Amazon Cloud Watch Publication
Amazon Cloud watch is primarily used for watching all the requests coming into any of the AWS services our organization is using. It can …
Starting at $0 per canary run
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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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Pricing
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
Product Demos
AWS Container Day - Amazon Cloudwatch (Container Insights)
YouTube
Product Details
- About
- Competitors
- Tech Details
- Downloadables
- FAQs
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
Amazon CloudWatch Videos
Amazon CloudWatch: Complete Visibility of Your Cloud Resources and Applications
Governance with AWS
Amazon CloudWatch Competitors
- Datadog
- Azure Monitor
- Splunk IT Essentials
- New Relic
- AppDynamics
- Dynatrace
- Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI)
Amazon CloudWatch Technical Details
| Deployment Types | On-premise |
|---|---|
| Operating Systems | Windows, Linux, Mac |
| Mobile Application | No |
| Supported Countries | Americas, Europe, Middle East, Africa, Asia Pacific |
Amazon CloudWatch Downloadables
Frequently Asked Questions
Amazon CloudWatch is a native AWS monitoring tool for AWS programs. It provides data collection and resource monitoring capabilities.
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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Reviews
(26-38 of 38)Companies can't remove reviews or game the system. Here's why
April 30, 2019
Excellent Monitoring!!
We use CloudWatch to monitor logs of cloud services and other infrastructure. Mostly being used by our development and engineering departments. It gives us a good idea about the health of infrastructure and helps us prioritize maintenance activities.
- Easy integration with other services.
- Seamless Configuration.
- Variety of matrix, graphs and dashboards.
- Support to third party libraries.
- User Interface can be improved.
- High cost of implementation.
- No Phone notifications.
April 30, 2019
CloudWatch for the win
We use Amazon CloudWatch across IT to trigger alerts, handle scaling, and for logging.
- We are able to capture all of our Lambda logs through CloudWatch and ship them off to another provider for analysis.
- The alerting features allow us to scale certain services when needed so we don't have to do it manually, or over provision.
- Monitoring resource utilization allows us to see what is going on in our RDS services, so we can test optimizations and fixes.
- The auto refresh feature could use some work so that it doesn't kick you back to the main dashboard.
- The search features aren't as well developed as other areas in the AWS console.
- It would be nice to be able to create a custom dashboard of multiple widgets like resource stats and alarms on one page.
April 06, 2019
Capable logging of AWS metrics and events
Amazon Cloudwatch has been useful for aggregating metrics around our Amazon server 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.
- Solid support for posting data from a variety of AWS services to CloudWatch logs.
- Can setup alarms alert teams when certain resources hit a particular metric threshold.
- CloudWatch Metric view allows for custom graphs based on whatever AWS criteria you would need.
- Alerting could be beefed up, the options in terms of notification of alerts are pretty slim.
- The usability of the Metric graph view could be improved, it can be tricky to find the metrics of interest and setup graphs.
- The CloudWatch log view is pretty basic, the search options could stand to be more fleshed out.
February 02, 2019
AWS CloudWatch: a must for your cloud AWS infrastructure
Most of my organization's cloud platform runs on AWS. So as part of that, we use CloudWatch for collecting and monitoring logs for the infrastructure. CloudWatch helps collects monitoring data in the form of logs and events and provides one unified view of AWS resources and services that run on AWS. We use it for monitoring logs and events, raising alarms if any part of our infrastructure has any issues and also ingests CloudWatch logs into ELK system for detailed log analysis and monitoring.
- We use CloudWatch for collecting and monitoring logs for the AWS infrastructure.
- CloudWatch events and alarms are configured for all our infrastructure running on AWS. Like Ec2, ECS, AWS Lambda, RDS. We can track auto-scaling at the service level (ECS) and instance level (EC2 and ECS).
- CloudWatch helps collects monitoring data in the form of logs and events and provides one unified view of AWS resources and services that run on AWS.
- We use it for monitoring logs and events, raising alarms if our infrastructure has any issues and also CloudWatch logs into ELK system for detailed log analysis and monitoring.
- AWS Lambda's cold and warm boot times can also be registered using it.
- CloudWatch could provide better log analytics using a better log parsing and log indexing. Like what is provided in ELK or Splunk.
- Better dashboarding can be provided. Currently the dashboarding is very rudimentary.
- No good customizable log indexing is available.
We use CloudWatch to monitor all of our cloud estates. We also integrate Cloudwatch into our main monitoring platform (SolarWinds) which allows us to pull the CloudWatch metrics down into SolarWinds. This is used specifically by our IT department, and our devs tend to use the native dashboard with CloudWatch. Overall it gives us visibility into our instances running in AWS and also provides us with alerting, which we also integrate into Slack.
- Allows integration into non-native products (SolarWinds, Nagios, etc).
- Proactive monitoring and recommendations.
- Alerting and dashboards.
- There is only a limited amount of credits available each month when pulling metrics into other applications. We have had to use larger polling intervals as a result.
- Unable to export alert data into 3rd party data warehouses for record keeping.
- Learning curve is slightly steep and there isn't much automation in terms of setting alerts up.
December 01, 2018
Simple Log Aggregation and Metrics Out-of-the-Box
Our engineering team uses CloudWatch to collect logs and monitor our back-end infrastructure and services. We use AWS ECS, Lambda, API Gateway, SageMaker and Step Functions; CloudWatch collects logs for these products out-of-the-box. It is easy to configure log retention policies; e.g., after three months, we can move logs to S3 infrequent-access or Glacier to save money. CloudWatch's log search in the console lacks many of the search features you would find in PaperTrail or Log.ly, but I find it is serviceable. Searching JSON-lines logs in the console might be an unpleasant experience. Similarly, CloudWatch metrics are provided out-of-the-box for all of the AWS products we use; it is easy to create alarms for these metrics and integrate them with PagerDuty.
