Amazon CloudWatch vs Elastic Observability comparison

Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Elastic are both solutions in the Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability category. Amazon Web Services (AWS) is ranked #13 with an average rating of 8.1, while Elastic is ranked #6 with an average rating of 8.7. Amazon Web Services (AWS) holds a 1.5% mindshare in APM, compared to Elastic’s 3.0% mindshare. Additionally, 90% of Amazon Web Services (AWS) users are willing to recommend the solution, compared to 88% of Elastic users who would recommend it.

Amazon CloudWatch

Read 48 Amazon CloudWatch reviews

4,426 Views
2,390 Comparison Views

90% willing to recommend

Elastic Observability

Read 29 Elastic Observability reviews

8,461 Views
7,023 Comparison Views

88% willing to recommend

Amazon CloudWatch

Elastic Observability

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Executive SummaryUpdated on Oct 9, 2024

Amazon CloudWatch and Elastic Observability are key competitors in monitoring and observability tools. Elastic Observability appears to have the upper hand due to its advanced features, despite CloudWatch's strong user satisfaction regarding pricing and customer support.

Features: Amazon CloudWatch offers seamless integration with AWS services, providing efficient monitoring of applications and resources. Users benefit from real-time performance monitoring and detailed metrics. Elastic Observability provides robust analytics and handles a wide range of data sources, supported by comprehensive monitoring features that cater to varied needs.

Room for Improvement: Users feel Amazon CloudWatch could improve its real-time alerting capabilities and simplify the configuration process. Enhancing its data visualization features would benefit users. Elastic Observability could work on reducing the complexity of dashboard customization, minimizing resource consumption, and simplifying setup to better serve its users.

Ease of Deployment and Customer Service: Amazon CloudWatch is known for straightforward deployment within AWS environments and dependable customer service. Elastic Observability offers comprehensive documentation but has a steeper learning curve in deployment. However, the support team is positively acknowledged for responsiveness.

Pricing and ROI: Amazon CloudWatch is recognized for providing value, especially within AWS-centric ecosystems. Elastic Observability, though more costly, is regarded positively regarding ROI due to its extensive feature set offering powerful insights, justifying its pricing structure.

To learn more, read our detailed Amazon CloudWatch vs. Elastic Observability Report (Updated: December 2025).

Buyer's Guide

Amazon CloudWatch vs. Elastic Observability

December 2025

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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

6.8

Amazon CloudWatch reduces monitoring costs, boosts operational efficiency, is vital for oversight, but not direct revenue, especially for small projects.

Sentiment score

6.5

Elastic Observability enhances cost-effectiveness by reducing incidents, automating fixes, and visualizing cloud operations, saving time and resources.

Amazon CloudWatch offers cost-saving advantages by being an inbuilt solution that requires no separate setup or maintenance for monitoring tasks.

Satheesh Papisetty

Digital Services & Engagement Senior Manager at AXA

For more quotes and insights, download the Amazon CloudWatch report

Elastic Observability has saved us time as it's much easier to find relevant pieces across the system in one screen compared to our own software, and it has saved resources too since the same resources can use less time.

Stefan Decuypere

Technology Consultant at Hybrid software

For more quotes and insights, download the Elastic Observability report

Customer Service

Sentiment score

7.4

Amazon CloudWatch support is reliable, with varying response times and expertise based on support level, premium ensures faster help.

Sentiment score

7.6

Elastic Observability customers appreciate their helpful support, quick responses, and valuable documentation, despite some challenges in complex issue resolution.

In recent years, due to business expansion, knowledge levels among support engineers seem to vary.

Satheesh Papisetty

Digital Services & Engagement Senior Manager at AXA

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.

S K Mishra

founder, ceo at Techrev Solutions Pvt Ltd

For more quotes and insights, download the Amazon CloudWatch report

Elastic support really struggles in complex situations to resolve issues.

Mohammed-Abdelalim

Assistant Vice President at QualityKiosk Technologies Pvt. Ltd.

Their excellent documentation typically helps me solve any issues I encounter.

Stefan Decuypere

Technology Consultant at Hybrid software

For more quotes and insights, download the Elastic Observability report

Scalability Issues

Sentiment score

7.7

Amazon CloudWatch excels in scalability and performance, efficiently managing data and adapts quickly to diverse organizational needs.

Sentiment score

7.2

Elastic Observability is praised for scalability and ease of deployment, despite potential complexities and internal process limitations.

It is already there as a managed service from AWS.

Azam S M

Infrastructure Lead at Danat Fz LLC

Amazon CloudWatch's scalability is managed by AWS.

