CloudWatch is a great almost-free monitoring solution if you are on AWS
March 21, 2017
CloudWatch is a great almost-free monitoring solution if you are on AWS
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Overall Satisfaction with Amazon CloudWatch
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.
- Very positive ROI, we are able to pre-empt production issues via alerting
- CloudWatch is low cost and allows us to get enterprise level monitoring
- CloudWatch allows us to get visibility into all of our workloads and see how traffic is increasing or decreasing and make product level decisions
- New Relic and Nagios
CloudWatch is a good competitor to New Relic, Dynatrace and Nagios, as it is already baked into AWS and requires no setup unlike its competitors. CloudWatch doesn't do application performance monitoring which New Relic and Dynatrace can provide, which basically gives you an additional layer of metrics on how the application is performing in addition to what the underlying hardware is doing. The trade-off is cost. CloudWatch is much cheaper than both options.