Amazon CloudWatch vs. VictoriaMetrics Community

For out business we find that AWS Cloudwatch is good at providing real-time metrics for monitoring and analysing the performance and usage of our platform by customers. It is possible to create custom metrics from log events, such people adding items to a basket, checking out or abandoning their orders.

Incentivized

Best suited, where your data is highly cardinal since it does a better job at maintaining it than other competitors. It is also well suited if you are using Prometheus and are looking for something that is less hungry for resources in comparison since the migration would be easier. But in case the company is small and wants a solution which is cheap and relies on built-in visualizations, it is not something that is suited. Although it takes fewer resources than Prometheus, it is still resource-intensive and attracts a high cost for maintenance.

Incentivized

• 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.

Incentivized

• Easy to configure and manage
• Ready to be configured at cloud and microservices
• Easy to scale vertically and horizontally

Incentivized

• 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.

Incentivized

• Community and Eco system -> Although it supports the ecosystem of Prometheus, it is still troublesome for someone who's not using Prometheus
• Configuration is not so easy, especially if you are a beginner, you will struggle a bit. Even the documentation is not so welcoming for beginners
• Built-in Visualisation is bare minimal, leading almost everyone to use some other extension/tool

Incentivized

It's excellent at collecting logs. It's easy to set up. The viewing & querying part could be much better, though. The query syntax takes some time to get used to, & the examples are not helpful. Also, while being great, Log Insights requires manual picking of log streams to query across every time.

Incentivized

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.

Incentivized

Grafana is definitely a lot better and flexible in comparison with Amazon CloudWatch for visualisation, as it offers much more options and is versatile. VictoriaMetrics and Prometheus are time-series databases which can do almost everything cloudwatch can do in a better and cheaper way. Integrating Grafana with them will make it more capable Elasticsearch for log retention and querying will surpass cloudwatch log monitoring in both performance and speed

Incentivized

Prometheus only support PromQL and it is very complex with different exporter required for different requirement like Windowsexporter,linixexporter,sqlexporter etc but VictoriaMetrics is very simple comapred to it. VictoriaMetrics support both PromQL and MetricQL and can be integrated with Graphana easily. It is very easy to setup and learn compared to mutiple Prometheus exporters

Incentivized

• Positive for alarms and alert notifications once configured/customized.
• Has upfront learning curve, and cost can increase as does the alarm activity and monitoring details you may require.
• Cost-effective for any size organization keeping with AWS and utilizing its native tools is a savings in long-term ROI.

Incentivized

• Lowered our infra costs in comparison with our older tools
• Need minimal effort for migration since it already supports Prometheus ecosystem
• Saved on Storage costs

Incentivized