Item: Amazon CloudWatch
Rating: 8
Author: Apurv Doshi

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

We use Amazon CloudWatch for monitoring cloud and deriving the lot of useful metrics. We have deployed applications with micro-service architecture and observe them for CPU usage, Network usage and Disk usage with help of CloudWatch default Dashboard. We have also created custom dashboards observe certain exceptions. All the deployments which we have done on AWS, CloudWatch is the one which is used for sure. It also helps us to trigger the alarm when billing goes up than a standard limit.

Pros and Cons

It provides lot many out of the box dashboard to observe the health and usage of your cloud deployments. Few examples are CPU usage, Disk read/write, Network in/out etc.
It is possible to stream CloudWatch log data to Amazon Elasticsearch to process them almost real time.
If you have setup your code pipeline and wants to see the status, CloudWatch really helps. It can trigger lambda function when certain cloudWatch event happens and lambda can store the data to S3 or Athena which Quicksight can represent.

Sometimes live metrics show older data and take time to refresh. It fills dashboard with stale data.
There is no provision of Webhooks. You must need to go via the route of Amazon Lambda. They should provide the way to integrate custom webhooks.
This service is bit costly.

Most Important Features

Billing alarm for development and staging server
Debug the application via CloudWatch log and fix the issues
Scaling of resources basis on CloudWatch metrics

Return on Investment

It has helped a lot to identify the corner scenarios which may happen once in a while and bound to skip from dev or stag environment
It has helped a lot by triggering billing alarm
No negative impact has been observed till date

Alternatives Considered

I think there is no alternative of [Amazon] CloudWatch service. However it provides lot of glue points which you can use to show different metrics, trigger events and update your dashboards.

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

Azure Bot Service (Microsoft Bot Framework), Amazon Comprehend, Amazon SageMaker

Likelihood to Recommend

[Amazon] CloudWatch is the service which is required by almost all kind of applications. Whenever you need logging for your application and monitoring your cloud, you will require [Amazon] CloudWatch. Apart from default dashboards, you can create custom dashboards to check the health of your cloud or to debug the scenarios via logs. [Amazon] CloudWatch events can be triggered real time and appropriate actions can be taken on top of the events. When the cloud services are used for purpose like storage or simple notifications, you may not require CloudWatch. For any sophisticated cloud architecture, this service is must.

CloudWatch - Excellent Service to Monitor Cloud Applications

Overall Satisfaction with Amazon CloudWatch