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Amazon CloudWatch

Amazon CloudWatch

Overview

What is Amazon CloudWatch?

Amazon CloudWatch is a native AWS monitoring tool for AWS programs. It provides data collection and resource monitoring capabilities.

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Recent Reviews

A must-have!

9 out of 10
October 23, 2019
We use AWS to sync a lot of files that all the users need. It's a very good tool to keep track of everything, including notifications and …
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Pricing

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Canaries

$0.0012

On Premise
per canary run

Logs - Analyze (Logs Insights queries)

$0.005

On Premise
per GB of data scanned

Over 1,000,000 Metrics

$0.02

On Premise
per month

Entry-level set up fee?

  • No setup fee
For the latest information on pricing, visithttps://aws.amazon.com/cloudwatch/prici…

Offerings

  • Free Trial
  • Free/Freemium Version
  • Premium Consulting/Integration Services
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Product Demos

AWS Container Day - Amazon Cloudwatch (Container Insights)

YouTube
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Product Details

What is Amazon CloudWatch?

Amazon CloudWatch is a native AWS monitoring and observability service built for DevOps engineers, developers, site reliability engineers (SREs), and IT managers. CloudWatch provides users with data and actionable insights to monitor applications, respond to system-wide performance changes, optimize resource utilization, and get a unified view of operational health. CloudWatch collects monitoring and operational data in the form of logs, metrics, and events, providing users with a unified view of AWS resources, applications, and services that run on AWS and on-premises servers. CloudWatch can be used to detect anomalous behavior in environments, set alarms, visualize logs and metrics side by side, take automated actions, troubleshoot issues, and discover insights to keep your applications running smoothly. With Amazon CloudWatch, there is no up-front commitment or minimum fee; users simply pay for what they use.

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

Amazon CloudWatch Videos

Amazon CloudWatch: Complete Visibility of Your Cloud Resources and Applications
Governance with AWS

Amazon CloudWatch Competitors

Amazon CloudWatch Technical Details

Deployment TypesOn-premise
Operating SystemsWindows, Linux, Mac
Mobile ApplicationNo
Supported CountriesAmericas, Europe, Middle East, Africa, Asia Pacific

Frequently Asked Questions

Amazon CloudWatch is a native AWS monitoring tool for AWS programs. It provides data collection and resource monitoring capabilities.

Datadog, Azure Monitor, and Splunk IT Essentials are common alternatives for Amazon CloudWatch.

Reviewers rate Support Rating highest, with a score of 8.4.

The most common users of Amazon CloudWatch are from Enterprises (1,001+ employees).
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Comparisons

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Reviews and Ratings

(169)

