AtemnkengNkeze - PeerSpot reviewer
AWS Cloud Engineer/Cloud Architect at Landmark Technologies
Real User
Top 5
A monitoring tool that collects metrics well and easily integrates with other solutions
Pros and Cons
  • "The detection is the most valuable feature."
  • "CloudWatch's scalability could be improved."

What is our primary use case?

CloudWatch is important because we use it to remediate automation. For example, I had to integrate GuardDuty with CloudWatch. If anything went wrong in the environment when GuardDuty had captured all the APIs, and if someone got an alarm on the server, it was basically because of CloudWatch. CloudWatch would have seen an intruder, thinking, "This is what's happening," and so on.

I used the solution to monitor, collect, and store metrics from AWS solutions like EC2. Taking all these metrics from other sections, such as GuardDuty for the security department and all the security hubs, you are presented with all the views at once.

How has it helped my organization?

CloudWatch is required for the organization to stay compliant.

What is most valuable?

The detection is the most valuable feature.

What needs improvement?

CloudWatch's scalability could be improved.

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For how long have I used the solution?

I've been using CloudWatch for almost five years.

What do I think about the stability of the solution?

I rate CloudWatch's stability a seven out of ten.

What do I think about the scalability of the solution?

I rate CloudWatch's scalability a seven out of ten.

How was the initial setup?

The solution was easy to deploy.

What's my experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing?

The price is okay for me. How good the pricing is depends on how you want to use the solution.

What other advice do I have?

CloudWatch has good features and tools. No matter how many people are on the security team, CloudWatch monitors the performance of your gateway resources daily, including CPU utilization and network traffic. If you are new to monitoring, CloudWatch is good because it helps you monitor your environment and your logs and captures and generates logs by applications and resources. I rate CloudWatch an eight out of ten.

Which deployment model are you using for this solution?

Public Cloud
Disclosure: I am a real user, and this review is based on my own experience and opinions.
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Shubham Chakraworty - PeerSpot reviewer
Infrastructure Engineer at a tech vendor with 10,001+ employees
MSP
Top 5Leaderboard
A scalable and affordable monitoring tool that integrates with different services and has a good support team
Pros and Cons
  • "The product can be integrated with AWS very easily."
  • "The product’s documentation must be improved."

What is our primary use case?

It's a monitoring tool. If we want to monitor any of the applications hosted in AWS, we can see the logs and the artifacts of those applications in CloudWatch.

How has it helped my organization?

If we deploy anything and get into some issues, it would be pretty difficult to understand it. So, we go through the CloudWatch logs of the application to understand why we are getting the error. It helps us to resolve the issues.

What is most valuable?

The product can be integrated with AWS very easily. Most of the services are in-built. We just need to have the configurations. We can easily get the logs we need from those services. It gives us the logs of CPU utilization and memory utilization of the applications.

What needs improvement?

The product’s documentation must be improved. We faced an issue with a service that is integrated with CloudWatch. Whenever there were 50,000 to 60,000 log lines, CloudWatch only showed us 10,000 to 15,000. We could not get all the log lines in the same place. When we tried to get everything together, the product crashed.

For how long have I used the solution?

I have been using the solution for around two 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?

I rate the tool’s scalability a nine out of ten.

How are customer service and support?

The support team is good.

How would you rate customer service and support?

Positive

What's my experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing?

It’s an open-source solution.

What other advice do I have?

It's an AWS service. We just have to integrate it into our application, and we'll be able to see the values and logs on the server. If an organization is using AWS, only then they should use CloudWatch. It is already integrated into AWS. Just a few clicks will show the logs and data that we need. Overall, I rate the tool a nine out of ten.

Disclosure: I am a real user, and this review is based on my own experience and opinions.
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Amazon CloudWatch
May 2024
Learn what your peers think about Amazon CloudWatch. Get advice and tips from experienced pros sharing their opinions. Updated: May 2024.
770,292 professionals have used our research since 2012.
Lead Technical Product Owner - AI & ML at a transportation company with 10,001+ employees
Real User
Top 5
A very simple logging system that is easy to set up and deploy
Pros and Cons
  • "It's a very simple logging system."
  • "It's not an advanced way of monitoring."

What is our primary use case?

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.

What is most valuable?

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.

What needs improvement?

It's not an advanced way of monitoring.

For how long have I used the solution?

I haven’t used the solution for that long.

What do I think about the stability of the solution?

