Amazon CloudWatch Reviews

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.

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. 

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. 

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.

We use the product to monitor resources for reporting purposes. It alerts us when we are required to scale up resources.

The product helps us collect and store various metrics to set test alarms. The metrics allow us to apply the configuration changes in our environment.

Amazon CloudWatch's pricing needs improvement.

We have been using Amazon CloudWatch for three years.

The product is very stable.

The initial setup process is easy.

The product generates a return on investment.

The product's cost is relatively inexpensive.

I rate Amazon CloudWatch an eight out of ten. I recommend the product if you want a system to monitor the resources. It provides proper metrics and manages workload efficiently. It offers features for real-time cloud monitoring. You can view the activities on the network set for a specific timeline.

We use Amazon CloudWatch for logging.

The solution's pricing is a bit higher.

I have not faced any issues with the solution’s stability.

Amazon CloudWatch’s technical support is good.

Overall, I rate Amazon CloudWatch a six out of ten.

We use the solution to set alerts. We can set up thresholds to trigger alerts if an instance in AWS reaches the threshold value. Based on the alerts, we check the issue in the instance.

We can set CPU thresholds using the solution.

The technical support must be improved.

I have been using the solution for more than two years.

The tool is very stable.

We have more than 600 customers hosted in the AWS environment.

Recently, we faced a payment issue in AWS. Our payments were not happening through the default account. My organization contacted the support team. Sometimes, we get good support. Sometimes, we do not get good support.

We have the complete documentation to set up AWS. We use Confluence for our documents. The steps to set up AWS are clearly mentioned in the documentation.

The solution charges $0.09 for 1GB of data we store in AWS.

We use AWS for our infrastructure. Overall, I rate the product a six out of ten.

We use it for testing environments.

There is room for improvement in terms of stability. 

I have been using this solution for two years. 

I would rate the stability an eight out of ten. 

I would rate the scalability a ten out of ten.

The initial setup is easy. 

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

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

We use the solution for monitoring the traffic. We analyze any suspicious traffic detected by AWS.

The monitoring feature is valuable. AWS provides a detailed document of how CloudWatch works and how we can integrate and utilize it. We get a summary of all the logs explained in the documentation.

The product should provide more features.

I have been using the solution for one and a half years.

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

I rate the tool’s scalability a nine out of ten. Almost 100 people from three to four teams use the solution in our organization.

We have reached out to the support team a few times. The technical support is very good. Sometimes, we don’t even have to reach out to the team. If they detect any issue, they email us about it.

Positive

The initial setup was quite easy.

I have seen an ROI on the solution.

People who want to use the solution can follow the AWS documentation for configuring the product. Overall, I rate the solution a nine out of ten.

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

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. 

I have been working with the product for five years. 

The tool's stability good. 

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

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

I would rate the solution a nine out of ten. 

Amazon CloudWatch is a cheap and easy-to-use solution. We can run custom queries on the logs with the solution. Since our whole system is in AWS, we can easily push to Amazon CloudWatch.

There's a learning curve with Amazon CloudWatch since we have to learn to write the queries to extract the keys and logs.

We have been using Amazon CloudWatch for five years.

Amazon CloudWatch is a stable solution. I rate Amazon CloudWatch a nine out of ten for stability.

Amazon CloudWatch is a scalable solution. I rate Amazon CloudWatch a nine out of ten for scalability.

Amazon CloudWatch's initial setup is easy.

I have not used the solution extensively, but it's not user-friendly, and we have to learn the queries and then type.

If you can write custom queries or learn to write them, you can do many things with Amazon CloudWatch.

Rapid7 is cheap and more user-friendly as compared to Amazon CloudWatch. However, Amazon CloudWatch is more stable as compared to Rapid7.

Overall, I rate Amazon CloudWatch a nine out of ten.