Attribute Ratings

Reviews

(1-25 of 38)
Companies can't remove reviews or game the system. Here's why
Mayank Thirani | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Amazon Cloud watch is primarily used for watching all the requests coming into any of the AWS services our organization is using. It can tracks all the requests, with the IP address and can help in monitoring the requests/ sec. Also helps to filter what requests need to be searched based on different criteria like Access Key, and IP address.
  • Tracking all the incoming requests.
  • Filtering the requests.
  • It can collect and access all your performance and operational data in the form of logs and metrics from a single platform rather than monitoring them in a server, database, or network.
  • Integration of Cloud watch to other tools to export data and analyze it on premise.
  • Improved formatting of log datas in various formats.
  • Better searching capability and narrow down searching capability to controlled users.
CloudWatch allows to ingest, store, filter, search and archive the logs reducing operational burden Allows to focus on application and business rather than logging Specific scenarios where it is less appropriate: When different users have different permission to view a specific set of logs, it does not allow that Product managers or Business people cannot easily make charts to view the stats from each customer for their purpose. Easy integration with the product team is not viable.
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
Amazon CloudWatch assists us in monitoring the performance of our applications, resource use, and overall operation health. Our employees must comply to a CloudWatch threshold anytime they use our amazon EC2 instances, as well as whenever an employee is logged in to the EC2 instance for hours longer than those given to them. Also, they must comply to the threshold if they do anything that could compromise the application's health and operation.
  • EC2 instances are easy to integrate into a system
  • Simple to use
  • Need improvement on dashboards
  • Improve altering regarding unusual IP addresses
Amazon CloudWatch is best suited in a large firm with many employees, where machines work overtime and manual labour is ineffective at monitoring software longevity. In small firms, when each person can manually keep track of their application threshold, it is less suitable.
Sunny Hemnani | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
1. With Amazon CloudWatch, we monitor the cloud resources used for our product. 2. Create various alarms for auto-scaling, increasing CPU load on EC2 instance. 3. Create custom rules to trigger other cloud resources in our product. Since we use AWS Cloud for our application, our scope is all the resources being used by our application and CloudWatch helps in monitoring all the resources across our application.
  • Provides various metrics for cloud resources
  • Logging functionality across all the cloud resources.
  • Ability to trigger events on exceptions or any user-defined actions.
  • AWS Lambda CloudWatch logs become a little tricky to analyze when used in multiple threads.
  • Searching on CloudWatch is slow if we apply multiple text filters.
Amazon CloudWatch is well suited for an application which is native AWS cloud based application and all the resources can be monitored and controlled using Amazon CloudWatch. If an application is deployed on Azure, Google Cloud Platform, etc. Amazon CloudWatch is not supported or well-suited in those cases and less appropriate.
Rob Domenico | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
Our organization has utilized monitoring and events for overall health in the AWS environment. The custom dashboards allow us to manage the display of critical metrics and alarms for any resource in the regional virtual private cloud. This has proven more valuable than setting up another vendor system (Orion by SolarWinds, or Nagios, etc) within AWS space. Having the available alarms and cost metrics all in one place has been a better overall solution since nearly all our systems are cloud-based.
  • Alarms on disk and thresholds for CPU and all vitals on ec2 systems.
  • Billing and cost metric for advisor alerts to manage bills.
  • DNS alerting for and critical issues with resolution to any of our sites.
  • Possible better visual graphs are basic.
  • More exports of the data types.
  • Easier topics for initial setup to alams data.
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.
Apurv Doshi | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
We use Amazon CloudWatch for monitoring cloud and deriving the lot of useful metrics. We have deployed applications with micro-service architecture and observe them for CPU usage, Network usage and Disk usage with help of CloudWatch default Dashboard. We have also created custom dashboards observe certain exceptions. All the deployments which we have done on AWS, CloudWatch is the one which is used for sure. It also helps us to trigger the alarm when billing goes up than a standard limit.
  • 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.
  • Sometimes live metrics show older data and take time to refresh. It fills dashboard with stale data.
  • There is no provision of Webhooks. You must need to go via the route of Amazon Lambda. They should provide the way to integrate custom webhooks.
  • This service is bit costly.
[Amazon] CloudWatch is the service which is required by almost all kind of applications. Whenever you need logging for your application and monitoring your cloud, you will require [Amazon] CloudWatch. Apart from default dashboards, you can create custom dashboards to check the health of your cloud or to debug the scenarios via logs. [Amazon] CloudWatch events can be triggered real time and appropriate actions can be taken on top of the events. When the cloud services are used for purpose like storage or simple notifications, you may not require CloudWatch. For any sophisticated cloud architecture, this service is must.
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
CloudWatch is used as our main monitoring tool for our EC2 instances and other relevant resources. CloudWatch is used both for online monitoring and [as a] logging tool. We also use CloudWatch dashboard as the main dashboard for the AWS-based infrastructure that we use. CloudWatch is also used as an alarm and notification solution for the health of our EC2 instances.
