Amazon CloudWatch is a native AWS monitoring tool for AWS programs. It provides data collection and resource monitoring capabilities.
$0
per canary run
Datadog
Score 8.5 out of 10
N/A
Datadog is a monitoring service for IT, Dev and Ops teams who write and run applications at scale, and want to turn the massive amounts of data produced by their apps, tools and services into actionable insight.
$0
Up to 5 hosts
Pricing
Amazon CloudWatch
Datadog
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
Free
$0
Up to 5 hosts
Log Management
$1.27
Per Million Log Events
Standard
$15/host
Up to 500 hosts
Infrastructure
$15.00
Per Host Per Month
APM
$31.00
Per Host Per Month
Enterprise
Custom
500+ hosts
Offerings
Pricing Offerings
Amazon CloudWatch
Datadog
Free Trial
Yes
Yes
Free/Freemium Version
Yes
No
Premium Consulting/Integration Services
Yes
No
Entry-level Setup Fee
No setup fee
Optional
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.
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More Pricing Information
Community Pulse
Amazon CloudWatch
Datadog
Considered Both Products
Amazon CloudWatch
Verified User
Engineer
Chose Amazon CloudWatch
CloudWatch's log search features are impoverished compared to PaperTrail's or Loggly's. However, CloudWatch aggregates logs from Lambda, ECS, API Gateway and more out-of-the-box. You do not need to manage anything. You do not need to worry about an errant logging configuration …
As CloudWatch is integrated into AWS already, its ready to go. External products such as Nagios require a fair bit of work to actually get the metrics into the dashboards. Products like SolarWinds and Datadog provide quite a high level of very easy integration which allows for …
Amazon CloudWatch is fully integrated into your existing AWS account, and provides easy hooks into several different services to make a cohesive infrastructure. Unfortunately, using other services will not allow you to get into the weeds to do everything Amazon CloudWatch can …
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 …
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.
DataDog Is well suited to all of the Infrastructure Monitoring Solutions, DB monitoring, and other Network monitoring also. It's not well suited because it cannot give perfect Infrastructure recommendations for our use case but also For example: If we are using AWS DB to monitor performance insights then Datadog is less effective there because AWS gives very niche recommendations.
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.
APIs, the ability to interact with the data we pull into data dog is key. We port the information over to Servicenow, so the ability to pull everything into DataDog, then Servicenow, is a key component of our success here at Wayfair.
Simple Interface - clean, useful, effective. Allows users to use DataDog for one reason, get work done.
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.
We had a couple "integrations" that had some issues during setup, but Support addressed them very quickly
Unnecessary alerts about DataDog components...by the time I see them, they're almost always also fixed
I wish there was a DataDog mobile app that would have dedicated alerts (configurable per alert to override Do Not Disturb setting) instead of relying on emails notifications that could be overlooked in the midst of many incoming emails around the same time.
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.
The support team usually gets it right. We did have a rather complicate issue setting up monitoring on a domain controller. However, they are usually responsive and helpful over chat. The downside would be I don’t think they have any phone support. If that is important to you this might not be a good fit.
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 are still trying other products, but people still like Datadog. After setting up a dashboard, it's great for monitoring instances on Datadog. Also, the DevOps team had a good time setting up Datadog. It means Datadog was way easier to set up compared to those others.
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.
