Amazon CloudWatch Reviews

In Amazon CloudWatch, I found their data analytics services most valuable. They are what we are looking for. We are utilizing Kinesis Data Firehose, Logstash Elastic, and CloudWatch Logs. There are many services that we are using, and in our case, we are using three.

An area for improvement that we want to see in Amazon CloudWatch is a more realistic monitoring. It's real-time data stream monitoring we are looking for. Our application is a huge application that will run on AWS. It has a lot of services that are running, so we want to monitor those services, e.g. message review and frontend application in ELB (Elastic Load Balancing).

It's not only monitoring that we want to do. We also want to visualize that monitoring data through dashboards. This is the main reason we plan to try Datadog because in Datadog, we can create a dashboard and we can visualize the log data through the dashboard.

We are not happy about the dashboards. In Amazon CloudWatch, they can fetch all the logs, but the service is not good at delivering the data into the dashboard, plus there's the lack of real data, e.g. in application performance monitoring. We find this product lacking and this is why we want to look for a new service that can cover our needs.

Additional features we would like to see in the future on this product include more API performance features, e.g. application performance monitoring. We also want live dashboards and well-designed workflows.

We also want integrative services, e.g. custom logs we can check, as we are not satisfied with what Amazon CloudWatch currently has. We are looking for more competency on these services: dashboards, real-time monitoring, real user monitoring, and application performance monitoring. We also have more and more mobile apps, so mobile app monitoring is also important.

These are the key areas that people are looking for, and what we'd like to see on this product in the future.

I've been using Amazon CloudWatch for over six years.

Amazon CloudWatch is scalable to some extent.

Technical support for this product is okay. They have a different support standard which they are maintaining. When you pay for premium support, you'll get your issue resolved within two hours. If it is standard support, it takes one to two days. The support you get depends on the type of support you paid for.

This solution is easy to set up. It's not complex. You just need to run the Amazon CloudWatch agent in all the services. Once we install the agent into our services, we'll be able to fetch the log regularly.

I evaluated Nagios.

We're using Amazon CloudWatch. Our clients are using different monitoring services. Some are using Prometheus, while some are using Nagios, but in our platform overall, all the services are located in AWS only.

I have no advice for people looking into using Amazon CloudWatch, but in our case, all our services are running on the AWS platform, so initially we thought of using all their cloud-based native services to save on admin and infrastructure costs, including other connectivities. That was our plan initially, but now client requirements have been more demanding.

The client wants a real-time monitoring solution which is something we are unable to get from the product, so we are looking for a new solution like Datadog, or New Relic, or Prometheus.

My rating for Amazon CloudWatch is a seven out of ten.

I'm a consumer and I'm working in a company like Accenture. It's a service-based organization. It's a MNC (multinational corporation), so it's global and we have multiple clients. These multiple clients have different strategies and they want their applications to be set up in the Cloud. I'm the AWS architect, so I do the solutions and provide solutions for them, e.g. cost optimization, infrastructure optimization, etc.

What clients find most challenging thing in the Cloud is monitoring, so we are looking for a centralized monitoring solution where we can get everything in a single window, but we want a service that's similar to Amazon CloudWatch. We collect data and we need to analyze that log and analyze the metrics, so we create a refined monitoring data, then we publish it by using the Amazon QuickSight dashboard. There are three different services we have to use, so instead of using all these different services, we want to use only one service: a centralized monitoring service to meet all our needs. This is what we are looking to have in the future.

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.

Amazon CloudWatch for infrastructure and serverless monitoring.

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.

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

I have been using Amazon CloudWatch for approximately five years.

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

We have five or six customers using the solution.

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

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.

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

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

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

Most of my customers are using Datadog.

I rate Amazon CloudWatch a six out of ten.

We use CloudWatch to monitor our infrastructure and resources, such as bandwidth, etc. It comes with the AWS package we use, and it's easier when all your services come from one vendor. 

The alarms are one thing I love about AWS CloudWatch. It has alerts that notify us when resource use is approaching the limit. 

The graphical interface has room for improvement. CloudWatch only gives you a breakdown of what's wrong. However, it would be nice if it could automatically remedy the problems it identifies. You should be able to configure it so that when a specific condition arises, it will take a predefined action.

I've been using CloudWatch for two years.

I rate AWS CloudWatch nine out of 10 for ease of setup. Deployment is practically instant. 

The price is worth it because it saves you money in the long run. 