  • Easy to use
  • Easy to integrate to a system based on AWS EC2 instances and other AWS resources
  • Can trigger alerts
  • Integration with non-AWS applications
  • Not really online, there's a short delay
  • Need to improve in monitoring and alerting about irregular IP address/requests
I [would] highly recommend AWS CloudWatch to a colleague if he is using AWS EC2 instances and other AWS services and resources. It is pretty easy to install and use CloudWatch and it can integrate, monitor and log relevant data from different AWS resources. The price is reasonable for the ease of use (you might be able to find cheaper solutions, but it will be more difficult to integrate with all of your AWS services and resources).
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
We use Cloudwatch to see our EC2 instances and other AWS resources (like LoadBalancer, Elasticache, RDS, etc.). We designed custom dashboards for monitoring our performance and response time. You can create a particular alert with Cloudwatch alarms, and you can see your logs in Cloudwatch logs.
  • Stability and availability
  • Easy usage
  • Integration with other AWS Resources
  • Price is higher than other 3rd party monitoring tools and log shipping tools.
  • You can see 5-minute log intervals with standard monitoring.
You shouldn't use it if your log IO is so much. If your all-Cloud structure is AWS, you should use Cloudwatch.
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
A few years back we migrated all of our local VM's to AWS. This includes robust VM's that host our Oracle, Mysql, Jenkins, and other development boxes. We also host our web-services which our customers use to receive our data. CloudWatch helps us monitor and alert our dev-ops and development team of any health concerns on those ec2 instances. We also can tell when we need to scale up an instance or even scale down, saving money in the process.
  • Gives a well-reported status on your system health, usages, and traffic.
  • The ability to place monitors on any or all of our instances while triggering alarms on certain events.
  • Easy to set up and create alarms.
  • The interface is really well designed.
  • Its limitation on only Amazon resources.
  • Cost is higher.
  • Lack of ability to create graphs on distinct counts and histograms which can make it hard quickly identify specific IP addresses that have a high request volume in a certain period. We have worked around this but a feature on the dashboard would be nice.
CloudWatch is highly recommended for monitoring EC2 services. It provides easy setup, straight forward alarm creation, easy to read monitoring.
It is great for scalability/cost. We know when to increase an EC2 instance or when it can be scaled down. I do have a concern on the documentation. I would say it is not for AWS beginners and to actually talk to support can be costly.
Ramindu Deshapriya | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
Amazon CloudWatch is being used across our organization on various software implementations on behalf of multiple clients. It is the go-to solution used by our organization to track logs and organize metrics across all applications deployed on Amazon Web Services. We have integrated it into all our applications and enables us to ensure effective monitoring and the capability of maintaining reasonable SLAs.
  • Monitoring of AWS resources
  • Aggregation of low-level infrastructure metrics on the cloud
  • Providing alerts on given events on AWS infrastructure
  • Easy integration in to anything deployed on AWS
  • Better integration with applications that do not use core AWS services
  • Better customization of log metrics
  • Better reporting with fewer reporting errors
AWS CloudWatch is the best monitoring, log aggregation, and metrics tracking tool available on Amazon Web Services. If you are deploying your application stack to AWS, CloudWatch is the best solution to use to monitor the health of your applications, aggregate their logs, and view specific infrastructure-related metrics on your applications such as memory usage, CPU usage, network throughput, etc. However, it is not the best logging tool if you want to log out from your custom applications, as application logs can get lost within the sheer volume of infrastructure logs that are present. This can be resolved through some intelligent filtering of logs, however.
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
I used Amazon CloudWatch to monitor specific events in the AWS cloud. Out of the box CloudWatch provides events to monitor, but it also allows you configure other specific events through a UI selection screen. We created a group of events to monitor autoscaling events such as launches, terminations and changes. Also setup to monitor API calls to monitor thresholds, volumes and usage. This monitoring allowed us to determine if the application was up/down/stressed so that we could take action or cause activities to occur like launching additional instances.
  • Monitoring application state - up/down/stressed.
  • View of API calls - threshold, volumes, response times.
  • Rules-based functionality to allow for automatic triggering of Lambda functionality.
  • 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.
It does very well for monitoring internal metrics of AWS. For instance monitoring API calls, instance starts/stops, and resource usage. Other third-party tools that sit on top of AWS are often better than CloudWatch when you are trying to analyze results. The system doesn't provide automatic analysis to guide you through the process or point out things you aren't monitoring for.
Diego Turcios Lara | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
We used Amazon CloudWatch in our company for capturing the logs of our applications. We decided to use this AWS service as all of our infrastructure is based in Amazon. We saw a high impact in using it. We really like that we can export our docker logs to AWS, which is great for developers, this way they can check any issue they encounter in CloudWatch.
  • Easy to use
  • Alarms available
  • A little bit expensive
Amazon CloudWatch is great. If you're using AWS consider using it. You can set up alarms in case there's an error in your application. Basically all AWS infrastructure turns around AWS, so it will be really easy to use and configure. It helps you to monitor your services and keeps you updated on the status of it, if it's well configured.
January 06, 2020