- Integration with other AWS products is CloudWatch's greatest feature. CloudWatch logs and metrics are provided out-of-the-box for ECS, Lambda, Sagemaker, and most other AWS products. Log aggregation and instrumentation are difficult to configure and manage; it is great to defer that work to AWS.
- Configuring log retention policies is simple with AWS. If your business is required to retain logs for years, being able to automatically move old logs to S3 IA or Glacier with a few clicks is convenient.
- Configuring alerts from metrics is simple, and it is easy to integrate alerts with PagerDuty or email.
- The console's log search lacks many of the features you would find in PaperTrail or Log.ly. Regex search is either not supported, or very difficult to find.
- It can be difficult to understand how the CloudWatch bill breaks down by log group.
- The date/time picker in the console could be easier to use.
November 21, 2018
Don't Skip Proactive Server(less)-side Monitoring
We use Amazon Cloudwatch in a variety of ways, from monitoring the performance and validation success/failures of our ETL (extract, transform, and load) processes, our Lambda Services, our EC2 instances, our RDS instances, as well as our Redshift instance. Certainly we're using Amazon Cloudwatch to monitor day-to-day server-side activities, but the really impressive capabilities lie in its ability to both diagnose issue, as well as to trigger automated remediation.
- Lambda process monitoring, particularly useful when you're relying on third-party services.
- Active monitoring RDS (set thresholds so we know before a database runs out of space)
- Auto-requisitioning of additional resources
September 17, 2018
CloudWatch - Flexible Log Management At A Great Price Point
We use Amazon CloudWatch to aggregate and retain logs across all of the different services that make up our infrastructure. It is primarily used across our engineering and dev ops departments. Using CloudWatch logs allows us to address compliance issues associated with log retention because it is very easy to configure an expiration (if any) for log files. We also use CloudWatch metrics to monitor important KPIs and performance metrics for our business.
- 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.
- Unfortunately, the CloudWatch dashboard does not provide the ability to create histograms of discrete counts. This makes it difficult to, for instance, use CloudWatch to quickly identify specific IP addresses that have a high request volume in a certain period.
- The UX for creating a custom metric from a CloudWatch log group is somewhat confusing. Every time I need to create a new metric I find myself fumbling around the interface for a few minutes while I try to remember how to do it.
- The alerting options for CloudWatch are not as extensive as are available with some 3rd-party services.
September 29, 2017
Necessary if you are in the AWS cloud
We manage hundreds of virtualized machines in the AWS cloud, so we need a place to look up logs from all of these machines. We use cloudwatch in debugging production issues and tracking trending data. Devs use it in our dev environment to debug new code.
- The ability to create dashboards off of metrics
- Setting alarms when things go wrong so we get alerts
- Its integrations with other AWS products.
- If you have to ever dig manually through logs to try to find something it can be a little overwhelming. The user interface could use some work
- I would like the ability to create more customizable dashboards.
- The way log streams are used feels very counterintuitive.
August 17, 2017
A great tool to get insights into your AWS infrastructure.
Cloudwatch is a great way to get information about all your hardware in Amazon Web Service. It allows you to know the state and health of all of your infrastructure and you can alert, graph, and monitor the health and state of every piece. It solved the issue of not knowing the state of your system.
- Monitor
- Alert
- Visibility
- Amazon-only
- cumbersome compared to other solutions
- not 100% customizable.
We use CloudWatch to monitor all of our production infrastructure. We need visibility into how our servers, databases and AWS resources are behaving and CloudWatch provides realtime dashboards to get information. We also use alerts on cloudwatch so that the system is proactively monitoring for our recommended levels of CPU usage, or storage usage, and alerts us when alarms break. This allows us to run our operations without having all eyes on glass 24x7. Recently we have been using CloudWatch Logs to send application logs to CloudWatch for later processing and debugging.
- Infrastructure monitoring
- Infrastructure alerting
- Dashboarding
- Building cloudwatch dashboards can be cumbersome. You have to navigate through various screens to get the metrics you want to add.
- Exporting alarm / alerting data is not available for further post-processing or analysis
- You have to build alerts and alarms yourself. CloudWatch does not give you any recommendations, so you have to know what you're doing.
March 20, 2017
Easy to set up
We used it in our web app for improved response time for video streaming. Our web servers are already in EC2.
- Easy to set up
- Pay per use
- Better performance
- IPv6 support
- No free support
March 08, 2017
Amazon CloudWatch is an essential tool for governing your system-wide resources and app management
At my organization, we use AWS (Amazon Web Services) to spin up new server instances for any business critical applications we require. This is known as containerization. Instead of purchasing new computers we buy more RAM and then have the capacity to spin up or shut down an almost limitless array of servers on an as-needed basis.
Not long ago companies needed to physically install servers on-site. Hardware would need to be upgraded, administrated and repaired. Also if these servers contained sensitive data, they would need to be secured from hacking or fire and theft.
Today we let Amazon host all of our data in the cloud. They are at least partially responsible for guarding our data from theft and fire. Our organization instantly recognized the benefit of being able to administrate our AWS server instances via Amazon CloudWatch. If you rely on AWS in any way, you need to use Amazon CloudWatch.
- Application Performance Management.
- Error Management.
- Utilization Management.
- The interface is clunky.
- The context sensitive help could be written more clearly.
- I wish there were more options for arranging the dashboard interface to my specific needs.