Satheesh Papisetty

Digital Services & Engagement Senior Manager at AXA

For more quotes and insights, download the Amazon CloudWatch report

I rate the scalability of Elastic Observability as a ten, as we have never seen issues even with a lot of data coming in from more customers, provided we have the appropriate configuration.

Stefan Decuypere

Technology Consultant at Hybrid software

Elastic Observability seems to have a good scale-out capability.

Syed Waqar Uddin

Chief Cloud Architect at a tech services company with 11-50 employees

Elastic Observability is easy in deployment in general for small scale, but when you deploy it at a really large scale, the complexity comes with the customizations.

Mohammed-Abdelalim

Assistant Vice President at QualityKiosk Technologies Pvt. Ltd.

For more quotes and insights, download the Elastic Observability report

Stability Issues

Sentiment score

8.1

Amazon CloudWatch is praised for its reliability and performance, though some note occasional data delays and slowness in low-capacity environments.

Sentiment score

8.2

Elastic Observability is stable and reliable, with high user ratings, efficiently handling large data volumes with proper configuration.

I sometimes notice slowness when Amazon CloudWatch agents are installed on machines with less capacity, causing me to use other monitoring tools.

Satheesh Papisetty

Digital Services & Engagement Senior Manager at AXA

For more quotes and insights, download the Amazon CloudWatch report

There are some bugs that come with each release, but they are keen always to build major versions and minor versions on time, including the CVE vulnerabilities to fix it.

Mohammed-Abdelalim

Assistant Vice President at QualityKiosk Technologies Pvt. Ltd.

It is very stable, and I would rate it ten out of ten based on my interaction with it.

Adelina Craciun

Product Owner at Swisscom

I would rate the stability of Elastic Observability as a ten, as we don't experience any issues.

Stefan Decuypere

Technology Consultant at Hybrid software

For more quotes and insights, download the Elastic Observability report

Room For Improvement

Users seek better customization, visualization, and integration in CloudWatch, citing high costs, steep learning curve, and scalability challenges.

Elastic Observability needs automation, AI, and customization improvements, addressing complex deployment, market presence, metrics, licensing, and usability issues.

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.

S K Mishra

founder, ceo at Techrev Solutions Pvt Ltd

We are in a process of integrating Grafana, Loki, and Prometheus to have better visualization on Amazon CloudWatch.

Azam S M

Infrastructure Lead at Danat Fz LLC

Maybe Amazon Web Services can improve by providing a library for CloudWatch with some useful features.

Rohit Bhosale

Senior Software Engineer at Carnera

For more quotes and insights, download the Amazon CloudWatch report

For instance, if you have many error logs and want to create a rule with a custom query, such as triggering an alert for five errors in the last hour, all you need to do is open the AI bot, type this question, and it generates an Elastic query for you to use in your alert rules.

Lakshmi Bodepu

Senior Consultant at Skillfield

It lacked some capabilities when handling on-prem devices, like network observability, package flow analysis, and device performance data on the infrastructure side.

reviewer708360

Senior Technical Sales at a tech vendor with 1,001-5,000 employees

Some areas such as AI Ops still require data scientists to understand machine learning and AI, and it doesn't have a quick win with no-brainer use cases.

Mohammed-Abdelalim

Assistant Vice President at QualityKiosk Technologies Pvt. Ltd.

For more quotes and insights, download the Elastic Observability report

Setup Cost

Amazon CloudWatch pricing is variable, with costs ranging from $25 to $350, depending on usage and AWS service integration.

Elastic Observability provides competitive pricing, benefiting large enterprises with comprehensive licensing, but may be costly for smaller users.

Overall, the pricing of Amazon CloudWatch is very expensive.

S K Mishra

founder, ceo at Techrev Solutions Pvt Ltd

Amazon CloudWatch charges more for custom metrics as well as for changes in the timeline.

Satheesh Papisetty

Digital Services & Engagement Senior Manager at AXA

For more quotes and insights, download the Amazon CloudWatch report

The license is reasonably priced, however, the VMs where we host the solution are extremely expensive, making the overall cost in the public cloud high.

Adelina Craciun

Product Owner at Swisscom

Elastic Observability is cost-efficient and provides all features in the enterprise license without asset-based licensing.

Syed Waqar Uddin

Chief Cloud Architect at a tech services company with 11-50 employees

Observability is actually cheaper compared to logs because you're not indexing huge blobs of text and trying to parse those.

Lakshmi Bodepu

Senior Consultant at Skillfield

For more quotes and insights, download the Elastic Observability report

Valuable Features

Amazon CloudWatch offers real-time data, AWS integration, efficient monitoring, user-friendly interface, and versatile dashboards for enhanced system performance.

