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Amazon CloudWatch vs Pandora FMS comparison

 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive SummaryUpdated on Jul 27, 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
16th
Ranking in Cloud Monitoring Software
11th
Average Rating
8.0
Reviews Sentiment
7.1
Number of Reviews
48
Ranking in other categories
Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability (13th)
Pandora FMS
Ranking in Log Management
57th
Ranking in Cloud Monitoring Software
40th
Average Rating
9.2
Reviews Sentiment
7.6
Number of Reviews
22
Ranking in other categories
Network Monitoring Software (74th), Server Monitoring (23rd), IT Infrastructure Monitoring (54th)
 

Mindshare comparison

As of October 2025, in the Log Management category, the mindshare of Amazon CloudWatch is 2.1%, up from 1.3% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Pandora FMS is 0.3%, up from 0.2% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Log Management Market Share Distribution
ProductMarket Share (%)
Amazon CloudWatch2.1%
Pandora FMS0.3%
Other97.6%
Log Management
 

Featured Reviews

Azam S M - PeerSpot reviewer
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.
Gabriel Glusgold - PeerSpot reviewer
Personalized metrics; simplicity of data
My primary use case for Pandora is monitoring This solution has helped us improve our organization by allowing us to create a lot of metrics on several platforms, including Windows, Linux, and Unix. We then use these Pandora metrics to create an interface. We then pass the interface off to the…

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"The most valuable feature of Amazon CloudWatch is its ease of use and logs. You do not have to go to each separate system to see the logs, such as Syslog and they are located in one dashboard GUI."
"Setting up this product was easy. I found data analytics as its most valuable feature."
"We can create events and alerts. We use the information to dive down into the infrastructure performance."
"It is a stable solution...I rate the technical support a ten out of ten."
"You can automate actions or use AWS functionalities like auto-scaling, where you can configure the metrics to add more nodes if the threshold is exceeded."
"The most valuable feature of Amazon CloudWatch is intrusion prevention."
"It is very easy to use; as a monitoring tool, whenever your system experiences issues, it will notify you and is directly linked to your service."
"The monitoring features are valuable."
"The network monitoring and configuration within this solution is very good."
"Thanks to this software and to the work of the support team, we have everything under control."
"The official forum is active enough to answer most of the high-end technical questions that you may have."
"It allows me to quickly see the status of all of my printers, switches, computers, and virtual machines to determine if any system has fallen."
"It provides us with proactive monitoring and is very easy to configure and maintain."
"This product has allowed us to identify and correct certain issues that were affecting our solution."
"It is easy to create your own custom modules if you just know a little bit of scripting. If you have unique requirements, you can just make your own modules. You can even grab checks from other vendors. There are open-source checks for various things such as SMTP, etc. There is a long list of different ones from Nagios. You can just use them, and within seconds, you get yourself a check that is monitoring whatever you need. It is really flexible. I guess that's why they call it Pandora Flexible Monitoring System (FMS). It is reliable. It does the job, and it alerts. It is also surprisingly feature-rich. Our network guy just recently asked about a particular protocol to monitor the bandwidth on the network, which is not a common protocol. When I looked it up, and I found that they cover it. It is very mature for a not-so-known product."
"What I value most about Pandora FMS is the simplicity of working with it."
 

Cons

"Right now, in relation to monitoring services, there are too many services and too many metrics per service."
"The solution should provide human-readable metrics."
"Maybe Amazon Web Services can improve by providing a library for CloudWatch with some useful features."
"It's not an advanced way of monitoring."
"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."
"The monitoring part and GUI are areas in Amazon CloudWatch that have shortcomings currently and can be considered for improvements in the future."
"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."
"The solution's pricing is a bit higher."
"It would be useful if Pandora FMS included an ISO image (or «software appliance») for each big company that leases virtual private machines (VPS), just like in AWS."
"A nice feature in the next release would be an automation module to run workflow actions."
"Pandora could deliver better analytics out of the box. You can work around these limitations with the help of other tools like Grafana. The shortcomings are mostly on the graphical side. The built-in report generators are a bit limited in some areas."
"We would like to see improvement in the mainframe integration that this solution is capable of."
"This solution requires proper training to get 100% out of it."
"It would be helpful to include the generation of reports for times that the network was out of service."
"When it comes to the definition of local Software Agents for the first time in the open-source version, it can become very tedious."
"I would like for the solution to be faster and have a better tolerance between parallel servers for Pandora and Pest Control."
 

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."
"Its pricing is reasonable. It is sometimes tricky, but it is reasonable as compared to others."
"The tool is not expensive."
"The product's cost is relatively inexpensive."
"The price of Amazon CloudWatch is reasonable for detailed basic monitoring."
"The price is okay for me."
"The pricing is average."
"The pricing can be considered reasonable, especially when already operating on a cloud platform."
"My rule of thumb would be that if you need more than thirty agents, and you lack an automation tool such as Chef or Puppet, you will save a lot of time and money going to the Enterprise edition."
"Pandora FMS is easy to implement and the pricing of licenses is competitive."
"They are very competitive on the pricing side. That's one reason why my manager keeps using it."
"Only one payment and it includes support, updates, new versions, and access to the complete library of plugins except for SAP and z/OS."
"In terms of money, the Enterprise version is the cheapest that I have found after a market study."
"Growing the solution or migrating to the Enterprise version is easy, and various plans are available."
"The Open Source Community Edition is great to just explore the software, or use it on medium-sized infrastructures."
"You get the license and it includes updates, new versions, and access to the complete library of modules."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Financial Services Firm
16%
Computer Software Company
12%
Manufacturing Company
10%
University
5%
Government
13%
Comms Service Provider
12%
Computer Software Company
8%
Manufacturing Company
6%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business17
Midsize Enterprise9
Large Enterprise24
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business11
Midsize Enterprise4
Large Enterprise3
 

Questions from the Community

What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Amazon CloudWatch?
Overall, the pricing of Amazon CloudWatch is very expensive.
What needs improvement with Amazon CloudWatch?
Apart from traceability of network resources, Amazon CloudWatch needs to be more interoperable with other tools because many companies are starting to use AI-based dashboards. When using third-part...
Ask a question
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Comparisons

 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

AirAsia, Airbnb, Aircel, APUS, Avazu, Casa & Video, Futbol Club Barcelona (FCBarcelona), National Taiwan University, redBus
Rakuten, Prosegur, Repsol, Teléfonica, Allianz, Ottawa Hospital, Hughes
Find out what your peers are saying about Amazon CloudWatch vs. Pandora FMS and other solutions. Updated: September 2025.
872,706 professionals have used our research since 2012.