I rate AWS CloudWatch nine out of 10. It gives me an idea about my resources through logs, metrics, etc. I recommend it. It's easy to understand, with graphs showing the services running on your applications and the resources they're consuming. You can also track your billings, and identify the services consuming too many resources and terminate instances if necessary. 

We use Amazon CloudWatch for monitoring infrastructure for EC2 instances. We created CPU, memory, system, status, and disk utilization checks. Based on those checks, we created actions such as disk cleaning by running a command, integrating with Lambda, and sending email notifications. We use the basic functionalities of Amazon CloudWatch.

Amazon CloudWatch helped improve my company through notification and automation. The tool is integrated with actions, so if an alarm gets triggered, you can execute an action through Amazon CloudWatch. Task automation through Amazon CloudWatch has improved the company's overall efficiency in terms of the time to resolve issues, so the tool has been beneficial.

What I found most valuable in Amazon CloudWatch is that it gives you detailed information, which I found helpful because it can even provide you with data for the past one minute, which is quite granular. That was what helped me most in terms of finding the root causes.

Task automation is another valuable feature of Amazon CloudWatch.

What would make Amazon CloudWatch better is if it includes more on-site checks, particularly status checks on the CPU, network input/output, etc. It would also be helpful if there's built-in swap space, disk, and memory monitoring in Amazon CloudWatch because, at the moment, my team has to configure it manually through a shell script.

Amazon CloudWatch is a pretty complete tool with many features, so apart from the improvements I mentioned, there isn't anything else I want to change in Amazon CloudWatch.

I've been using Amazon CloudWatch for almost two years.

Amazon CloudWatch is a very stable tool.

Amazon CloudWatch is a scalable tool because it has no limitations in the number of systems and alarms you can create.

I'd rate support for Amazon CloudWatch four out of five, but this is because my company has AWS premium support, so I'm unsure how it is with others with a different level of support with AWS.

We didn't use a different solution before using Amazon CloudWatch.

The initial setup for Amazon CloudWatch was quite okay, particularly for the standard alarms provided by Amazon. Still, for the custom alarms, such as memory and disk alarms, you have to put in some effort because if you make changes to the system, you'd also have to make changes in the scripts as well, so if that could be automated, it would be beneficial.

We implemented Amazon CloudWatch in-house. We're in consulting, so in a way, we're the third party who can implement the tool.

As my company only had to put in a small investment for Amazon CloudWatch, and the tool helped in terms of monitoring, alerting, etc., and is quite a good tool, in my opinion, it gave my company good ROI.

Amazon CloudWatch has very cheap pricing, and it hardly costs my company $25-$30 a month for fifty systems, so it's pretty affordable.

My company didn't evaluate other options because Amazon CloudWatch was pretty native. It was the only tool that was there, so Amazon CloudWatch was the only tool my company used and nothing else.

Amazon CloudWatch is a web-based tool, so there's no version control for it, so you could say it's always the latest version provided by Amazon. It's deployed on the cloud.

Almost everyone from the technical team within my company uses Amazon CloudWatch, so that's five to six people in total.

One to two people is enough to handle the deployment and maintenance of Amazon CloudWatch because it's a one-time process. Once it's done, you don't need to change it in a way, so one to two people would be fine.

As Amazon CloudWatch is an essential tool for my company, usage of it will gradually increase with new projects or instances because of the basic infrastructure monitoring and similar features it provides; however, there's no plan to expand in terms of doing more with Amazon CloudWatch.

My advice to others looking into implementing Amazon CloudWatch is that Amazon has pretty sufficient documentation on installing the tool and configuring the alerts. Still, it would be better to have a script deployed through Lambda to create alarms or use the Amazon SSM Agent to create the alarms instead of manually doing it.

I'd rate Amazon CloudWatch as eight out of ten because it does whatever it promises, and it's a good tool for monitoring and alerting.

Our company used the solution for a project that included data message and data lake architecture, performance testing, and an engineering solution to monitor virtual machines or the S3 bucket. 

The solution monitored key performance indicators for almost all services including Aurora, Fargate, Lambda, Snowflake NoSQL databases, and Sumo Logic.  

The solution effectively monitors golden signals like CPU, page requests, and queues. 

The solution's integration could be easier for laypersons. 

The solution should move from being a performance monitoring tool to a full stack content management system with a hybrid DPM tool that integrates front-end, browser-specific, and footprint-specific monitoring metrics and synthetics. 

The solution's interface could be improved to enhance user experience by including Kendo UI or React.js frameworks. 