Elastic Observability excels with flexible integration, powerful search, scalability, real-time insights, affordability, and robust support, enhancing efficiency.

Amazon CloudWatch allows me to set up and view even historical logs, which is one of the features I find valuable.

Satheesh Papisetty

Digital Services & Engagement Senior Manager at AXA

If there is a CPU spike or system issues, we set alarms to notify us if the system is going down or not reachable.

Azam S M

Infrastructure Lead at Danat Fz LLC

I like its filtering capability and its ability to give the cyber engine insights.

Rohit Bhosale

Senior Software Engineer at Carnera

For more quotes and insights, download the Amazon CloudWatch report

The most valuable feature is the integrated platform that allows customers to start from observability and expand into other areas like security, EDR solutions, etc.

Syed Waqar Uddin

Chief Cloud Architect at a tech services company with 11-50 employees

the most valued feature of Elastic is its log analytics capabilities.

reviewer708360

Senior Technical Sales at a tech vendor with 1,001-5,000 employees

All the features that we use, such as monitoring, dashboarding, reporting, the possibility of alerting, and the way we index the data, are important.

Adelina Craciun

Product Owner at Swisscom

For more quotes and insights, download the Elastic Observability report

Categories and Ranking

Amazon CloudWatch

Ranking in Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability

13th

Ranking in Log Management

14th

Ranking in Cloud Monitoring Software

11th

Average Rating

8.0

Reviews Sentiment

7.1

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

No ranking in other categories

Elastic Observability

Ranking in Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability

6th

Ranking in Log Management

12th

Ranking in Cloud Monitoring Software

6th

Average Rating

8.0

Reviews Sentiment

6.8

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

IT Infrastructure Monitoring (9th), Container Monitoring (4th)

Mindshare comparison

As of December 2025, in the Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability category, the mindshare of Amazon CloudWatch is 1.5%, up from 1.4% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Elastic Observability is 3.0%, down from 6.3% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.

Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability Market Share Distribution
Product	Market Share (%)
Elastic Observability	3.0%
Amazon CloudWatch	1.5%
Other	95.5%

Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability

Featured Reviews

Azam S M

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.

Read full review

Mohammed-Abdelalim

Assistant Vice President at QualityKiosk Technologies Pvt. Ltd.

Has provided powerful customization for unique monitoring needs but needs more out-of-the-box capabilities

In my opinion, the best features of Elastic Observability are their flexibility to integrate with other existing systems and the ability to build a unified monitoring tool that can integrate with existing ones and end-to-end user journeys which require a lot of customizations. The greatest feature in Elastic is the ability to customize. This is similar to my comments about customizable dashboards in Elastic because it's visible to the analyst. However, it's very great. Customizing these dashboards can meet the customer's specific use cases and specific stories that they have in their environment, their special environment that doesn't look like other environments. The dashboarding in Elastic is highly customizable to the level of logos. If the customer wants his company logo in the dashboard, it can be done.

Read full review

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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews

Financial Services Firm

15%

Computer Software Company

10%

Manufacturing Company

10%

Transportation Company

Financial Services Firm

17%

Computer Software Company

14%

Manufacturing Company

Government

Company Size

By reviewers

Large Enterprise

Midsize Enterprise

Small Business

By reviewers
Company Size	Count
Small Business	17
Midsize Enterprise	9
Large Enterprise	24

By reviewers
Company Size	Count
Small Business	9
Midsize Enterprise	4
Large Enterprise	16

Questions from the Community

What do you like most about Amazon CloudWatch?

The monitoring features are valuable.

See all answers

What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Amazon CloudWatch?

No specific setup costs were mentioned.

See all answers

What needs improvement with Amazon CloudWatch?

See all answers

What do you like most about Elastic Observability?

Elastic Observability significantly improves incident response time by providing quick access to logs and data across various sources. For instance, searching for specific keywords in logs spanning...

See all answers

What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Elastic Observability?

The problem is their licensing model, which is a bit confusing. Many customers struggle to understand their total cost of ownership because Elastic licensing is not dependent on easy, quantifiable ...

See all answers

What needs improvement with Elastic Observability?

After careful consideration about areas for improvement in Elastic Observability, aspects such as pricing, customization, implementation, and scalability could be improved. As a user of the system,...

