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Amazon CloudWatch vs ServiceNow Cloud Observability comparison

 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive Summary

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 Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability
13th
Average Rating
8.0
Reviews Sentiment
7.2
Number of Reviews
47
Ranking in other categories
Log Management (13th), Cloud Monitoring Software (10th)
ServiceNow Cloud Observability
Ranking in Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability
39th
Average Rating
7.6
Reviews Sentiment
6.9
Number of Reviews
4
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 ServiceNow Cloud Observability is 0.4%, up from 0.4% 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…
VinayKumar16 - PeerSpot reviewer
Provides ease of use in areas like analytics and reporting
The feature of the tool that is more impactful for cloud performance stems from the area revolving around analytics and reporting. It is an easy-to-use tool. There is something known as performance analytics within ServiceNow that offers complete analytics, which offers end-to-end analytics along with the KPI metrics with what we have in place and so on. With the aforementioned aspects of the tool, I think we should be able to create a dashboard according to the operations view called the operation dashboard view, specifically for C-level executives.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"The tool's UI is good. One can scroll through the logs very easily."
"The solution gives us very good real-time data."
"Amazon CloudWatch offers cost-saving advantages by being an inbuilt solution that requires no separate setup or maintenance for monitoring tasks."
"The most valuable feature of Amazon CloudWatch is reliability."
"We use Amazon CloudWatch for logging."
"You can enable alarms and metrics, and it has robust integration with AWS services. You can also trigger events. For example, if the CPU utilization is above 80%, it can launch a new instance for you."
"CloudWatch immediately hooks up and connects to the KPIs and all the metrics."
"I can put it in a simple term, its simplicity is always there."
"To a certain extent, it is possible to save on the costs of the product."
"The UI is very intuitive."
"The ability to create a stream based on different parameters, operation name, service name, URL, tags, and URI part, is one valuable feature."
"The solution Lightstep/ServiceNow has a couple of pretty advanced functionalities to help us investigate a deviation and help the development teams have better observability in the environment using distributed and complex services."
 

Cons

"Amazon CloudWatch's pricing needs improvement."
"There is some delay in logging that they need to improve on."
"CloudWatch's scalability could be improved."
"Amazon CloudWatch needs improvement. The main thing is we have noticed missing logs."
"I would like to monitor inbound and outbound transfer. I would also like to control the traffic for load balancing."
"The solution's integration could be easier for laypersons."
"The solution could benefit from a price decrease."
"CloudWatch doesn’t monitor disk throughput by default."
"The design of this solution is not very intuitive and probably could come with more friendly tips for beginners."
"The dashboard and graphics must be improved."
"The support team could be better. Because of the different versions of different tactics of integrating reactive code base, the documentation is not very clear if someone has to be onboard. I would rate the documentation of Lightstep a five out of ten. It could need improvement."
"In terms of licensing, users would want the product to offer them the ability to tailor the tasks offered in the solution to suit their needs."
 

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."
"The tool is not expensive."
"Amazon CloudWatch is a cheap solution."
"The product's cost is relatively inexpensive."
"It’s an open-source solution."
"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 solution is expensive."
"We have monthly licensing costs. The licenses are probably in the vicinity of about $300 - $350/month."
"The product is expensive. I rate the tool's pricing model an eight out of ten."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Financial Services Firm
17%
Computer Software Company
13%
Manufacturing Company
9%
Real Estate/Law Firm
5%
Financial Services Firm
21%
Manufacturing Company
12%
Computer Software Company
12%
Retailer
10%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
No data available
 

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...
What needs improvement with LightStep?
There are a lot of workflows and connectors. In terms of licensing, users would want the product to offer them the ability to tailor the tasks offered in the solution to suit their needs.
What is your primary use case for LightStep?
I use the solution in my company since it has multiple tenants available. Basically, what happens in business is that you have a hybrid setup model, and for that, you extensively use a cloud platfo...
 

Also Known As

No data available
LightStep
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

AirAsia, Airbnb, Aircel, APUS, Avazu, Casa & Video, Futbol Club Barcelona (FCBarcelona), National Taiwan University, redBus
InVision, Twilio, Lyft, Yext, DigitalOcean,
Find out what your peers are saying about Amazon CloudWatch vs. ServiceNow Cloud Observability and other solutions. Updated: July 2025.
861,524 professionals have used our research since 2012.