Amazon CloudWatch - Perfect when melded with other monitoring platforms
January 28, 2019
Amazon CloudWatch - Perfect when melded with other monitoring platforms
Score 7 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Overall Satisfaction with Amazon CloudWatch
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.
- The cost is low in terms of what you get and what it provides.
- Containers and workloads are now monitored and we can see how the computed levels are increasing, which allows us to make adjustments before we have complaints.
- The proactive element of CloudWatch allows us to address issues before they arise.
As CloudWatch is integrated into AWS already, its ready to go. External products such as Nagios require a fair bit of work to actually get the metrics into the dashboards. Products like SolarWinds and Datadog provide quite a high level of very easy integration which allows for the metrics to be viewed within minutes of linking accounts. You can then deploy agents if you want to get even more data. It works very well with these type of monitoring systems.