See all answers

Comparisons

Grafana Loki vs Amazon CloudWatch

Compared 18% of the time

Amazon OpenSearch Service vs Amazon CloudWatch

Compared 9% of the time

Zabbix vs Amazon CloudWatch

Compared 7% of the time

Dynatrace vs Amazon CloudWatch

Compared 6% of the time

Datadog vs Amazon CloudWatch

Compared 5% of the time

More Amazon CloudWatch Competitors

Sentry vs Elastic Observability

Compared 10% of the time

New Relic vs Elastic Observability

Compared 9% of the time

Dynatrace vs Elastic Observability

Compared 8% of the time

Grafana vs Elastic Observability

Compared 8% of the time

Zabbix vs Elastic Observability

Compared 6% of the time

More Elastic Observability Competitors

Product Reports

Buyer's Guide

Amazon CloudWatch

December 2025

Download Amazon CloudWatch product report

Buyer's Guide

Elastic Observability

December 2025

Download Elastic Observability product report

Overview

Amazon CloudWatch integrates seamlessly with AWS, providing real-time monitoring and alerting features. Its interface supports task automation, enhancing troubleshooting and analytics capabilities, while offering strong security and scalability at a cost-effective rate.

Amazon CloudWatch is an impactful platform for monitoring AWS resources and managing application performance. It simplifies infrastructure performance monitoring by providing comprehensive analytics capabilities, including application insights and event scheduling. Users appreciate CloudWatch for its detailed metrics, dashboards, and support in issuing alerts to detect anomalies. It efficiently tracks performance, optimizes resource utilization, and ensures service availability. CloudWatch is recognized for its robust alerting features and integration with other AWS services, further supporting its resource monitoring capabilities. However, there is room for improvement in dashboard customization, log streaming speed, and integration with non-AWS services. Enhancements in API integration, machine learning features, and support for third-party tools are also desired.

What features does Amazon CloudWatch offer?

Seamless Integration: Works effortlessly with AWS for cohesive service management.
Advanced Metrics: Provides detailed monitoring of CPU, memory, and more.
Real-time Monitoring: Offers up-to-the-minute alerts on infrastructure status.
Dashboards: User-friendly and informative for quick insights.
Automation: Supports task automation for efficient troubleshooting.

What benefits does Amazon CloudWatch provide?

Cost-effectiveness: Efficient resource monitoring without high costs.
Scalability: Easily adapts to growing infrastructure needs.
Security: Strong protocols for safe monitoring activities.
Improved Performance: Enhances application insights and operational efficiency.
Operational Insights: Provides comprehensive logging and performance analysis.

Industries implementing Amazon CloudWatch often focus on optimizing IT infrastructure. Companies in sectors like finance and e-commerce rely on its monitoring and alerting capabilities to ensure service uptime and performance. The platform's automation and analytics features empower teams to proactively manage performance and detect potential issues promptly.

Amazon Web Services (AWS)

Elastic Observability offers a comprehensive suite for log analytics, application performance monitoring, and machine learning. It integrates seamlessly with platforms like Teams and Slack, enhancing data visualization and scalability for real-time insights.

Elastic Observability is designed to support production environments with features like logging, data collection, and infrastructure tracking. Centralized logging and powerful search functionalities make incident response and performance tracking efficient. Elastic APM and Kibana facilitate detailed data visualization, promoting rapid troubleshooting and effective system performance analysis. Integrated services and extensive connectivity options enhance its role in business and technical decision-making by providing actionable data insights.

What are the most important features of Elastic Observability?

Centralized Logging: Streamlines the collection, analysis, and storage of log data.
Powerful Search: Provides robust search capabilities for quick access to relevant information.
Scalability: Supports growing data needs across diverse environments.
Real-time Telemetry: Ensures up-to-date insights and monitoring.
Platform Integration: Seamlessly connects with services like Teams and Slack.
Data Visualization: Enhances visibility with Elastic APM and Kibana.

What benefits and ROI should users explore in reviews?

Cost-effectiveness: Offers significant savings through efficient data management.
Rapid Incident Response: Minimizes downtime with quick troubleshooting tools.
Comprehensive Insights: Supports better business decisions with detailed data analysis.
Performance Tracking: Enables assessment of system effectiveness and improvements.

Elastic Observability is employed across industries for critical operations, such as in finance for transaction monitoring, in healthcare for secure data management, and in technology for optimizing application performance. Its data-driven approach aids efficient event tracing, supporting diverse industry requirements.

Elastic

Sample Customers

AirAsia, Airbnb, Aircel, APUS, Avazu, Casa & Video, Futbol Club Barcelona (FCBarcelona), National Taiwan University, redBus

PSCU, Entel, VITAS, Mimecast, Barrett Steel, Butterfield Bank

Buyer's Guide

Amazon CloudWatch vs. Elastic Observability

December 2025

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