Amazon CloudWatch Reviews

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. 

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 are kind of consultants. We maintain our customers' environment on AWS. 

CloudWatch is good to use for infrastructure monitoring and workload monitoring on AWS. It is good for monitoring AWS infrastructure and services.

You can enable alarms and metrics, and it has robust integration with AWS services. You can also trigger events. For example, if the CPU utilization is above 80%, it can launch a new instance for you.

For monitoring applications or for APM, CloudWatch has some limitations. You cannot monitor application performance from CloudWatch, and you have to go for a third-party tool.

A major drawback of CloudWatch is that you cannot create reports. They should add the functionality for creating some reports so that the users can download those reports. Currently, you can see the old data, but you cannot generate reports. So, if some of our customers ask us for monthly or weekly reports, there is a limitation, and we have to go for a third-party tool to generate reports.

I have been working with Amazon CloudWatch for two years. 

It is stable.

It is scalable. You can do alarms, and you can send logs. 

We have many customers. We have enterprise customers, and we also have medium-sized customers.

Their technical support is good. If you have AWS business support, AWS technical guys can support you a lot.

We have worked with Datadog and New Relic. New Relic is pretty good in application performance. It gives you a lot of insights. Two of our customers use it.

Its setup is easy. AWS documentation is there, and you can find a lot of guidance on it. You can configure it easily.

Its pricing is reasonable. It is sometimes tricky, but it is reasonable as compared to others.

I would recommend it depending on what a customer wants to achieve or what is the requirement for monitoring. 

I would rate Amazon CloudWatch a six out of 10.

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 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.

We are using Amazon CloudWatch for all of our data monitoring.

The most valuable feature of Amazon CloudWatch is reliability.

When customers want to see the CPU or memory utilization there is a cost. This should be free to see the utilization.

I have been using Amazon CloudWatch for approximately three years.

If the servers are running then the solution is good. It is a separate service on the cloud.

The solution is scalable.

All of our technical staff are using the solution. We have a large organization with many branches.

I rate the scalability of Amazon CloudWatch 

I have not used the support but I have heard from a colleague they are excellent.

We were previously using the AppDynamics machine agent and it saved money by using Amazon CloudWatch.

There is no setup for Amazon CloudWatch. It is on the cloud and all that is required is a migration.

The price of Amazon CloudWatch is reasonable. When the rate of data collection is done the price will increase. The price is less than other solutions.

This is a native Amazon Cloud solution and I would recommend it for monitoring.

I rate Amazon CloudWatch a nine out of ten.