Amazon CloudWatch Reviews

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Approximately forty to fifty individuals within the current organization use it actively.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

It's stable. The performance is good. It's reliable. There are no bugs or glitches. It doesn't crash or freeze.

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. 

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.

Positive

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.

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.

I'm not sure what the exact cost is. 

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. 

Amazon CloudWatch is a monitoring and availability service designed to collect and check metrics and collect and monitor log files. We can set alarms, and Amazon CloudWatch allows users to gain operational insight into their application resource and services. The solution also helps users to ensure the reliability, performance, and availability of their infrastructure.

The most valuable features of Amazon CloudWatch are metrics, dashboards, alarms, logs, events, logs insight, and application insights.

The solution should provide human-readable metrics. Amazon CloudWatch should add custom metrics, like static metrics or any data relevant to our use case.

I have been using Amazon CloudWatch for more than three years.

More than five people are using Amazon CloudWatch in our organization.

The solution’s technical support is good.

The solution’s initial setup is easy.

Amazon CloudWatch is a cheap solution.

We don't need to update or do any maintenance on Amazon CloudWatch. The solution has more features available, like metrics. Amazon CloudWatch provides a wide range of metrics for AWS resources, including EC2 and all AWS services. Users can create a custom dashboard to visualize and monitor metrics from various AWS services on a single screen on the dashboard.

This helps in checking the health and performance of the application and resources. Amazon CloudWatch logs allow users to monitor and install log files from the application. The solution's alarms allow users to set thresholds on metrics.

Overall, I rate the solution ten out of ten.

We're using Amazon CloudWatch to monitor the entire application instances, client application, and backend communication. We're also using the solution to monitor service availability and application development.

What my company likes best about Amazon CloudWatch is that it's on AWS. My team also likes it for its log feature. As the solution is on AWS, it also has good pricing and resource availability, plus it's what clients choose. My company also chose AWS for Forge ECS, and at the time, there was a need for the log features provided by Amazon CloudWatch, so it's the solution my team went with.

I found several areas for improvement in Amazon CloudWatch. First is that it's tough to track issues and find out where it's going wrong. The process takes longer. For example, if I get an exception error, I read the logs, search, go to AWS Cloud, then to the groups to find the keyword to determine what's wrong.

Another area for improvement in Amazon CloudWatch is that it's slow in terms of log streaming. It requires an entire twenty-four hours for scanning, rather than just one hour. This issue can be solved with Elasticsearch streaming with Kibana, but it requires a lot of development effort and integration with Kibana or Splunk, and this also means I need a separate developer and software technical stack to do the indexing and streaming to Kibana. It's a manual effort that you need to do properly, so log streaming should be improved in Amazon CloudWatch.

The AWS support person should also have a better understanding of the logs in Amazon CloudWatch.

What I'd like added to the solution is a more advanced search function, particularly one that can tell you more information or special information. Right now, the search function is difficult to use because it only gives you limited data. For example, I got an error message saying that the policy wasn't created. I only know the amount the customer paid for the policy, the mobile number, and the customer name, but if I use those details, the information won't show up on the logs. I need to enter more details, so that's the type of fuzzy matching Amazon CloudWatch won't provide. If this type of search functionality is provided, it will be very helpful for businesses and companies that provide professional services to customers, like ours.

I've been using Amazon CloudWatch for three years.

Amazon CloudWatch is a stable solution.

Amazon CloudWatch is a scalable solution, and what I mean by this is that it will hold the logs until the next deployment. If you do the deployment, then all the logs will go, but right now, my company doesn't have any requirement that says the logs should be stored for one year. Amazon CloudWatch may be scalable in the future, but my company has never tried scaling it, and there was never any instance when the solution ran out of memory.

We've never contacted the technical support team for Amazon CloudWatch because we found all the information we need in the AWS documentation.

The initial setup for Amazon CloudWatch was easy. It wasn't difficult. It was easy for my team to develop a microservices web application, but it would still depend on your experience and the way you use the solution. Whatever my team did was completed within one day.

