Necessary if you are in the AWS cloud
September 29, 2017

Necessary if you are in the AWS cloud

Anonymous | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 7 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User

Overall Satisfaction with Amazon CloudWatch

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.
  • Looking at logs is necessary for software development.
  • Cloudwatch provides what our users need to get the job done
  • It won't directly affect the bottom line but less time spent on support issues means less wasted money.
Ultimately because we are in the AWS cloud we need a tool to report, alert, and hold our logs in AWS, and AWS cloudwatch has great integrations with all existing AWS products. There are some UX quirks and I wish the dashboarding tools could stack up against some of the competitors we have evaluated however we can never not use cloudwatch as long as we are in the AWS cloud.
If you're just starting out with smaller applications in the AWS cloud, then AWS cloudwatch is the right tool. When your company starts growing, along with your software becoming more mature, you may end up piping your logs to another system in order to do more analytics on it and gather better insights.