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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
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 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
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
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
[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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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.
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
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
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 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
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
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 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.
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