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Amazon CloudWatch vs Graylog comparison

 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive SummaryUpdated on Apr 20, 2025

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)
Graylog
Ranking in Log Management
15th
Average Rating
8.0
Reviews Sentiment
7.2
Number of Reviews
21
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 Graylog is 6.7%, up from 5.9% 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…
Ivan Kokalovic - PeerSpot reviewer
Facilitates backend service monitoring with efficient log retrieval and API flexibility
Graylog is valuable because it bridges technical knowledge to non-technical teams, presenting complex backend processes in a simple timeline. It boosts the knowledge of sales and customer support teams by allowing them to see the backend operations without needing to read the code. Its API is flexible for visualization, and its powerful search engine efficiently handles large volumes of log data. Moreover, its stability, fast search capabilities, and compatibility with languages like ANSI SQL enhance its utility in IT infrastructure.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"It is a stable solution...I rate the technical support a ten out of ten."
"It's a very simple logging system."
"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."
"The initial setup is easy."
"The tool enables live monitoring."
"The solution gives us very good real-time data."
"I have found the memory metrics and the CPU metrics valuable."
"Setting up this product was easy. I found data analytics as its most valuable feature."
"I like the correlation and the alerting."
"The build is stable and requires little maintenance, even compared to some extremely expensive products."
"Open source and user friendly."
"UDP is a fast and lightweight protocol, perfect for sending large volumes of logs with minimal overhead."
"The ability to write custom alerts is key to information security and compliance."
"Graylog is very handy."
"The Graylog features that have proven to be most beneficial for our data analysis in particular are that we tend to use it as a big data store, so we have the correlation rules that, if something matches under certain conditions, it raises an alarm."
"Everything stands out as valuable, including the fact that I can quantify and qualify the logs, create pipelines and process the logs in any way I like, and create charts or data maps."
 

Cons

"The product’s documentation must be improved."
"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."
"Incorporating a straightforward method or a plug-and-play solution for integrating these databases with our systems, facilitating smooth data transfer, and enabling the creation of dashboards for monitoring and analysis would be beneficial."
"Adding conditional expressions would enhance its functionality."
"The dashboard of Amazon CloudWatch is not very customizable right now."
"It would be beneficial for CloudWatch to provide an API interface and some kind of custom configuration."
"The graphical interface has room for improvement. CloudWatch only gives you a breakdown of what's wrong. However, it would be nice if it could automatically remedy the problems it identifies. You should be able to configure it so that when a specific condition arises, it will take a predefined action."
"I would like to monitor inbound and outbound transfer. I would also like to control the traffic for load balancing."
"The infrastructure cost is the main issue. I like the rest. If the infrastructure costs could be lower, it would be fantastic."
"More customization is always useful."
"Over six months, I had two similar issues where searches were performed on field "messages". It exhausted all the memory of the ES node causing an ES crash and a Graylog halt."
"I would like to see some kind of visualization included in Graylog."
"The biggest problem is the collector application, as we wanted to avoid using Graylog Collector Sidecar due to its architecture."
"Graylog can improve the index rotation as it's quite a complex solution."
"Since container orchestration systems are popular and Graylog fits the niche well, perhaps they could officially support running in docker containers on Kubernetes as a StatefulSet as a use case. That way, the declarative nature of Kubernetes config files would document their best case deployment scenario-"
"When it comes to configuring the processing pipeline, writing the rules can be very tedious, especially since the documentation isn't extensive on how the functions provided for these rules work."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"The pricing model is pay-as-you-go so you have to be mindful of usage to manage costs."
"Amazon CloudWatch has very cheap pricing, and it hardly costs my company $25-$30 a month for fifty systems, so it's pretty affordable."
"The pricing is average."
"It’s an open-source solution."
"The solution is expensive."
"The tool is not expensive."
"I consider it as a medium-priced solution."
"Its pricing is reasonable. It is sometimes tricky, but it is reasonable as compared to others."
"Having paid official support is wise for projects."
"Graylog is a free open-source solution. The free version has a capacity limitation of 2 GB daily, if you want to go above this you have to purchase a license."
"We are using the free version of the product. However, the paid version is expensive."
"I am using a community edition. I have not looked at the enterprise offering from Graylog."
"Consider Enterprise support if you have atypical needs or setup requirements.​"
"I use the free version of Graylog."
"If you want something that works and do not have the money for Splunk or QRadar, take Graylog.​​"
"It's an open-source solution that can be used free of charge."
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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%
Comms Service Provider
10%
Educational Organization
7%
Government
7%
 

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 Graylog?
The product is scalable. The solution is stable.
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Graylog?
I am not familiar with the pricing details of Graylog, as I was not responsible for that aspect. It was determined that we didn't need an enterprise plan, which is more suited for clients with less...
What needs improvement with Graylog?
An improvement I would suggest is in Graylog's user interface, such as allowing for font size adjustments. A potential enhancement could be the integration with Ollama to run large language models ...
 

Comparisons

 

Also Known As

No data available
Graylog2
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

AirAsia, Airbnb, Aircel, APUS, Avazu, Casa & Video, Futbol Club Barcelona (FCBarcelona), National Taiwan University, redBus
Blue Cross Blue Shield, eBay, Cisco, LinkedIn, SAP, King.com, Twilio, Deutsche Presse-Agentur
Find out what your peers are saying about Amazon CloudWatch vs. Graylog and other solutions. Updated: June 2025.
856,873 professionals have used our research since 2012.