Easy to implement & cost effective
May 18, 2019
Easy to implement & cost effective
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Overall Satisfaction with Amazon CloudWatch
Amazon Cloudwatch is used specifically for our AWS workloads (providing detailed monitoring of multiple services from EC2, Application Load Balancers, RDS, Elasticsearch As a Service, etc). Cloudwatch API allows us to visualize the monitoring with free open source solutions such as Grafana, which are then used within our NOC across the business. The ease of use and implementation of CloudWatch metrics reduces the implementation time of monitoring and is also very cost effective, as you only pay for what you use.
- CloudWatch API allows integration into multiple monitoring solutions, such as SolarWinds Orion, Site24x7, and Grafana just to name a few we use.
- It's cost-effective and you only pay for what you use.
- Easy implementation, just a few lines which you can rinse and repeat when provisioning workloads from code or a few tick boxes when doing ad-hoc.
- Memory metrics on EC2 are not available on CloudWatch. Depending on workloads if we need visibility on memory metrics we use Solarwinds Orion with the agent installed. For scalable workloads, this involves customization of images being used.
- Visualization out of the box. But this can easily be addressed with other solutions such as Grafana.
- By design, this is only used for AWS workloads so depending on your environment cannot be used as an all in one solution for your monitoring.
- Cloudwatch costs are below 0.5% of our AWS spend providing a very cost effective monitoring tool.
- We're able to integrate Cloudwatch metrics into our existing monitoring solutions (Site24x7/Solarwinds/ Grafana)—all for free!
- Due to no memory metrics, we do have to install agents on some workloads.
Out of the box monitoring which compliments workloads implemented from infrastructure as code so we have standardized metrics across all our monitoring for our AWS workloads. Also incredibly easy to implement via the console which can be done in minutes oppose to hours of configuration needed. The Cloudwatch API integration also allows us to centralize metrics accordingly so we can get alerts from other monitoring solutions (e.g. Site24x7) should any triggers get alerted.