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Amazon CloudWatch vs Grafana Loki comparison

 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive SummaryUpdated on Oct 9, 2024

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 Log Management
13th
Average Rating
8.0
Reviews Sentiment
7.2
Number of Reviews
46
Ranking in other categories
Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability (13th), Cloud Monitoring Software (9th)
Grafana Loki
Ranking in Log Management
4th
Average Rating
8.2
Reviews Sentiment
7.8
Number of Reviews
18
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
 

Mindshare comparison

As of June 2025, in the Log Management category, the mindshare of Amazon CloudWatch is 2.1%, up from 1.0% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Grafana Loki is 8.7%, up from 4.2% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Log Management
 

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…
Volodymyr Bondarchuk - PeerSpot reviewer
Integrations enhance monitoring but problem-solving proves challenging
Different types of integrations with various sources are the most helpful and useful features of Grafana Loki that I found for myself. As part of Kubernetes technology, I noticed benefits from using this product such as availability, configuration balancing, high availability solutions for high performance, and failover clustering. It provides a clear picture about the state of the system and gives needed information for taking action and quickly fixing problems.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"The monitoring feature is valuable."
"Most of it's around optimizing utilization, their cloud utilization. They're making sure that they're getting the most out of their in-cloud environments and their instances. Making sure that there's no strange behavior in the environment."
"The solution gives us very good real-time data."
"It's useful to analyze past data and compare it with recent activities."
"We have found the pricing to be reasonable."
"The initial setup is easy."
"Setting up this product was easy. I found data analytics as its most valuable feature."
"The tool's UI is good. One can scroll through the logs very easily."
"Grafana agent is very lightweight and does not cost significant resources of our cluster."
"I appreciate the capability to process logs from microservices and seamlessly integrate them into Grafana."
"Loki also utilizes the same service discovery mechanism as used by Prometheus. So, whatever labeled metadata you see in Prometheus, you have the exact same metadata in the Loki system. Given this level of intricacy and the attempt to address these challenges, I firmly believe that Loki deserves praise for the work."
"The most valuable feature of Grafana Loki is the dashboards which are really simple to create."
"The product's most valuable features are ease of installation, management, and reporting. It has an efficient ability to set thresholds for alerts, as well."
"The solution's stability has never been a problem. Stability-wise, I rate the solution a nine to ten out of ten."
"Different types of integrations with various sources are the most helpful and useful features of Grafana Loki that I found for myself."
"The most valuable feature is the capability to set up alerts, which becomes necessary when we need to receive notifications for specific events."
 

Cons

"It's not very intuitive. It doesn't have drag-and-drop functionality to trigger actions from notifications."
"There is room for improvement in terms of stability."
"Some of our customers want to use Kubernetes to monitor their CICD flow but Amazon CloudWatch does not support it. We need to use another solution, such as Datadog or Dynatrace has the needed capability."
"I would like to monitor inbound and outbound transfer. I would also like to control the traffic for load balancing."
"There is some delay in logging that they need to improve on."
"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."
"This product lacks some features: real-time data stream monitoring, application performance monitoring, mobile app monitoring, and live dashboards. Its workflows also need improvement."
"The dashboard and the UI could improve in Amazon CloudWatch. Additionally, they should focus on visibility inside the servers with AI and machine learning integrations. This would allow users who are using the solution to see what is happening within the system better."
"There is a need for some change in the alerting types of the product. In short, a few changes in the alert area are needed due to minor shortcomings."
"Enhancing speed could be a game-changer, and while it might vary depending on the application, it's a factor worth exploring."
"The solution's scalability depends on the team managing the Grafana instance."
"The product must improve its UI."
"I do not see any areas for improvement at the moment."
"We encountered certain limitations when it came to alerting, particularly when dealing with specific data sources."
"The platform's stability needs improvement."
"The solution has shortcomings regarding security monitoring-oriented features that need improvement."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"The price of Amazon CloudWatch is reasonable for detailed basic monitoring."
"Its pricing is reasonable. It is sometimes tricky, but it is reasonable as compared to others."
"The pricing can be considered reasonable, especially when already operating on a cloud platform."
"The tool is not expensive."
"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."
"The product's cost is relatively inexpensive."
"Amazon CloudWatch has very cheap pricing, and it hardly costs my company $25-$30 a month for fifty systems, so it's pretty affordable."
"We have monthly licensing costs. The licenses are probably in the vicinity of about $300 - $350/month."
"I use the solution's open-source version. Grafana Loki is a completely free solution for me."
"Grafana Loki is an open-source solution."
"The pricing structure varies based on the number of users; there might be specific taxes to pay for it."
"The cost is less than other paid services like CloudWatch."
"I find the licensing structure quite reasonable, as the free license effectively meets my requirements."
"The solution is open source."
"My company doesn't need to pay for the licensing cost of the solution."
"You can use the free version of Grafana Loki on-premises."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Financial Services Firm
17%
Computer Software Company
15%
Manufacturing Company
8%
Real Estate/Law Firm
5%
Computer Software Company
17%
Financial Services Firm
10%
Comms Service Provider
10%
Manufacturing Company
8%
 

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...
What do you like most about Grafana Loki?
We are using Grafana Loki as a database for real-time metrics.
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Grafana Loki?
We use the open-source version of Loki. The cloud version is competitively priced compared to other market solutions.
What needs improvement with Grafana Loki?
It would be beneficial if Loki could directly access Windows Server logs or events directly from the servers.
 

Comparisons

 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

AirAsia, Airbnb, Aircel, APUS, Avazu, Casa & Video, Futbol Club Barcelona (FCBarcelona), National Taiwan University, redBus
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Find out what your peers are saying about Amazon CloudWatch vs. Grafana Loki and other solutions. Updated: June 2025.
856,873 professionals have used our research since 2012.