Item: Amazon CloudWatch
Rating: 9
Author: Ramindu Deshapriya

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

Amazon CloudWatch is being used across our organization on various software implementations on behalf of multiple clients. It is the go-to solution used by our organization to track logs and organize metrics across all applications deployed on Amazon Web Services. We have integrated it into all our applications and enables us to ensure effective monitoring and the capability of maintaining reasonable SLAs.

Pros and Cons

Monitoring of AWS resources
Aggregation of low-level infrastructure metrics on the cloud
Providing alerts on given events on AWS infrastructure
Easy integration in to anything deployed on AWS

Better integration with applications that do not use core AWS services
Better customization of log metrics
Better reporting with fewer reporting errors

Return on Investment

Through the implementation of intelligent alerting, we were able to bring down response time to application issues by 5%.
Through understanding application infrastructure metrics better, we were able to optimize infrastructure, bringing down AWS infrastructure costs by 15%.

Alternatives Considered

Elasticsearch

We found that CloudWatch is the best solution to use with AWS services in terms of cost and ease of integration with AWS infrastructure services. While Elasticsearch is better at aggregating application-level metrics, CloudWatch wins out in its capabilities to tightly integrate and monitor native AWS services in almost real-time.

Support Rating

Support is effective, and we were able to get any problems that we couldn't get solved through community discussion forums solved for us by the AWS support team. For example, we were assisted in one instance where we were not sure about the best metrics to use in order to optimize an auto-scaling group on EC2. The support team was able to look at our metrics and give a useful recommendation on which metrics to use.

Key Insights

Do you think Amazon CloudWatch delivers good value for the price?

Yes

Are you happy with Amazon CloudWatch's feature set?

Yes

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

Other Software Used

Amazon API Gateway, Heroku Platform, Slack

Likelihood to Recommend

AWS CloudWatch is the best monitoring, log aggregation, and metrics tracking tool available on Amazon Web Services. If you are deploying your application stack to AWS, CloudWatch is the best solution to use to monitor the health of your applications, aggregate their logs, and view specific infrastructure-related metrics on your applications such as memory usage, CPU usage, network throughput, etc. However, it is not the best logging tool if you want to log out from your custom applications, as application logs can get lost within the sheer volume of infrastructure logs that are present. This can be resolved through some intelligent filtering of logs, however.

Watching the AWS Cloud is easier with CloudWatch

Overall Satisfaction with Amazon CloudWatch