation. They are always ready to help.

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Verified User

Employee in Information Technology

Industrial Automation Company, 201-500 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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We shorten the time we fix app issues
We spend a lot less time digging through data
We can be proactive and see issues as they are trending before the completely explode
I have APM on all production servers so I can catch issues as they happen
I no longer get 2000 email on an issue but rather one full of data

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Verified User

Manager in Engineering

Computer Software Company, 1001-5000 employees

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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

—

Premium Consulting/Integration Services

—

Entry-level set up fee?

No

Retrace Editions & Modules

Edition

Essentials	$99¹
Standard	249+²
Enterprise	Custom³

up to 3 servers, 500,000 traces, and 1,000,000 logs
2,000,000+ traces and 5,000,000+ logs
Customer number of traces and logs

Additional Pricing Details

Pricing is based on trace and log usage.

Amazon CloudWatch vs Retrace