Item: Amazon CloudWatch
Rating: 7
Author: Verified User

Overall Satisfaction with Amazon CloudWatch

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

We use Amazon Cloudwatch to monitor the health of our infrastructure running on Amazon Web Services (AWS). Particularly the health of EC2 instances and RDS to ensure that our services are performing as expected. The service provides us with visibility and alerting helps us address problems quickly before they have an impact on customers.

Pros and Cons

Pros

Cloudwatch allows us to configure thresholds to trigger alerts
We can combine different metrics onto dashboards for different stakeholders
We can go back and look at trends over time for particular metrics

Cons

Dashboards are relatively basic
Its not possible, or difficult to write queries to correlate easily between different metrics
Searching through logs can be difficult if they are not structured well in advance

Return on Investment

Cloudwatch provides similar functionality to other tools available. However, it is easily available within AWS and can be used with minimal setup.
It is easy to let costs add up if using multiple custom metrics or more detailed metrics and retentions than necessary; we ensure that we retain the data in Cloudwatch for the minimum amount of time to be of value for Ops monitoring and then move to other tools such as Splunk for longer retention.
Alerting within Cloudwatch allows us to react quickly when thresholds are unmet or exceeded.

Usability

I do not find it particularly easy to create complex dashboards containing multiple service metrics, and queries involving complex math are hard to achieve. On the other hand, it's easy to create simple dashboards and alerts with the data available in Cloudwatch for our EC2/RDS/ApiGateway/Lambda services out of the box.

Alternatives Considered

Splunk IT Essentials, Splunk Cloud, Splunk IT Service Intelligence (ITSI) and Splunk On-Call

We use Cloudwatch for simpler monitoring, but these metrics and logs often feed into bigger ecosystems across our organization. The metrics and logs in Cloudwatch allow our developers quick and easy access to the data they need whilst easily integrating the same data into more prominent platforms for wider analysis, including Service desk support, SecOps, and ITOps monitoring within the organization.

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

Splunk Cloud, Splunk Synthetic Monitoring, Splunk IT Service Intelligence (ITSI)

Likelihood to Recommend

For out business we find that AWS Cloudwatch is good at providing real-time metrics for monitoring and analysing the performance and usage of our platform by customers. It is possible to create custom metrics from log events, such people adding items to a basket, checking out or abandoning their orders.

Comments

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Cloudwatch provides quick and easy access to your AWS Service metrics with dashboarding and alerting.