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Amazon CloudWatch pros and cons

Vendor: Amazon Web Services (AWS)

4.0 out of 5

45 reviews
89% willing to recommend

259 followers

Pros & Cons summary

Amazon CloudWatch offers real-time data, detailed metrics, and performance insights crucial for optimizing cloud usage and anomaly detection. Known for seamless AWS integration and features like alarms, automation, and scaling, its ease of setup and centralized dashboard are praised. Despite being cost-effective with reliable support, it requires enhancements in drill-down capabilities, user experience, log streaming efficiency, and pricing reassessment, alongside more effective technical support.

Buyer's Guide

Get pricing advice, tips, use cases and valuable features from real users of this product.

Prominent pros & cons

PROS

Amazon CloudWatch provides very good real-time data and detailed metrics for cloud services, helping optimize utilization and monitor environments for unusual behavior.

Users appreciate the ease of use, allowing for simple setup, integration with AWS, and task automation, including alarms and triggering events like auto-scaling based on CPU utilization.

The monitoring features are highly valued for their ability to log, track, and analyze metrics, offering comprehensive insights into application performance and infrastructure.

Amazon CloudWatch is praised for its reasonable pricing, stable service, and direct integration with AWS and other storage providers, making it possible to push logs and metrics effortlessly.

The ability to handle detailed data for log collection and intrusion prevention while offering reliable performance and efficiency makes Amazon CloudWatch a preferred choice for many.

CONS

Monitoring application performance has limitations and requires third-party tools for comprehensive insights.

Dashboard drill-down features need improvement for clearer analysis.

Log streaming is slow, requiring manual effort and integration with tools like Kibana or Splunk for efficiency.

Search functionality is limited, lacking advanced search features and integration capabilities.

Pricing is considered high, with additional costs for certain types of monitoring services.

Amazon CloudWatch Pros review quotes

SB

Head of Data Architect at LendingTree

Jul 25, 2022

CloudWatch immediately hooks up and connects to the KPIs and all the metrics.

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Solutions Architect at ValueMomentum

Sep 13, 2022

What my company likes best about Amazon CloudWatch is that it's on AWS. My team also likes it for its log feature. As the solution is on AWS, it also has good pricing and resource availability, plus it's what clients choose. My company also chose AWS for Forge ECS, and at the time, there was a need for the log features provided by Amazon CloudWatch, so it's the solution my team went with.

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NR

Vice President at American Technology Consulting

Mar 9, 2020

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.

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Amazon CloudWatch

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CEO at Axcess.io

Jun 17, 2024

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.

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Consultant at Deloitte

Oct 13, 2022

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.

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Cloud Architect at Mercedes-Benz

Jan 24, 2022

Setting up this product was easy. I found data analytics as its most valuable feature.

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Acquisitions Leader at a healthcare company with 10,001+ employees

Jul 20, 2020

The solution gives us very good real-time data.

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JR

Director at Fidelity Investments

Jun 29, 2022

Our team finds it overall quite useful.

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Shaamil Ashraff

Architect - Database Administration at Mitra Innovation

Jun 3, 2022

We have found the pricing to be reasonable.

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Rasanpreet Singh

Senior Consultant at Infosys

Sep 25, 2023

It offers direct integrations with various storage providers, making it convenient to push logs from CloudWatch to these external platforms.

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Amazon CloudWatch Cons review quotes

SB

Head of Data Architect at LendingTree

Jul 25, 2022

It would be beneficial for CloudWatch to provide an API interface and some kind of custom configuration.

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Solutions Architect at ValueMomentum

Sep 13, 2022

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.

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NR

Vice President at American Technology Consulting

Mar 9, 2020

Better reporting is always something needed. That could be an answer to just about anything. But you always want better reporting, better dashboards, things that are just more dynamic and more accessible.

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Amazon CloudWatch

Free Report: Amazon CloudWatch Reviews and More

Learn what your peers think about Amazon CloudWatch. Get advice and tips from experienced pros sharing their opinions. Updated: December 2024.

824,053 professionals have used our research since 2012.

CEO at Axcess.io

Jun 17, 2024

It's not very intuitive. It doesn't have drag-and-drop functionality to trigger actions from notifications.

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Consultant at Deloitte

Oct 13, 2022

What would make Amazon CloudWatch better is if it includes more on-site checks, particularly status checks on the CPU, network input/output, etc. It would also be helpful if there's built-in swap space, disk, and memory monitoring in Amazon CloudWatch because, at the moment, my team has to configure it manually through a shell script.

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Cloud Architect at Mercedes-Benz

Jan 24, 2022

This product lacks some features: real-time data stream monitoring, application performance monitoring, mobile app monitoring, and live dashboards. Its workflows also need improvement.

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Acquisitions Leader at a healthcare company with 10,001+ employees

Jul 20, 2020

The drill-down aspect on the dashboard of the solution needs improvement. We get a very good high-level overview, but when we drill down, it becomes a little less clear. We have given this feedback to AWS as well and hope they will improve this in the future.

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JR

Director at Fidelity Investments

Jun 29, 2022

We'd like the interface to be as easy as Datadog.

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Shaamil Ashraff

Architect - Database Administration at Mitra Innovation

Jun 3, 2022

I do not know whether or not CloudWatch can be integrated with on-prem services.

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Rasanpreet Singh

Senior Consultant at Infosys

Sep 25, 2023

There could be further enhancements through CloudWatch's partnerships.

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Product Categories

Product Categories

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Product Categories

Product Categories

Cloud Monitoring Software

Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability

Popular Comparisons

Popular Comparisons

Datadog vs Amazon CloudWatch

Zabbix vs Amazon CloudWatch

New Relic vs Amazon CloudWatch

Elastic Observability vs Amazon CloudWatch

SolarWinds NPM vs Amazon CloudWatch

Nagios XI vs Amazon CloudWatch

LogicMonitor vs Amazon CloudWatch

Centreon vs Amazon CloudWatch

ScienceLogic vs Amazon CloudWatch

Icinga vs Amazon CloudWatch

BMC TrueSight Operations Management vs Amazon CloudWatch

Google Cloud's operations suite (formerly Stackdriver) vs Amazon CloudWatch

VMware Aria Operations for Applications vs Amazon CloudWatch

IBM SevOne Network Performance Management (NPM) vs Amazon CloudWatch

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