What's were using is the free service of Amazon CloudWatch, so they're not charging us. As for hidden fees, we're not aware of them because we're using what our clients provided us.

We never looked at other options because we decided to go with AWS, which meant going with Amazon CloudWatch as well.

I'm a solution architect who works for a service-based company, so I have different clients. I provide software development services for architecture support for multiple global insurance companies and the bank financial sector. Some companies use Amazon CloudWatch, and I've worked on that solution. I've also provided Azure Managed Grafana services for one of the clients.

There's no particular version for Amazon CloudWatch, but whatever the latest version is, that's what I'd be configuring. I don't focus too much on the version of the solution. It's on AWS Cloud.

My company runs almost forty to fifty projects, mostly using AWS and Amazon CloudWatch, so at least thirty to forty people use the solution.

What I would advise anyone looking into using Amazon CloudWatch is to go for it especially when you're on the AWS environment. To be frank, I've only used Amazon CloudWatch, so I'm recommending it because I've never faced any major challenge with it. I haven't found any new software that's as user-friendly as Amazon CloudWatch. I did have a few problems with it such as log storing, log back up, and log searching, and if I see any other tool that's better than Amazon CloudWatch, then I'll put that up for discussion, but right now, other people also recommend the solution and I know it, so I'm going ahead with Amazon CloudWatch. I'm looking at other solutions in the market, but I'm not comfortable, and I haven't even done a POC with other solutions yet.

I'd compare Amazon CloudWatch with my old style of reading the logs as a developer, and I would rate the solution as seven out of ten. Amazon CloudWatch benefits me by streaming all the logs together, and this means that across all the services, I can search for specific transactions. The solution also has a single dashboard that shows me all services via log steaming.

My company is a service provider, partner, and manager of AWS.

CloudWatch is used to monitor not only for the cloud but also for on-premises services. So, you could think of it as a comprehensive monitoring tool. It's just proprietary monitoring software.

Every time we get an alarm or have an incident, CloudWatch is always there. We use it not only for resources we've spun up in the cloud but also for some of our on-premises resources. There are many advantages you can set up on CloudWatch, so it has improved the overall stability of our environment and financial monitoring. If anything goes out of budget, CloudWatch notifies us.

The most valuable feature is monitoring. 

There is room for improvement in the pricing because they have a premium version, but it's not really a premium version. It's just an enhanced monitoring version, and it can be a bit expensive depending on your usage.

I have used it for five years in a row. I currently use the latest version because it's a SaaS. 

I would rate the stability a ten out of ten. 

I would rate the scalability a ten out of ten.

The initial setup has medium complexity. You have to know what you're looking for.

I have seen an ROI.

I would say to someone who wants to use it, read the recommendations thoroughly before you start using it.

Overall, I would rate the solution a ten out of ten.

Whenever we launch any instances or use any service we receive default metrics from Amazon CloudWatch. It is easy to track what is happening in the services that we are using. Additionally, it provides metrics logs from servers and what is happening from the infrastructure.

The most valuable feature of Amazon CloudWatch is its ease of use and logs. You do not have to go to each separate system to see the logs, such as Syslog and they are located in one dashboard GUI.

If someone changes some configurations in other tools, such as Grafana, someone has to deep dive to see what has happened. These issues do not happen in Amazon CloudWatch because it is easy to use. It is managed by Amazon AWS.

The dashboard and the UI could improve in Amazon CloudWatch. Additionally, they should focus on visibility inside the servers with AI and machine learning integrations. This would allow users who are using the solution to see what is happening within the system better.

I have used Amazon CloudWatch within the last 12 months.

The stability of the solution is good.

I rate the stability of Amazon CloudWatch a ten out of ten.

The scalability of Amazon CloudWatch is good. We do not have to do anything to scale the solution it is done by the vendor.

We have more than 10,000 people using the solution.

I rate the scalability of Amazon CloudWatch a nine out of ten.

I rate the support of Amazon CloudWatch a ten out of ten.

Positive

The initial setup of Amazon CloudWatch is simple. The deployment of the solution only took minutes.

