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AWS CloudWatch: a must for your cloud AWS infrastructure
February 02, 2019

AWS CloudWatch: a must for your cloud AWS infrastructure

Anonymous | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User

Overall Satisfaction with Amazon CloudWatch

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.
  • CloudWatch is a great tool for cloud infrastructure monitoring and alerting. Currently, there is no good alternative in AWS.
  • For an SRE organization, it has great value and ROI.
  • Just imagine that you can set 10-second or 30-second period alarms on your EC2 infrastructure and it would raise alarm for CPU or memory utilization or if the service is not responding. This kind of service is a must-have for engineering organizations.
I feel that CloudWatch will always remain the backbone of log analytics, events, and alarms. However, we can use other products in conjunction with it for better log analytics and monitoring. In my organization, we also ingest logs from CloudWatch to Splunk and ELK. This way we can create an index on the logs and then use them for better dashboarding. Parsing logs to create custom indexes and dashboarding is something that CloudWatch could improve. We also send text alarms and emails that can be configured using CloudWatch to support and SRE organizations as part of the monitoring of our infrastructure.
Nothing better than AWS CloudWatch on AWS for event recording and alarms. It can also be used for cost monitoring. Logs can be retained for long terms. Logs can be ingested into ELK or Splunk using a Lambda or some other mean, then dashboards can be generated. These are very useful features if your organization has 100s of APIs or microservices where they need a unified view, monitoring, and analytics.