Amazon CloudWatch helps us with some monitoring, analyzing different logs, and collecting and aggregating infrastructure and application metrics. The solution also helps us with container metrics.
The solution can be used for monitoring, analyzing logs, and collecting and aggregating infrastructure and application metrics
Pros and Cons
- "The most valuable feature of Amazon CloudWatch is collecting the logs from Lambda."
- "The solution's auto-scaling could be improved."
How has it helped my organization?
What is most valuable?
The most valuable feature of Amazon CloudWatch is collecting the logs from Lambda.
What needs improvement?
The solution's auto-scaling could be improved.
Log analytics features should be included in the next release of Amazon CloudWatch.
For how long have I used the solution?
I have used Amazon CloudWatch for the last two years.
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What do I think about the stability of the solution?
I rate Amazon CloudWatch an eight out of ten for stability.
What do I think about the scalability of the solution?
I rate Amazon CloudWatch an eight out of ten for scalability.
What was our ROI?
Amazon CloudWatch helped us meet our business requirement goals.
What other advice do I have?
Amazon CloudWatch's features, like logs, metrics, and co-relations, can be useful for users looking for monitoring or collecting logs.
Overall, I rate Amazon CloudWatch an eight out of ten.
Which deployment model are you using for this solution?
On-premises
Disclosure: My company does not have a business relationship with this vendor other than being a customer.

Developer at a tech services company with 11-50 employees
Effective application monitoring with room for improvement in logging and alerting
Pros and Cons
- "The most valuable part is the metrics part, which is really good."
- "There is some delay in logging that they need to improve on."
What is our primary use case?
We use Amazon CloudWatch for monitoring applications. We use it for Synthetics and also RAM. Amazon CloudWatch has been very helpful for monitoring our applications. We have been able to create a monitoring account where we get metrics, traces, and application monitoring data in one account. One noteworthy feature is that this is free of cost.
How has it helped my organization?
Amazon CloudWatch has been very helpful for monitoring our applications. We have been able to create a monitoring account where we get metrics, traces, and application monitoring data in one account. One noteworthy feature is that this is free of cost.
What is most valuable?
The most valuable part is the metrics part, which is really good. They recently introduced Application Signals, which we like the most. Additionally, the Synthetics feature is something that we love.
What needs improvement?
There is some delay in logging that they need to improve on. While CloudWatch is good, when compared to Dynatrace, there are several areas for improvement. For instance, Dynatrace has better distributed tracing and a feature like back trace, which CloudWatch lacks. In terms of alerts, we use PagerDuty, but composite alarms and similar features need more work.
For how long have I used the solution?
I would say I have almost three years of experience with Amazon CloudWatch.
What do I think about the stability of the solution?
Amazon CloudWatch is stable. However, there is some delay in logging that needs improvement.
What do I think about the scalability of the solution?
It is pretty scalable. We have not had any problems so far.
How are customer service and support?
Amazon's customer service is very good. They are both responsive and knowledgeable. Depending on the ticket, they connect us with the right resource without having us jump through different channels.
How would you rate customer service and support?
Positive
Which solution did I use previously and why did I switch?
Previously, we used Dynatrace, which is an APM tool. We recently moved to CloudWatch but still use Dynatrace.
How was the initial setup?
The initial setup of Amazon CloudWatch is very simple. On a scale of one to ten, I would rate the ease of setup between nine and ten.
What about the implementation team?
Multiple squads and teams, approximately 200 different teams, have been using Amazon CloudWatch.
What was our ROI?
Return on this investment is still to be discovered. Currently, we are in the middle of migration, paying for both on-prem and CloudWatch, as well as Dynatrace and CloudWatch. Once everything is settled in the cloud, we will have a clearer picture.
What's my experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing?
In general, Amazon CloudWatch is cheaper compared to Dynatrace. However, there are potential costs to be mindful of, like running a log query that returns trillions of bytes of data.
Which other solutions did I evaluate?