Metrics made easy

Gedson Silva | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
We're using CloudWatch for gathering all our key metrics, from business data to IoT sensors data. CloudWatch makes it very easy and convenient to set-up threshold-based alarms and it also integrates natively with AWS Lambda and SNS, so we receive both email and SMS notifications when something's off-balance.
  • Collects metrics from multiple sources.
  • Integration with SNS and Lambda.
  • Dashboard chart types could be broadened.
If you need to collect and act on metrics, which you should no matter what it is that you do, then CloudWatch will make a great fit. If you're after fancy analysis and charts, then there are better alternatives out there.
Jose Adan Ortiz | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
Right now we are using Amazon CloudWatch to monitor some AWS instances that we are running with different technology services. We are using its built-in monitoring capabilities for AWS service to visualize resources consumption and behavior and to keep an eye over AWS instances contracted to reduce billing each month.
  • Monitor physical resources for EC2 instances.
  • You can integrate AWS Cloud Watch with EC2 Autoscaling service to create new instances.
  • You can notify any anomaly detected via Amazon SNS.
  • AWS can include User Experience monitoring for applications hosted on AWS.
  • AWS can include code-level traceability for transactions on monitored technologies.
  • CloudWatch could be deployable to other on-premise services from customers.
AWS CloudWatch is perfectly suited for deployments where there are a lot of EC2 instances you need to control and where you need to scale in new EC2 instances depending on users or network load, you can take advantage of multiple integrations AWS CloudWatch have to improve your application platform performance.
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
We are in the first stages of migrating to the AWS cloud. Beginning one of AWS's own offerings, CloudWatch is being used as the foundation for our security and performance monitoring. Together with CloudWatch Events, we are being alerted on stuff we didn't even know was happening
  • It collects a lot of logs if you want it to. As always in the cloud, money is the primary bottleneck. :-)
  • CloudWatch Events is a very effective way to automate responses and any shape or form.
  • No real issues. It's a basic service, but that also means you can expand from the basics yourself.
Starting with AWS Cloud, you should always incorporate CloudWatch, together with CloudTrail. The two together gives you a lot of insight into your cloud environment and allow you to create (security) automation scenarios.
October 23, 2019

A must-have!

Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
We use AWS to sync a lot of files that all the users need. It's a very good tool to keep track of everything, including notifications and we're learning how to use Lambda. I'm very excited whit this acquisition. Dashboard code can be exported, so you can look at the same dashboard in a different AWS account if you need this.
  • The rules section is just awesome. You can schedule events with CRON schedules.
  • You can keep on track all your AWS services in just one program. The ability to create all types of dashboards for your services is great.
  • Very easy to use, set alarms so easily and quick, one of the best things since anyone can create these without having so much advanced IT knowledge.
  • To be honest, in my case, there's not too many things that I would need this program to improve since we can do everything we need so far.
CloudWatch is one of the best services provided by AWS. With the help of CloudWatch, we can monitor all of our active features hired to AWS. CloudWatch checks EC2 instances, Custom Dashboards for our files as many other instances. Made our workflow way better and faster. Planning to acquire more services from Amazon.
October 22, 2019

Review of AWS CloudWatch

Xialin Zhu | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
Some of our AWS deployed apps are using CloudWatch. It's only used by a few engineering teams, but the scope is expanding now.
  • CloudWatch provides a pretty thorough set of metrics to monitor
  • Supplemental features offered by CloudWatch are also easy to use and helpful
  • The reliability of the metrics is better than other cloud platforms
  • Some aggregation functions we want to leverage are missing
  • The overall UI experience also has room to improve
  • Some complicated alerting logic is not supported today
Basically, any monitoring needs for an application would be a good fit for using CloudWatch.
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
Amazon Cloudwatch is used specifically for our AWS workloads (providing detailed monitoring of multiple services from EC2, Application Load Balancers, RDS, Elasticsearch As a Service, etc). Cloudwatch API allows us to visualize the monitoring with free open source solutions such as Grafana, which are then used within our NOC across the business. The ease of use and implementation of CloudWatch metrics reduces the implementation time of monitoring and is also very cost effective, as you only pay for what you use.
  • CloudWatch API allows integration into multiple monitoring solutions, such as SolarWinds Orion, Site24x7, and Grafana just to name a few we use.
  • It's cost-effective and you only pay for what you use.
  • Easy implementation, just a few lines which you can rinse and repeat when provisioning workloads from code or a few tick boxes when doing ad-hoc.
  • 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.
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.
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
Amazon CloudWatch is now used by our whole department of enterprise architecture. It provides a solution for monitoring, alerting, and auditing our services on AWS. It solves problems such as not being informed of unhealthy services so we can take action as quickly as possible. The dashboard is a great tool to have to monitor all the resources you have.
  • Real-time monitoring.
  • Unhealthy resources reports and alerts.
  • Clear dashboard.
  • Only used with AWS resources
  • Not cloud agnostic
  • Have to pay much for detailed report.
If your company has lots of AWS services or uses part of the AWS services, you should also set up CloudWatch. It is a great tool to monitor your resources' health status. It provides specific details about your resources' status. It can alert you when some of the services go down.

