Capable logging of AWS metrics and events
April 06, 2019
Capable logging of AWS metrics and events
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Overall Satisfaction with Amazon CloudWatch
Amazon Cloudwatch has been useful for aggregating metrics around our Amazon server environment, as well as a way to set up alerts based on various criteria for those environments. In addition to alerting and metrics, Cloudwatch has a logging facility to aggregate logs from various Amazon sources. It has given us a good view of our AWS infrastructure.
- Solid support for posting data from a variety of AWS services to CloudWatch logs.
- Can setup alarms alert teams when certain resources hit a particular metric threshold.
- CloudWatch Metric view allows for custom graphs based on whatever AWS criteria you would need.
- Alerting could be beefed up, the options in terms of notification of alerts are pretty slim.
- The usability of the Metric graph view could be improved, it can be tricky to find the metrics of interest and setup graphs.
- The CloudWatch log view is pretty basic, the search options could stand to be more fleshed out.
- CloudWatch Metrics gave us the opportunity to analyze our server performance and try to track down times where our customer experience could be affected.
- CloudWatch logs facilitated an understanding of what was happening with various AWS systems (for example, CloudFormation and determining what occurred when launching new stacks, etc.).
- CloudWatch Alarms provided some rudimentary alerting capabilities before we moved on to a different solution.
Amazon CloudWatch is great in terms of the CloudWatch Logs feature, it integrates easily with other AWS services (CloudFormation, S3, Lambda, etc.) and is reasonably low cost, so it was a no-brainer for that area. For alerting, CloudWatch didn't offer much in the way of notification options so we went with PagerDuty for that area.