I have experience with Dynatrace. Comparing CloudWatch against Dynatrace highlights many areas for improvement.
What other advice do I have?
I would definitely recommend CloudWatch if your applications are running in AWS. If your applications are in a different environment or cloud, I am not sure I would recommend it.
I'd rate the solution six out of ten.
Which deployment model are you using for this solution?
Public Cloud
Disclosure: My company does not have a business relationship with this vendor other than being a customer.
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September 2025

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DevOps Engineer at plutos ONE
Provides excellent monitoring features and integrates well with other tools
Pros and Cons
- "The monitoring features are valuable."
- "CloudWatch doesn’t monitor disk throughput by default."
What is our primary use case?
We use the solution for monitoring CPU usage, memory usage, Lambda logs, and load balancer logs.
What is most valuable?
The monitoring features are valuable. The product pushes notifications with the help of SNS. We can increase or decrease our instances horizontally or vertically. We are collecting CloudWatch logs in Grafana too. We have also configured it with Kibana.
What needs improvement?
CloudWatch doesn’t monitor disk throughput by default. It is part of EC2. If EC2 forwards the logs, then we can do it.
For how long have I used the solution?
I have been using the solution for three years.
What do I think about the stability of the solution?
I rate the tool’s stability an eight out of ten.
What do I think about the scalability of the solution?
The tool’s scalability is good. I rate the scalability a seven and a half out of ten. I have configured two instances for CPU usage. It breaks the threshold. It scales up and down multiple times. It is better to build only one instance in such facilities. We have 30 users in our organization.
How are customer service and support?
The support is good.
How would you rate customer service and support?
Positive
How was the initial setup?
The initial setup is easy. The deployment takes around five minutes. It is very fast.
What's my experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing?
The pricing is average.
Which other solutions did I evaluate?
We were using third-party tools before. We had to configure the third-party tools.
What other advice do I have?
I will recommend the tool to others. Overall, I rate the solution an eight out of ten.
Disclosure: My company does not have a business relationship with this vendor other than being a customer.
A product with great support, an easy installation phase, and great scalability options
Pros and Cons
- "Amazon CloudWatch's best feature stems from its ability to monitor app performance."
- "The dashboard of Amazon CloudWatch is not very customizable right now."
What is our primary use case?
My company's clients use Amazon CloudWatch, which offers a very good performance for application performance monitoring, as well as the integrations part.
What is most valuable?
Amazon CloudWatch's best feature stems from its ability to monitor app performance. People also use Amazon CloudWatch for integration with AWS services.
What needs improvement?
I think Amazon CloudWatch has built a very good service in terms of integration since it can integrate with Docker, EC2, and Kubernetes, owing to which we don't have any problem with the solution in our company right now as it works fine. Amazon CloudWatch resolved its performance issues quickly as well. I don't think there is anything bad in Amazon CloudWatch.
I don't think I need to comment on any additional features that need to be included in Amazon CloudWatch since they roll out new features as per the roadmap Amazon has planned.
The dashboard of Amazon CloudWatch is not very customizable right now. In the future, I would like the dashboard of Amazon CloudWatch to be made more customizable.
For how long have I used the solution?
I have been using Amazon CloudWatch for more than three to four years. My company operates as an integrator, consultant, and partner of Amazon.
What do I think about the stability of the solution?
It is a stable solution.
What do I think about the scalability of the solution?
With Amazon CloudWatch, you don't need to worry about scalability in terms of volume or in terms of horizontal or vertical growth. In general, Amazon CloudWatch is a highly scalable product.
My company's clients who use Amazon CloudWatch and I deal with are mostly small and medium-sized companies.
How are customer service and support?
The solution's technical support is great since I haven't faced any challenges yet. I rate the technical support a nine out of ten.
How would you rate customer service and support?
Positive
How was the initial setup?
The product's installation phase is very easy. In our company, we didn't face any problems with the product's installation part.
