CloudWatch provides the basics, but you may need more.
March 30, 2020
CloudWatch provides the basics, but you may need more.
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Overall Satisfaction with Amazon CloudWatch
I used Amazon CloudWatch to monitor specific events in the AWS cloud. Out of the box CloudWatch provides events to monitor, but it also allows you configure other specific events through a UI selection screen. We created a group of events to monitor autoscaling events such as launches, terminations and changes. Also setup to monitor API calls to monitor thresholds, volumes and usage. This monitoring allowed us to determine if the application was up/down/stressed so that we could take action or cause activities to occur like launching additional instances.
- Monitoring application state - up/down/stressed.
- View of API calls - threshold, volumes, response times.
- Rules-based functionality to allow for automatic triggering of Lambda functionality.
- CloudWatch doesn't monitor things outside of the cloud, it's not what it is intended for.
- Billing is confusing as it bills on Dashboard, metrics called, custom metrics, etc. Hard to forecast the charge.
- Paradigm is confusing sometimes and difficult to learn.
- Uptime/downtime knowledge has provided increased awareness to ensure SLAs are achieved.
- Generally speaking, the value of the service was quite high compared to money spent, however was unpredictable.
CloudWatch is the minimum viable product that is used as your baseline. Once you graduate beyond the basic needs, there is a wide range of tools from other AWS partners that go well above and beyond. However the cost of those tools is typically considerably more.
Do you think Amazon CloudWatch delivers good value for the price?
Yes
Are you happy with Amazon CloudWatch's feature set?
No
Did Amazon CloudWatch live up to sales and marketing promises?
Yes
Did implementation of Amazon CloudWatch go as expected?
Yes
Would you buy Amazon CloudWatch again?
Yes