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Amazon CloudWatch vs Apache SkyWalking comparison

 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive Summary

Review summaries and opinions

We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use. Here are some excerpts of what they said:
 

Categories and Ranking

Amazon CloudWatch
Ranking in Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability
14th
Average Rating
8.0
Reviews Sentiment
7.1
Number of Reviews
48
Ranking in other categories
Log Management (13th), Cloud Monitoring Software (13th)
Apache SkyWalking
Ranking in Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability
30th
Average Rating
8.6
Reviews Sentiment
5.5
Number of Reviews
2
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
 

Mindshare comparison

As of March 2026, in the Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability category, the mindshare of Amazon CloudWatch is 1.2%, down from 1.6% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Apache SkyWalking is 0.7%, up from 0.7% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability Mindshare Distribution
ProductMindshare (%)
Amazon CloudWatch1.2%
Apache SkyWalking0.7%
Other98.1%
Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability
 

Featured Reviews

Azam S M - PeerSpot reviewer
Infrastructure Lead at Danat Fz LLC
Has provided reliable monitoring and alerting through extensive metric tracking and dashboard configuration
Amazon CloudWatch itself provides a lot of data. However, for visualization, we need to use third-party tools. We are in a process of integrating Grafana, Loki, and Prometheus to have better visualization on Amazon CloudWatch. We are also integrating Grafana with the application itself to get the application data and logs. Alternatively, there is AWS Kinesis and Glue where you can scrape the logs and have visualization, but a more easy option is Grafana. If you want to get a proper visual representation to see what is happening, then you need to integrate a third-party tool. Amazon CloudWatch has all the data, but to see what is happening, you need some third-party tool.
reviewer2784462 - PeerSpot reviewer
Software Engineer at a tech vendor with 10,001+ employees
Tracing has revealed hybrid bottlenecks and delivers full visibility into critical payment flows
Apache SkyWalking provided full visibility into the black hole because before using it, we could not see what was happening when a request left Amazon EKS and went to our on-premises legacy databases. Apache SkyWalking's distributed tracing correlates these two worlds in a single view, showing us that 40% of the latency was actually happening in the network hop between the cloud and the physical data center, not in the code itself. Second, it exposes hidden architectural flaws. By using the automatic dependency mapping, we discovered that some microservices were stuck in a cyclic dependency which was documented nowhere. This visual evidence allowed us to refactor the logic and immediately increased our throughput by 30%. Apache SkyWalking gave us database-level insight without database access. Through its slow query monitoring, the Java agents captured the exact SQL statements that were hanging during peak sales hours. This meant our developers could fix the exact line of code or index without needing to wait for a DBA to pull logs, reducing our mean time to resolution. There are many features that are useful to mention in this case because we obtained different benefits. Apache SkyWalking automatically drew the topology of the 600 pods where we discovered cyclic dependencies between services that no one had documented before and that were slowing down the system. Another valuable feature is resolving hybrid bottlenecks because we isolated a specific network issue between AWS and the physical data center. Without distributed tracing, infrastructure teams blame Java code and vice versa. Database tuning is also important because thanks to slow query metrics captured by the agent, we identified and rewrote the SQL queries that most impacted performance during sales peaks.

Quotes from Members

We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use. Here are some excerpts of what they said:
 

Pros

"We use Amazon CloudWatch for logging."
"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."
"Scheduling is a valuable feature."
"The solution gives us very good real-time data."
"It's stable, the performance is good, it's reliable, there are no bugs or glitches, and it doesn't crash or freeze."
"Our team finds it overall quite useful."
"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."
"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."
"Using Apache SkyWalking has had a positive impact on my organization because it has enabled us to identify the causes of various problems more quickly."
"Apache SkyWalking is a very nice tool and an exceptional tool for managing volume and complex architecture on AWS without the prohibitive cost of commercial suites."
 

Cons

"We'd like the interface to be as easy as Datadog."
"It's not an advanced way of monitoring."
"The product should provide more features."
"There could be further enhancements through CloudWatch's partnerships."
"The solution could benefit from a price decrease."
"Amazon CloudWatch needs improvement. The main thing is we have noticed missing logs."
"Right now, in relation to monitoring services, there are too many services and too many metrics per service."
"When customers want to see the CPU or memory utilization there is a cost. This should be free to see the utilization."
"Apache SkyWalking can be improved with storage management complexity because with this volume of 50 million traces a day, managing data retention on OpenSearch is critical."
"Apache SkyWalking can be improved by responding more quickly to new versions of monitored products."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"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."
"Amazon CloudWatch is a cheap solution."
"I consider it as a medium-priced solution."
"The price of Amazon CloudWatch is reasonable for detailed basic monitoring."
"Amazon CloudWatch has very cheap pricing, and it hardly costs my company $25-$30 a month for fifty systems, so it's pretty affordable."
"It is a free-of-charge service."
"The pricing is average."
"The solution is expensive."
Information not available
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Financial Services Firm
14%
Manufacturing Company
9%
Computer Software Company
8%
Transportation Company
8%
Computer Software Company
19%
Financial Services Firm
16%
Retailer
11%
Manufacturing Company
11%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business17
Midsize Enterprise9
Large Enterprise24
No data available
 

Questions from the Community

What needs improvement with Amazon CloudWatch?
Amazon CloudWatch itself provides a lot of data. However, for visualization, we need to use third-party tools. We are in a process of integrating Grafana, Loki, and Prometheus to have better visual...
What is your primary use case for Amazon CloudWatch?
Amazon CloudWatch is a very small service that AWS provides. It is a monitoring service for applications within the AWS cloud, and we can integrate external applications using the APIs or SDK. The ...
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Apache SkyWalking?
Our experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing for Apache SkyWalking is positive since it is free, which was the reason for our decision to use it.
What needs improvement with Apache SkyWalking?
Apache SkyWalking can be improved by responding more quickly to new versions of monitored products, including, for example, taking into account changes in Java class names.
What is your primary use case for Apache SkyWalking?
Our main use case for Apache SkyWalking is for monitoring Java application servers such as Tomcat and WebSphere Liberty.
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

AirAsia, Airbnb, Aircel, APUS, Avazu, Casa & Video, Futbol Club Barcelona (FCBarcelona), National Taiwan University, redBus
1. Alibaba 2. Amazon 3. Apple 4. Baidu 5. ByteDance 6. Cisco 7. Dell 8. Google 9. Huawei 10. IBM 11. Intel 12. JPMorgan Chase 13. Klarna 14. LinkedIn 15. Microsoft 16. Netflix 17. Oracle 18. PayPal 19. Pinterest 20. Qualcomm 21. SAP 22. Samsung 23. Spotify 24. Tencent 25. Twitter 26. Uber 27. VMware 28. WeChat 29. Xiaomi 30. Zoom
Find out what your peers are saying about Amazon CloudWatch vs. Apache SkyWalking and other solutions. Updated: March 2026.
885,311 professionals have used our research since 2012.