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

What do I think about the scalability of the solution?

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

Which solution did I use previously and why did I switch?

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

How was the initial setup?

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.

What's my experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing?

I'm not aware of the pricing.

What other advice do I have?

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.

Disclosure: My company has a business relationship with this vendor other than being a customer: partner
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Prathap G - PeerSpot reviewer
Solutions Architect at ValueMomentum
Real User
Top 10
User-friendly, easy to set up, and has a good log feature and resource availability, but tracking issues takes a little longer and streaming logs on it is slow
Pros and Cons
  • "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."

What is our primary use case?

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 is most valuable?

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.

What needs improvement?

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.

For how long have I used the solution?

I've been using Amazon CloudWatch for three years.

What do I think about the stability of the solution?

Amazon CloudWatch is a stable solution.

What do I think about the scalability of the 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.

How are customer service and support?

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

How was the initial setup?

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 my experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing?

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.

Which other solutions did I evaluate?

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

What other advice do I have?

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.

Which deployment model are you using for this solution?

Public Cloud

If public cloud, private cloud, or hybrid cloud, which cloud provider do you use?

Amazon Web Services (AWS)
Disclosure: My company has a business relationship with this vendor other than being a customer: Partner
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Selva Thurai - PeerSpot reviewer
DevOps-TechSpecialist at Brillio
Real User
Top 10
Useful basic monitoring and UI, but lacking automation
Pros and Cons
  • "The most valuable feature of Amazon CloudWatch is the monitoring and UI."
  • "Some of our customers want to use Kubernetes to monitor their CICD flow but Amazon CloudWatch does not support it. We need to use another solution, such as Datadog or Dynatrace has the needed capability."

What is our primary use case?

Amazon CloudWatch for infrastructure and serverless monitoring.

What is most valuable?

The most valuable feature of Amazon CloudWatch is the monitoring and UI.

What needs improvement?

Some of our customers want to use Kubernetes to monitor their CICD flow but Amazon CloudWatch does not support it. We need to use another solution, such as Datadog or Dynatrace has the needed capability.

In a future release, the vendor could add automation for quicker integration and improve the visualization similar to other solutions.

For how long have I used the solution?

I have been using Amazon CloudWatch for approximately five years.

What do I think about the stability of the solution?

There has been some leg in the use of the solution.

What do I think about the scalability of the solution?

We have five or six customers using the solution.

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

Which solution did I use previously and why did I switch?

I have used Datadog. If we want to do any basic infrastructure monitoring, such as CPU. If our customers want to do automation, Kubernetes, and application monitoring, we use Datadog because Amazon CloudWatch does not have these features.

How was the initial setup?

The initial setup of Amazon CloudWatch is simple. Everyone can do it if they learn how to do it.

What's my experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing?

The price of Amazon CloudWatch is reasonable for detailed basic monitoring.

Which other solutions did I evaluate?

I have evaluated many tools, such as SolarWinds New Relic.

What other advice do I have?

Most of my customers are using Datadog.

I rate Amazon CloudWatch a six out of ten.

Disclosure: My company has a business relationship with this vendor other than being a customer: Partner
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Cloud Engineer/Cloud Architect at a healthcare company with 10,001+ employees
Real User
Top 5
A monitoring solution that helps to create events and alerts
Pros and Cons
  • "We can create events and alerts. We use the information to dive down into the infrastructure performance."
  • "The product's configuration has some challenges. The solution needs to be more user-friendly."

What is our primary use case?

We use the solution for monitoring purposes. We also use it for events and alerts. 

What is most valuable?

We can create events and alerts. We use the information to dive down into the infrastructure performance.

What needs improvement?

The product's configuration has some challenges. The solution needs to be more user-friendly. 

For how long have I used the solution?

I have been working with the product for five years. 

What do I think about the stability of the solution?

The tool's stability good. 

What do I think about the scalability of the solution?

I would rate the solution's scalability a nine out of ten. My company has 10-15 users for the product. 

How was the initial setup?

The product's setup is easy. The tool's deployment depends on scenarios like the metrics, events we create, etc. 

What other advice do I have?

I would rate the solution a nine out of ten. 

Disclosure: I am a real user, and this review is based on my own experience and opinions.
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Acquisitions Leader at a healthcare company with 10,001+ employees
Real User
one of the best tools for monitoring AWS cloud
Pros and Cons
  • "The solution gives us very good real-time data."
  • "The drill-down aspect on the dashboard of the solution needs improvement. We get a very good high-level overview, but when we drill down, it becomes a little less clear. We have given this feedback to AWS as well and hope they will improve this in the future."

