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Amazon CloudWatch vs Azure Monitor comparison

 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive SummaryUpdated on Dec 18, 2024

Review summaries and opinions

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

ROI

Sentiment score
7.1
Amazon CloudWatch offers cost savings and control, aiding compliance but challenges remain in quantifying returns during cloud migrations.
Sentiment score
7.0
Azure Monitor offers cost-effectiveness and proactive visibility, with pay-as-you-go flexibility and potential savings despite mixed ROI feedback.
Amazon CloudWatch offers cost-saving advantages by being an inbuilt solution that requires no separate setup or maintenance for monitoring tasks.
 

Customer Service

Sentiment score
7.4
Amazon CloudWatch support is generally praised for responsiveness and expertise, though experiences and costs vary by support package.
Sentiment score
6.1
Azure Monitor support is generally positive, with high-priority users obtaining quicker responses, while others report variable experiences.
While using their cloud and cloud resources, if you have an issue with CloudWatch, you must pay additional monthly fees to get time from dedicated tech support.
In recent years, due to business expansion, knowledge levels among support engineers seem to vary.
Users end up getting no resolution from their team because they're outsourced vendors, and they don't have deeper expertise over any of the products they are referring to.
However, the second-line support is good.
 

Scalability Issues

Sentiment score
7.7
Amazon CloudWatch is praised for its scalability, managing large workloads effortlessly and adapting to diverse performance monitoring needs.
Sentiment score
7.7
Azure Monitor efficiently scales across industries, integrating well with services, and reliably supports growing infrastructure and application needs.
Amazon CloudWatch's scalability is managed by AWS.
 

Stability Issues

Sentiment score
8.1
Amazon CloudWatch is reliable and stable, though users experience occasional logging delays and minor complexities in query customization.
Sentiment score
8.3
Azure Monitor is stable and reliable with high ratings, but could improve in alerting compared to competitors.
I sometimes notice slowness when Amazon CloudWatch agents are installed on machines with less capacity, causing me to use other monitoring tools.
Azure Monitor is working fine, yet I face a costing issue as if there are a lot of logs collected in the workspace or in the center, it becomes very costly.
 

Room For Improvement

Amazon CloudWatch needs enhancements in customization, log management, pricing, integrations, data visibility, and user interface for better performance.
Azure Monitor requires better integration, user experience, automation, alerting, support, cost clarity, and improved interface and performance monitoring.
When using third-party dashboards such as Kibana or Grafana and other visualization tools, there should be a way to feed CloudWatch's data and logging capabilities into these visualization tools.
Amazon CloudWatch charges extra for custom metrics, which is a significant disadvantage.
Maybe Amazon Web Services can improve by providing a library for CloudWatch with some useful features.
The cost skyrockets once you start using it, and there are complaints that the actual cost of the Kubernetes cluster was less than the cost they were incurring for Azure Monitor.
If Azure Monitor can independently add one gigabyte, two gigabytes, or five gigabytes at least to log storage, I can fix the logs without syncing with Log Analytics Workspace and Sentinel.
 

Setup Cost

Amazon CloudWatch pricing is usage-based, often cost-effective, but may increase with data use and custom metrics.
Azure Monitor's flexible pricing is generally competitive, but costs can rise due to storage and integration needs.
Overall, the pricing of Amazon CloudWatch is very expensive.
Amazon CloudWatch charges more for custom metrics as well as for changes in the timeline.
When I export logs into the application, workspace, log analytic workspace, and into Sentinel to read reports, I need to add storage, which increases the cost.
 

Valuable Features

Amazon CloudWatch offers metrics, alerts, automation, and analytics with seamless AWS integration, scalability, and third-party service support.
Azure Monitor provides seamless integration, robust security, dynamic alerting, and efficient reporting, enhancing user satisfaction with scalability and cost-effectiveness.
Being an inbuilt solution from AWS, it saves time on installation, setup, and maintenance.
I like its filtering capability and its ability to give the cyber engine insights.
The best features of Amazon CloudWatch need to improve visibility into the network because when using hundreds of network resources such as transit gateway, VPNs, routers, route tables, and firewalls, it does not give many details in a structured manner.
The ease of access in Azure is significant because it's native to the platform and easy to integrate.
Resource monitoring is essential.
 

Categories and Ranking

Amazon CloudWatch
Ranking in Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability
13th
Ranking in Cloud Monitoring Software
10th
Average Rating
8.0
Reviews Sentiment
7.2
Number of Reviews
47
Ranking in other categories
Log Management (13th)
Azure Monitor
Ranking in Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability
4th
Ranking in Cloud Monitoring Software
3rd
Average Rating
7.6
Reviews Sentiment
7.0
Number of Reviews
55
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
 

Mindshare comparison

As of July 2025, in the Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability category, the mindshare of Amazon CloudWatch is 1.7%, up from 1.1% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Azure Monitor is 6.3%, down from 8.7% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability
 

Featured Reviews

Rahul Kundu - PeerSpot reviewer
Proactively address issues with seamless monitoring while enhancing custom metrics functionality
We use CloudWatch for monitoring and logging. It helps us monitor our applications' performance, particularly in ensuring that every API hit returns a response within four seconds, which is our SLA. We also monitor invocation errors in Lambda and use CloudWatch alerts to notify us of any issues…
Muhammad Usman Khawar - PeerSpot reviewer
Native integration simplifies monitoring but documentation and cost improvements are needed
The ease of access in Azure is significant since it's native to the platform and easy to integrate. It has no maintenance overhead, and users don't have to navigate to another portal to get their desired result. It's the handiness that it has, rather than the features. The interpretation from the logs and injection requires custom runbooks. While it's complex, many services provide native insights and workbooks. It does the basic job quite efficiently. They added new kinds of metrics with more integrations to send out metrics. They have even added support for third-party tools that can be integrated. Azure Monitor is working on improvements and becoming more mature. Azure Monitor is stable and scalable. Azure Monitor is evolving with new workbooks and dashboards.
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Financial Services Firm
17%
Computer Software Company
14%
Manufacturing Company
9%
Real Estate/Law Firm
5%
Computer Software Company
15%
Financial Services Firm
13%
Manufacturing Company
8%
Government
6%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
 

Questions from the Community

What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Amazon CloudWatch?
Amazon CloudWatch charges more for custom metrics as well as for changes in the timeline, which I see as a disadvantage given the price.
What needs improvement with Amazon CloudWatch?
Amazon CloudWatch charges extra for custom metrics, which is a significant disadvantage. Another aspect that needs improvement is the look and feel of custom dashboards, which currently do not matc...
How does Splunk compare with Azure Monitor?
Splunk handles a high amount of data very well. We use Splunk to capture information and as an aggregator for monitoring information from different sources. Splunk is very good at alerting us if we...
What do you like most about Azure Monitor?
Azure Monitor is a very easy-to-use product in the cloud environment.
What needs improvement with Azure Monitor?
The primary challenge is the documentation. The major challenge that remains is the costing factor for the logs ingestion. The cost skyrockets once you start using it, and there are complaints that...
 

Comparisons

 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

AirAsia, Airbnb, Aircel, APUS, Avazu, Casa & Video, Futbol Club Barcelona (FCBarcelona), National Taiwan University, redBus
Rackspace, First Gas, Allscripts, ABB Group
Find out what your peers are saying about Amazon CloudWatch vs. Azure Monitor and other solutions. Updated: May 2025.
859,957 professionals have used our research since 2012.