I rate the initial setup of Amazon CloudWatch a nine out of ten.

If someone is utilizing a limited set of services on Amazon AWS and their application is hosted on Docker or Kubernetes products, they may choose to use an alternative monitoring tool instead of relying on Amazon CloudWatch. However, the developers of Amazon CloudWatch are continually improving the tool, and adding features to address any issues that are not currently available on the cloud version will eventually be incorporated into Amazon CloudWatch. If the infrastructure and the software services are relatively simple I would recommend this solution. The Amazon CloudWatch agent can provide additional metrics, but for those seeking a more visually appealing and understandable approach, different tools may be more suitable.

I rate Amazon CloudWatch an eight out of ten.

I rated the solution an eight out of ten because of its user-friendly interface and the presence of a helpful single dashboard. This solution also offers unique tools, like application insights, which rely on artificial intelligence. This means that regardless of the traffic or type of users accessing our server, the insights provided are based on AI technology. The role of application insights is expected to grow significantly in the coming years as the solution continues to incorporate AI into its functionality. For example, it can provide information on how much memory was occupied by your machine at a particular time.

While we have used CloudWatch, we have not used it extensively. We should start monitoring our applications once it starts performing in production. We are not at that stage yet. However, we have implemented it. In the end, we will use it mainly to monitor our applications.

It's a very simple logging system. It's a very simple monitoring system, however, you have other advanced services as well if you choose to go more advanced. This is a simpler product that we can use right away.

The implementation process is very simple.

It's not an advanced way of monitoring.

I haven’t used the solution for that long.

Until now, we haven't seen any stability issues. There are no bugs or glitches. It doesn’t crash or freeze. It is reliable.

I’m not aware of the level of scalability on offer.

Right now, for monitoring, what we do is, we have a login into an SQL server.

It's very easy to implement. It's simple. These are solutions that are very simple to use, and therefore, there isn’t really any complexity involved.

You may not need so much technical knowledge or information to use this product. That said, there are some policies where you would need to know how to write the script. Still, it would be simple for anyone to use quickly.

I'm not aware of the pricing.

Since it is a cloud solution, we are likely on the latest version, although I don’t know the exact version number.

This is a basic version that you can start using right away, and there's nothing too technical to think about or to know. You can implement it right away and then try to scale up or advance on the monitoring.

I would rate the product eight out of ten.

The primary use cases are creating a platform for customer experience and customer engagement. This is more about profiling a customer and it is more about using or basically understanding the customer's needs and wants and profiling the data and showing it to a business analyst.

That is pretty straightforward and it is not really meant for a technical user specifically, even a non-technical person can use it. I can put it in a simple term, its simplicity is always there. And it is also in real-time and it has a log analysis feature wherein you can do some insights into the log that is generated. Yeah, but again, this is not a full-fledged monitoring tool. Just like Dynatrace, it comes with various other things like log security and many other features, but the log analysis for the team.

The most valuable feature is the insights are good.

I think something that can be improved are the alerts and alerting mechanism based on no rejects. We want to have it more flexible and that is one of the key things that is required.

I have been using Amazon CloudWatch for the past four to five years now.

The performance is very good and there are no problems accessing it.

We are already on the cloud platform, and we have never experienced any hurdles in terms of performance or scalability. It is always the same as it was at the beginning and we do not feel many differences as we have been growing because that is something that is already scaling at the back end and I think the team is doing it. We are not aware of how they do it, but as end users, we do not feel such difficulties in accessing it.

There are three packages currently we are opting for package one, which basically means that you can only do offline chats or, we have to send any queries offline. But there are three packages in which we can do real-time calls and chats with them to rectify the issues if there are any. So, I can say that from the support perspective with whatever package that we have taken, they are meeting expectations.

The setup is very straightforward and took less than thirty minutes to install.

All of our implementations took place in-house.

The pricing is based on a storage cost plus there is a minimal cost for the usage, but I am not sure about the actual figures, but it is built upon the usage.

I would recommend they have an understanding of the basics of AWS before you start configuring. I would rate Amazon CloudWatch a nine out of ten.