Amazon CloudWatch Review
June 27, 2021

Amazon CloudWatch Review

Rob Domenico | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User

Overall Satisfaction with Amazon CloudWatch

Our organization has utilized monitoring and events for overall health in the AWS environment. The custom dashboards allow us to manage the display of critical metrics and alarms for any resource in the regional virtual private cloud. This has proven more valuable than setting up another vendor system (Orion by SolarWinds, or Nagios, etc) within AWS space. Having the available alarms and cost metrics all in one place has been a better overall solution since nearly all our systems are cloud-based.
  • Alarms on disk and thresholds for CPU and all vitals on ec2 systems.
  • Billing and cost metric for advisor alerts to manage bills.
  • DNS alerting for and critical issues with resolution to any of our sites.
  • Possible better visual graphs are basic.
  • More exports of the data types.
  • Easier topics for initial setup to alams data.
  • Trends and metric graphic, exports for reports.
  • Alarms for critical alerting of any resources.
  • Billing and cost alarms without using budgets to manage cost changes.
  • Positive for alarms and alert notifications once configured/customized.
  • Has upfront learning curve, and cost can increase as does the alarm activity and monitoring details you may require.
  • Cost-effective for any size organization keeping with AWS and utilizing its native tools is a savings in long-term ROI.
We have also tested with SolarWinds NPM, and Zoho Monitors. They seemed to work fine and setup was not as involved as Amazon services, JSON, etc. However, the issue of upgrades made the other solutions incur more downtime overall for maintenance and software upgrades via the vendor's portal or support. This has actually made the decision easier to choose a monitoring metric system that was the best option for our organization.

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

Cloud watch is great and essential if you decide to invest in AWS and have any need to monitor the health of all aspects of your VPC resources, or at the organizational level (multiple accounts). Another benefit of the service is constant upgrades at no additional costs; the software evolves to develop modules and interface improvements. For first-time users in AWS, this is going to take a bit to understand, so the learning curve to this metrics environment can seem overwhelming at first glance/use.