What is our primary use case?

We are primarily using the solution to monitor some of the instances that we have on Amazon for our testing development. It is also the go-to solution used by our organization to track logs and organize metrics across all applications deployed on Amazon Web Services

How has it helped my organization?

We are able to, on a real-time basis, understand the capacity utilization and the latency aspects, and, to that extent, we can now know the productivity of the tests and if the development team has increased them in any way. The tool provides an easy integration to monitor and aggregate metrics for any deployment on AWS cloud.

What is most valuable?

The solution works well as part of an overall Amazon ecosystem.

The solution is easy to set up.

The solution gives us very good real-time data.

Ability to aggregate performance metrics.

Getting  real time alerts on AWS environment.

What needs improvement?

The drill-down aspect on the dashboard of the solution needs improvement. We get a very good high-level overview, but when we drill down, it becomes a little less clear. We have given this feedback to AWS as well and hope they will improve this in the future. It could also do a much better job of monitoring performance when core AWS services are not used. 

For how long have I used the solution?

I've been using the solution for about three and a half years now.

What do I think about the stability of the solution?

The solution is very stable. We haven't had issues with bugs, glitches, or crashes.

What do I think about the scalability of the solution?

The solution scales quite well.

It's the infrastructure team that is using the solution at our organization. It's a team of about seven or eight people and they are using it to monitor the performance of the cloud instances to address any degradation.

The solution is currently being used in 100% of the Amazon instances that we are leveraging. Unless we increase the number of instances on Amazon, we are not planning to scale this product beyond what we are using. We are already using it to the maximum.

How are customer service and technical support?

Amazon's technical support is a tiered support system. In our case, we have somebody who's available to us and they call us to assist if we need them to.

Which solution did I use previously and why did I switch?

We didn't previously use a different solution. We've only ever used Amazon.

How was the initial setup?

The solution's initial setup was fairly simple and straightforward. 

The deployment took less than a week. Once we started, our first task was to understand the solution and how we could best leverage it for our environment. Once we had that configured, we then started working towards deploying it.

What about the implementation team?

We worked directly with Amazon. We didn't work with an integrator or reseller.

What's my experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing?

We have monthly licensing costs. The licenses are probably in the vicinity of about $300 - $350/month.

There are no other costs or hidden fees beyond the licensing.

Which other solutions did I evaluate?

We didn't evaluate any other solutions. This is because this was the product that was native to Amazon and so this, we knew, would suit us. There was no need for us to look at another product at that time we set this solution up.

What other advice do I have?

We're not using the latest version of the solution. We might be using the latest version minus one.

I would advise other users that they need to understand the solution and what it is capable of doing. From there, they should build out their use case and try to see if the solution will fit into it. It's a good idea to do a POC.

Unless you do a technical evaluation and a proof of concept, you will not be 100% thorough in your preparations before implementing any kind of solution. 

I'd rate the solution eight out of ten. 

Which deployment model are you using for this solution?

Public Cloud
Disclosure: I am a real user, and this review is based on my own experience and opinions.
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Cloud architect at Freebyte
Real User
Top 5
Easy initial setup and scalable solution
Pros and Cons
  • "The initial setup is easy."
  • "There is room for improvement in terms of stability."

What is our primary use case?

We use it for testing environments.

What is most valuable?


What needs improvement?

There is room for improvement in terms of stability. 

For how long have I used the solution?

I have been using this solution for two years. 

What do I think about the stability of the solution?

I would rate the stability an eight out of ten. 

What do I think about the scalability of the solution?

I would rate the scalability a ten out of ten.

How was the initial setup?

The initial setup is easy. 

What about the implementation team?

I deployed the solution myself. We need cloud architects and engineers for the deployment and maintenance of the solution.

What other advice do I have?

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

Which deployment model are you using for this solution?

Public Cloud

If public cloud, private cloud, or hybrid cloud, which cloud provider do you use?

Amazon Web Services (AWS)
Disclosure: I am a real user, and this review is based on my own experience and opinions.
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Buyer's Guide
Download our free Amazon CloudWatch Report and get advice and tips from experienced pros sharing their opinions.
Updated: May 2024
Buyer's Guide
Download our free Amazon CloudWatch Report and get advice and tips from experienced pros sharing their opinions.