For companies who do not use AWS, CloudWatch is less appropriate to use.
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
We use CloudWatch on a couple of projects. Usually for changing CronJob functions, for watch logs and to debug AWS Lambda functions. It is easy to set up CloudWatch to call some AWS Lambda functions.
  • Filter and Search can be better from the site.
You can easily set up rules to call AWS lambda on time. It's good for notification on time.
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
We are using Amazon CloudWatch to monitor our AWS infrastructure. This includes networking flow logs to application logs. Using the Events feature in Amazon CloudWatch allows us to trigger auto-scaling rules for our auto-scaling groups, to spin up and spin down hosts. This provides us a dynamic infrastructure that can adjust for the requests coming in.
  • Events.
  • Flowlogs.
  • Monitoring.
  • The price is too high for stored logs.
  • Not everything is integrated into Cloud Watch.
  • Different interfaces per region.
Amazon CloudWatch is best for monitoring your AWS infrastructure. When using other services, such as Lambda, you rely on Cloud Watch to provide all of the logging functionality for the functions. Other than writing custom Lambda functions to trigger autoscaling rules, using CloudWatch Events to trigger scaling policies is amazing.
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
Amazon Cloudwatch has been useful for aggregating metrics around our cloud environment, as well as a way to set up alerts based on various criteria for those environments. In addition to alerting and metrics, Cloudwatch has a logging facility to aggregate logs from various Amazon sources. It has given us a good view of our AWS infrastructure.
  • Set up alarms to alert teams and is a useful monitoring tool.
  • Integration into other products.
  • Dashboards.
  • It takes time to get a hang of the tool.
  • The graph metrics and view could be improved.
To monitor all cloud environments. To integrate with other monitoring platforms such as SolarWinds and Nagios.
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
We have multiple web applications running in production and we were looking for the right tool to monitor them. Since most of our applications run in AWS, we considered Amazon CloudWatch to monitor our web applications and know the performance and optimize resource utilization. Logs and metrics are very useful to review.
  • Logs
  • Metrics
  • Alerts
  • The dashboard needs some improvements to read.
Amazon CloudWatch is well suited to monitor applications and helps you know the resource utilization.
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
In my previous position at a public university, we had various applications that were deployed on the Amazon cloud infrastructure. The student portal and course registration applications were the most widely accessed websites in our portfolio. They were also the most critical in terms of business continuity for the university. We started using Amazon Cloudwatch to aggregate all our application logs for performance monitoring and security alerts. It was used by the product development department mainly.
  • Amazon Cloudwatch integrates with all the Amazon deployment infrastructure and provides monitoring capabilities at each step of the pipeline.
  • Individual dashboards can be configured to do performance monitoring.
  • Alerts can be configured for different performance indicators that can be very useful for event mitigation.
  • Presently the application expects scripting experience in order to configure individual scripts for handling performance monitoring and alerts.
  • The documentation is not at par for an enterprise offering and hence it makes the learning curve even steeper.
If most of the applications are cloud hosted on the Amazon infrastructure, then using CloudWatch will aide a lot in terms of actively monitoring performance. We had been experiencing a severe bottleneck with our student portal application under high loads. With using Amazon CloudWatch we were able to identify the problem areas and make tweaks accordingly.
Thomas Young | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
Amazon CloudWatch is used by Econometric Studios to develop systems for viewing how programs and apps are performing. It is used by certain individuals within the organization. The program is helpful in that it allows a single place for IT professionals to monitor activity.
  • Perhaps the most useful aspect of CloudWatch is its all-in-one user interface. Makes it easier to manage.
  • CloudWatch also appears to never have downtime.
  • The third advantage of CloudWatch is that it integrates nicely with other Amazon products.
  • The data collection could be made easier to access and manipulate.
  • Although the program is made for professional IT managers, the program could be made more useful for other analysts.
  • The logs data is cool but requires some effort for taking action.
Amazon CloudWatch is well-suited for companies with a large enough user base to require monitoring of apps/access in a single user-centric interface. The tool works well when you're concerned about latency and need to ensure that resources are optimized.
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
We use CloudWatch across the entire organization to monitor the performance of our infrastructure as well as alerts on issues and problems.
  • CloudWatch integrates flawlessly with any AWS object like load balancers, EC2 instances, target groups, etc.
  • CloudWatch is extremely easy to create graphs and charts with.
  • Creating Dashboards on CloudWatch is as simple as dragging and dropping selected charts.
  • It is not always easy to understand what metric type one should use with CloudWatch metrics. Averages, sums, min, max, etc. are not always readily apparent and CloudWatch does not stop you from creating useless metrics.
  • CloudWatch cannot show milliseconds, it will instead show numbers in 'e' notation.
  • Many of the standard metrics provided by AWS into cloudwatch cannot see below 1 minute intervals.
Anyone using AWS to host any of their infrastructure should be leveraging CloudWatch for notifications, alerts, alarms, auto-scaling, metrics gathering and historical lookback, and performance analysis.
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