With Amazon CloudWatch, the time taken for the installation phase is only related to the configuration part. You just need to do the configuration on the basis of availability, after which you need to make sure that you have a configuration ready, making it a very easy process that doesn't take hours to finish.
Which other solutions did I evaluate?
Amazon CloudWatch is a really good product compared to its competitors in the market.
What other advice do I have?
With Amazon CloudWatch, my company did not find the need to get involved with the maintenance part as it is a service. It is the cloud service provider who makes sure that the service is available all the time, so you don't have to worry about the maintenance part.
I rate the overall product a nine out of ten.
Disclosure: My company has a business relationship with this vendor other than being a customer. Consultant
Senior Software Engineer at Saama
A stable tool to collect logs that provides its users with great technical support
Pros and Cons
- "It is a stable solution...I rate the technical support a ten out of ten."
- "The monitoring part and GUI are areas in Amazon CloudWatch that have shortcomings currently and can be considered for improvements in the future."
What is our primary use case?
My company uses the solution to collect logs from other sources, including Amazon Virtual Private Cloud. All the logs are collected from Amazon CloudWatch. From the log groups, my company sends S3 and other third-party applications. My company uses Amazon CloudWatch for monitoring purposes.
What is most valuable?
Amazon CloudWatch is a tool that already provides my company with external features. I will have to check all the features provided by Amazon CloudWatch. Monitoring is one of the best features of Amazon CloudWatch. Amazon CloudWatch can be considered as a tunnel where you can collect logs.
What needs improvement?
In my company, we have created a Lambda function to collect logs from CraC. Our company particularly uses Lambda function in Amazon CloudWatch's log groups. From Amazon CloudWatch, in my company, we are not getting proper logs from particular services. When my company faces the aforementioned issues, we have to get involved in the troubleshooting process while also keeping a check on Lambda functions. In my company, we are unable to get proper logs even with Lambda functions, making it one of the areas that needs improvement.
The monitoring part and GUI are areas in Amazon CloudWatch that have shortcomings currently and can be considered for improvements in the future.
For how long have I used the solution?
I have been using Amazon CloudWatch for two to three years.
What do I think about the stability of the solution?
It is a stable solution.
What do I think about the scalability of the solution?
In my company, we have around 20 AWS accounts, and on each AWS account, we use Amazon CloudWatch. The major purpose of the solution is to collect logs.
How are customer service and support?
I rate the technical support a ten out of ten.
How would you rate customer service and support?
Positive
How was the initial setup?
The initial setup of Amazon CloudWatch is easy.
The solution is deployed on the cloud.
What's my experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing?
I consider it as a medium-priced solution. The prices are dependent on the size of the log collection users require for their environments. If users opt for 10 TB, they need to pay a different price, while those who opt for 1 TB and 1 GB pay a different price.
What other advice do I have?
For the audit purposes of your environment or to collect some details through a better procedure, you can consider Amazon CloudWatch. Whether to use Amazon CloudWatch or not depends entirely on your environment.
I rate the overall solution a nine out of ten.
If public cloud, private cloud, or hybrid cloud, which cloud provider do you use?
Amazon Web Services (AWS)
Disclosure: My company does not have a business relationship with this vendor other than being a customer.
Senior Performance Architect at a tech services company with 501-1,000 employees
Robust and cost-effective monitoring and observability solution, seamlessly integrating with AWS services, offering detailed insights, and facilitating proactive management of resources
Pros and Cons
- "It is a robust analytical tool and it goes beyond mere functionality and extends into the realm of providing comprehensive insights."
- "Incorporating a straightforward method or a plug-and-play solution for integrating these databases with our systems, facilitating smooth data transfer, and enabling the creation of dashboards for monitoring and analysis would be beneficial."
What is our primary use case?
