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 …
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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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$0.005
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Over 1,000,000 Metrics
$0.02
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per month
Entry-level set up fee?
- No setup fee
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Offerings
- Free Trial
- Free/Freemium Version
- Premium Consulting/Integration Services
Product Demos
AWS Container Day - Amazon Cloudwatch (Container Insights)
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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 Mid-sized Companies (51-1,000 employees).
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Reviews
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February 21, 2022
Best monitoring tool for instances
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
December 20, 2021
A multipurpose tool for cloud services users, best for monitoring all the cloud resources
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.
June 27, 2021
Amazon CloudWatch Review
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.
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
December 15, 2020
Best Choice For Your AWS Structure
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.
May 29, 2020
CloudWatch by a Simple Engineer
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.
May 13, 2020
Watching the AWS Cloud is easier with CloudWatch
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
March 30, 2020
CloudWatch provides the basics, but you may need more.
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.
February 13, 2020
You will enjoy using AWS CloudWatch
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
November 07, 2019
A cloud service offering monitoring with integration features for cost and scalability
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.
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.
May 18, 2019
Easy to implement & cost effective
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.
May 03, 2019
Amazon CloudWatch Review
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.
May 01, 2019
Best monitoring application offered by Amazon
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.