Item: Amazon CloudWatch
Rating: 8
Author: Verified User

Overall Satisfaction with Amazon CloudWatch

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

We majorly use Amazon CloudWatch to track and get alerts on the metrics of RDS, Elasticache and other services of AWS in use. We do have it for logging Lamda runs in some cases, but not a significant requirement for us, as we use lambda with minimal logic and nothing complicated at all

Pros and Cons

Pros

Track and trace of metrics
Provide easy way to build dashboards

Cons

Log retention is quite expensive as querying cost increases as well with log size
Query lookup can be slow if the ingest data is of significant volume
Dashboarding is simple, however is limited in customizations

Return on Investment

Helps in real-time alerting esp. for RDS and Elasticache which are critical resources
Periodic analysis of metrics using dashboards makes it easier to monitor system's availability

Usability

Although the tool itself is easy to integrate and is readily available for use, it has its limitations. The key limitations of cloudwatch are with respect to cost incurred on log retention and log querying. While for key use cases this is sufficient, for more advanced use cases, Amazon CloudWatch doesn't work out. Also, obviously it is tightly coupled with AWS, which makes you look away if you need a single tool for all monitoring

Alternatives Considered

Grafana, VictoriaMetrics Community, Prometheus and Elasticsearch

Grafana is definitely a lot better and flexible in comparison with Amazon CloudWatch for visualisation, as it offers much more options and is versatile. VictoriaMetrics and Prometheus are time-series databases which can do almost everything cloudwatch can do in a better and cheaper way. Integrating Grafana with them will make it more capable Elasticsearch for log retention and querying will surpass cloudwatch log monitoring in both performance and speed

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?

I wasn't involved with the selection/purchase process

Did implementation of Amazon CloudWatch go as expected?

I wasn't involved with the implementation phase

Would you buy Amazon CloudWatch again?

Yes

Likelihood to Recommend

If there are a lot of AWS native solutions or infra in place, Amazon CloudWatch is certainly helpful and probably the best. Also, real-time alerting and metrics are easy to bring up using Amazon CloudWatch. Helps with troubleshooting in case of any issues in AWS resources. It also helps in triggering any events or incidents based on measured metrics Amazon CloudWatch may not be the best solution for monitoring resources spanning across multiple clouds or on-prem instances. It will also be an expensive solution when the volume of logs is high and the reads are frequent. While the visualization is limited compared to tools like Grafana, Amazon CloudWatch's internal visualization servers the purpose most of the time

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Amazon CloudWatch review from a dev