It serves as a diagnostic and profiling tool, particularly useful for dissecting the intricacies of applications, especially in scenarios like Microsoft's best applications. When a user triggers transactions through the GUI, such as purchasing tickets for events like cricket or concerts, the process involves multiple layers—starting from the front-end GUI to the back-end middle tier, microservices, and concluding with database interactions. It allows me to meticulously analyze and monitor these processes by creating and examining various logs. I can delve into the details of each stage, from API calls to network components, and server processing (involving Java Virtual Machine), and even gauge how long specific APIs or queries take to execute. This tool proves invaluable in identifying bottlenecks, such as waiting times or timeouts and understanding the performance of APIs, queries, and even the efficiency of gateways.
How has it helped my organization?
When working with AWS services like Lambda functions and AWS Step Functions, it facilitates the creation of insightful dashboards. These dashboards offer a comprehensive view of Lambda function performance, allowing me to gauge capacity utilization and identify areas requiring optimization. In recent experiences, its profiling capabilities have been instrumental in creating detailed dashboards for monitoring.
What is most valuable?
It is a robust analytical tool and it goes beyond mere functionality and extends into the realm of providing comprehensive insights. It empowers me with analytical skills and capabilities, offering a detailed snapshot of the entire process of requests within an application. Its strength lies in its ability to paint a vivid picture of the application's performance by breaking down the journey of each request, revealing which components are causing delays, and identifying specific pain points.
What needs improvement?
There is a need for seamless integration with databases, whether they are open-source or proprietary like InfluxDB. Incorporating a straightforward method or a plug-and-play solution for integrating these databases with our systems, facilitating smooth data transfer, and enabling the creation of dashboards for monitoring and analysis would be beneficial.
For how long have I used the solution?
Over the past six to seven months, I've been actively using it for one of our ongoing projects, but my broader experience extends over two to three years, particularly in migration projects from on-premises to cloud-based solutions.
What do I think about the stability of the solution?
I find it remarkably stable. Its effectiveness in helping me discern patterns, understand the behavior of components, requests, queries, or even aspects related to application performance is noteworthy.
What do I think about the scalability of the solution?
Approximately forty to fifty individuals within the current organization use it actively.
How are customer service and support?
When issues arise or specific requirements demand assistance, the process of reaching out to support can be somewhat cumbersome. Resolving concerns involve navigating through channels, creating or accessing accounts, and then connecting with support.
What about the implementation team?
While I have some hands-on involvement, the extent of my practical experience has been limited as the detailed implementation is usually managed by specialized teams.
What's my experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing?
The pricing can be considered reasonable, especially when already operating on a cloud platform. The cost is justifiable given the expertise it offers and its capabilities in addressing challenges associated with cloud environments.
What other advice do I have?
Leveraging CloudWatch is advantageous due to its seamless integration with cloud services, making it a valuable asset for monitoring and gaining insights into the platform's performance. Overall, I would rate it eight out of ten.
Disclosure: My company has a business relationship with this vendor other than being a customer.
Useful, easy to set yo, and offers good logs
Pros and Cons
- "Our team finds it overall quite useful."
- "We'd like the interface to be as easy as Datadog."
What is our primary use case?
We're only using it for collecting the logs and forwarding it, and then in some areas, we use it for scheduling stuff and there are some new alerts that come in, and then from there, they had to trigger some Lambdas.
We build the monitoring and everything on top of the Datadog.
What is most valuable?
I'm a technical manager and they use CloudWatch to forward all the requests to Datadog. I don't know the specific features inside the CloudWatch that they found useful.
Our team finds it overall quite useful.
Everything is based off of CloudWatch. Logs stream through CloudWatch and then everything is piggybacked, the telemetry and everything is coming out of that.
It's pretty simple to set up.
What needs improvement?
I haven't heard any complaints about the product.
It would be nice if they could make it in such a way that we wouldn't have to rely on Datadog as much.
We'd like the interface to be as easy as Datadog.
For how long have I used the solution?
The department has been using the solution for about two and a half to three years. They've used it for a while and I recently joined the team.
What do I think about the stability of the solution?
It's stable. The performance is good. It's reliable. There are no bugs or glitches. It doesn't crash or freeze.
What do I think about the scalability of the solution?