I have been using the solution for four years. 

The stability is quite impressive with a 99% availability rate. 

The solution uses metrics and measurements to scale data which then gets routed to a NQ at an Amazon data center. 

Data on the front end takes time to appear because of how the solution is designed. The UI interface takes some time to refresh large volumes of data so on occasion there is a lag. 

I rate stability an eight out of ten. 

The scalability is based purely on your stack and requirements. 

Our project involved processing billions of records and performance expectancy was 99% which is pretty impressive. 

I rate scalability an eight out of ten. 

The initial setup was a bit complex because we were new to AWS. 

It took us time to integrate EHNs because we had difficulty discovering traffic and TCP connections. 

The KPIs that needed to be monitored were books of medium to high complexity. 

As we became more proficient, we progressed quickly but that always depends on the complexity of the stack. 

For example, Java is easy but .Net is complex because many services are not API exposed so they have their own DLS running on machines. 

Our company worked with the client's IT operations team to implement the solution. 

More than ten architects worked both onsite and offshore to conduct engineering, performance testing, integrations, and monitoring. 

A big management team consisting of 30 onsite and offshore developers, QA technicians, and performance managers monitor the enterprise because it processes billions of records. These user groups have restricted access based on their roles. 

The pricing model is pay-as-you-go so you have to be mindful of usage to manage costs. 

Scalability is not limited because you can add components and integrations at any time.

Data gets stored on your EBS in RSN S3 buckets. Some free space is provided based on your configuration, but additional space is paid. Storage fees can be per unit or by the minute. 

The pricing model can get very expensive as the project's scope grows. 

The solution is expensive so a better option might be to use New Relic, Dynatrace, or Zabbix for open source monitoring. 

A central repository lock trail and analytics dashboard could be created in Tableau that stores metrics in one particular location and analyzes data using one particular dashboard. 

I rate the solution a seven 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.

The majority of the use cases are monitoring of all the AWS services, which can be integrated into CloudWatch. Also, the application logs also can be integrated. Due to that, if there are multiple instances they can be monitored through CloudWatch. The monitoring can be automated as well. It has automated thresholds that can be set for alerting. Therefore, we use CloudWatch for monitoring and incident alerts.

It's simple to use. It's not complex. The simplicity of the configuration is great. The product is also easy to set up.

It's stable.

The scalability is good.

We have found the pricing to be reasonable.

The technical support is good. 

The dashboards and monitoring have been great. It's user-friendly. 

It offers good security in general. 

We haven't come across any shortcomings. 

The costs could always be cheaper. 

I do not know whether or not CloudWatch can be integrated with on-prem services. I would like to see, for example, if it's a hybrid environment, that potential, however, I'm not quite sure whether it's available or not. 

I've used the solution for eight months. 

I haven't come across any unavailability of CloudWatch monitoring services. It's a very stable solution. There are no bugs or glitches. It doesn't crash or freeze. 

The solution is scalable. I have a total of three clients that I'm managing. All three clients are using CloudWatch as well.

Technical support is very good. 

The solution is very simple to set up. It's not overly difficult or complex. It's also easy to configure. 

How long it takes to deploy depends. CloudWatch is just a click away, however, integrating other services into CloudWatch, takes time and it all depends on what kind of complex scenarios you need to monitor. It's an iterative thing. For example, when we pinup other parameters that we are going to monitor on CloudWatch, it all takes different time limits and it takes a little bit of learning of the specific application. We cannot actually tell, on the implementation level, how long it will take. We cannot give a specific time range. However, activating CloudWatch is a few minutes and just a few clicks. 

You don't need additional staff for configuration, you would need only one. Of course, it all depends on their specialty. For example, if a person who's doing a program would like to integrate into CloudWatch, that specific specialized person would know what needs to be done. The DBA would want to send some monitoring parameters into CloudWatch, so that person would do that part of it. CloudWatch is segregated into different roles. It's not the same person most of the time who does all the configuration. 

There is a clear return on investment. You can reduce a lot of manual staff and physical staff monitoring. You can get CloudWatch to do that work for you and you can save a lot based on that.

The cost is all based on usage and processing. There's no separate licensing cost request.

I'd recommend the solution. Whoever is using Amazon services has to consider using CloudWatch as a bundled solution so that the systems are properly monitored and notified. If anybody is using any other Amazon services, they definitely should consider using CloudWatch. That's my recommendation.

I'd rate the solution nine out of ten. It's a robust service.