We haven't heard so much about any scalability issues. It scales well. It's about the volume and we pump so many logs, particularly in the space of the Datadog, it becomes expensive. We've put restrictions around it based on price and not based on that it can't be done. We just stick to the logs, indexed in size, so people complain that it costs so much.
When it comes to writing the PI data into the logs, we always ask: should we do it, not do it? It's all to do with your teams. Overall, for us, it has become a widely accepted solution to be used in the public cloud.
We have about five dozen technologists that use the solution currently. We might have between 100 and 500 end-users in different business groups.
How are customer service and support?
We've used support in the past and they are always available to us when we need them. We haven't had issues getting help.
We have their solution architects available for us. We can call them anytime and they come in. They're extremely good with us.
How would you rate customer service and support?
Positive
Which solution did I use previously and why did I switch?
We also use Datadog.
People find the dashboarding of Datadog to be very comfortable and very elegant. That's one of the main things that come out. They take the data from the CloudWatch and they tally with the costing aspect as well, however, mainly, people find it useful on the dashboard. They like the alerts et cetera. The usability and search are great.
How was the initial setup?
The initial setup is pretty straightforward and simple. It's easy. It's not overly complex.
The usage in both CloudWatch and Datadog is about the volume. People simply have to be mindful of how much they want and how they want to index and manage them. Otherwise, it's pretty straightforward.
What's my experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing?
I'm not sure what the exact cost is.
What other advice do I have?
We're an enterprise group. We may have a partnership with Amazon. I'm not sure.
We mainly use the public cloud. We also have hybrid setups.
I'd rate the solution an eight out of ten. It does what it does and it does well. However, the UI could always be better.
Which deployment model are you using for this solution?
Public Cloud
Disclosure: My company has a business relationship with this vendor other than being a customer. Partner
Cloud security manager at HID Global
Enables live monitoring, retains logs, and helps track threats easily
Pros and Cons
- "The tool enables live monitoring."
- "The integration with third-party tools must be made easier."
What is our primary use case?
We collect the CloudWatch logs and use them to analyze security. It helps us to monitor malicious activity.
What is most valuable?
Amazon CloudWatch is an important tool in AWS. If we have an AWS-based infrastructure, the product must be enabled in all environments. If we have different environments in the cloud, CloudWatch is mandatory. The tool enables live monitoring. It is easier for us to track who logs in and out of the systems and how the computing services work.
The product is more than enough for what we need daily. Amazon improves things year on year. It is quite straightforward for us. We are using the solution to monitor our live environment. If an attack happens, we can track it down using the logs easily and act fast to isolate the threat. The retention of the logs and live tracking features are useful for us.
What needs improvement?
The integration with third-party tools must be made easier.
For how long have I used the solution?
I have been using the solution for five to six years.
What do I think about the stability of the solution?
I rate the product’s stability a nine out of ten. We do not face any downtimes.
What do I think about the scalability of the solution?
We have more than 600 users in our organization. Every user in the organization is asked to enable CloudWatch in every environment. I rate the scalability a nine out of ten. Whenever we add more accounts, CloudWatch is enabled in those accounts.
How are customer service and support?
The technical support is pretty good. The team is always available. The support persons are readily available to get into a call and sort out our issues.
How would you rate customer service and support?
Positive
What's my experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing?
Amazon CloudWatch is a native service of AWS, and the bill is included with the other services in AWS. We receive a collective bill. The tool is not expensive. I rate the pricing an eight out of ten.
What other advice do I have?
I will recommend the product to others. CloudWatch brings in a lot of value. It enables live monitoring. We have ten engineers in our technical team. The tool is self-sufficient. It does not require much maintenance. We enable it, ensure the logs are pushed to the third-party tools, and monitor them. It does not require any deployment process. We are more aligned with Amazon’s services when building our products. It is suitable for our business purposes. Overall, I rate the product a nine out of ten.
Which deployment model are you using for this solution?
Public Cloud
Disclosure: My company does not have a business relationship with this vendor other than being a customer.

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