The primary use cases are creating a platform for customer experience and customer engagement. This is more about profiling a customer and it is more about using or basically understanding the customer's needs and wants and profiling the data and showing it to a business analyst.
Senior Product Architect at Majorel
Experienced user, with excellent customer analysis, and quick and easy installation
Pros and Cons
- "I can put it in a simple term, its simplicity is always there."
- "I think something that can be improved are the alerts and alerting mechanism based on no rejects. We want to have it more flexible and that is one of the key things that is required."
What is our primary use case?
How has it helped my organization?
That is pretty straightforward and it is not really meant for a technical user specifically, even a non-technical person can use it. I can put it in a simple term, its simplicity is always there. And it is also in real-time and it has a log analysis feature wherein you can do some insights into the log that is generated. Yeah, but again, this is not a full-fledged monitoring tool. Just like Dynatrace, it comes with various other things like log security and many other features, but the log analysis for the team.
What is most valuable?
The most valuable feature is the insights are good.
What needs improvement?
I think something that can be improved are the alerts and alerting mechanism based on no rejects. We want to have it more flexible and that is one of the key things that is required.
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January 2025
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For how long have I used the solution?
I have been using Amazon CloudWatch for the past four to five years now.
What do I think about the stability of the solution?
The performance is very good and there are no problems accessing it.
What do I think about the scalability of the solution?
We are already on the cloud platform, and we have never experienced any hurdles in terms of performance or scalability. It is always the same as it was at the beginning and we do not feel many differences as we have been growing because that is something that is already scaling at the back end and I think the team is doing it. We are not aware of how they do it, but as end users, we do not feel such difficulties in accessing it.
How are customer service and support?
There are three packages currently we are opting for package one, which basically means that you can only do offline chats or, we have to send any queries offline. But there are three packages in which we can do real-time calls and chats with them to rectify the issues if there are any. So, I can say that from the support perspective with whatever package that we have taken, they are meeting expectations.
How was the initial setup?
The setup is very straightforward and took less than thirty minutes to install.
What about the implementation team?
All of our implementations took place in-house.
What's my experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing?
The pricing is based on a storage cost plus there is a minimal cost for the usage, but I am not sure about the actual figures, but it is built upon the usage.
What other advice do I have?
I would recommend they have an understanding of the basics of AWS before you start configuring. I would rate Amazon CloudWatch a nine out of ten.
Disclosure: I am a real user, and this review is based on my own experience and opinions.
The solution can be used for monitoring, analyzing logs, and collecting and aggregating infrastructure and application metrics
Pros and Cons
- "The most valuable feature of Amazon CloudWatch is collecting the logs from Lambda."
- "The solution's auto-scaling could be improved."
How has it helped my organization?
Amazon CloudWatch helps us with some monitoring, analyzing different logs, and collecting and aggregating infrastructure and application metrics. The solution also helps us with container metrics.
What is most valuable?
The most valuable feature of Amazon CloudWatch is collecting the logs from Lambda.
What needs improvement?
The solution's auto-scaling could be improved.
Log analytics features should be included in the next release of Amazon CloudWatch.
For how long have I used the solution?
I have used Amazon CloudWatch for the last two years.
What do I think about the stability of the solution?
I rate Amazon CloudWatch an eight out of ten for stability.
What do I think about the scalability of the solution?
I rate Amazon CloudWatch an eight out of ten for scalability.
What was our ROI?
Amazon CloudWatch helped us meet our business requirement goals.
What other advice do I have?
Amazon CloudWatch's features, like logs, metrics, and co-relations, can be useful for users looking for monitoring or collecting logs.
Overall, I rate Amazon CloudWatch an eight out of ten.
Which deployment model are you using for this solution?
On-premises
Disclosure: I am a real user, and this review is based on my own experience and opinions.
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Amazon CloudWatch
January 2025
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830,455 professionals have used our research since 2012.
A product with great support, an easy installation phase, and great scalability options
Pros and Cons
- "Amazon CloudWatch's best feature stems from its ability to monitor app performance."
- "The dashboard of Amazon CloudWatch is not very customizable right now."
What is our primary use case?
My company's clients use Amazon CloudWatch, which offers a very good performance for application performance monitoring, as well as the integrations part.
What is most valuable?
Amazon CloudWatch's best feature stems from its ability to monitor app performance. People also use Amazon CloudWatch for integration with AWS services.
What needs improvement?
I think Amazon CloudWatch has built a very good service in terms of integration since it can integrate with Docker, EC2, and Kubernetes, owing to which we don't have any problem with the solution in our company right now as it works fine. Amazon CloudWatch resolved its performance issues quickly as well. I don't think there is anything bad in Amazon CloudWatch.
I don't think I need to comment on any additional features that need to be included in Amazon CloudWatch since they roll out new features as per the roadmap Amazon has planned.
The dashboard of Amazon CloudWatch is not very customizable right now. In the future, I would like the dashboard of Amazon CloudWatch to be made more customizable.
For how long have I used the solution?
I have been using Amazon CloudWatch for more than three to four years. My company operates as an integrator, consultant, and partner of Amazon.
What do I think about the stability of the solution?
It is a stable solution.
What do I think about the scalability of the solution?
With Amazon CloudWatch, you don't need to worry about scalability in terms of volume or in terms of horizontal or vertical growth. In general, Amazon CloudWatch is a highly scalable product.
My company's clients who use Amazon CloudWatch and I deal with are mostly small and medium-sized companies.
How are customer service and support?
The solution's technical support is great since I haven't faced any challenges yet. I rate the technical support a nine out of ten.
How would you rate customer service and support?
Positive
How was the initial setup?
The product's installation phase is very easy. In our company, we didn't face any problems with the product's installation part.
With Amazon CloudWatch, the time taken for the installation phase is only related to the configuration part. You just need to do the configuration on the basis of availability, after which you need to make sure that you have a configuration ready, making it a very easy process that doesn't take hours to finish.
Which other solutions did I evaluate?
Amazon CloudWatch is a really good product compared to its competitors in the market.
What other advice do I have?
With Amazon CloudWatch, my company did not find the need to get involved with the maintenance part as it is a service. It is the cloud service provider who makes sure that the service is available all the time, so you don't have to worry about the maintenance part.
I rate the overall product a nine out of ten.
Disclosure: My company has a business relationship with this vendor other than being a customer: Consultant
System Engineer at Wipro Limited
A cloud solution for monitoring the devices with a scheduling feature
Pros and Cons
- "Scheduling is a valuable feature."
- "It is hard to configure; it is not a straightforward tool."
What is our primary use case?
We use the solution to monitor the devices on our system or infrastructure. CloudWatch notifies you when a token is used or when the VM is not working. It helps you to determine the status of your infrastructure.
How has it helped my organization?
We created a CloudWatch application or feature for our system to provide us with the ongoing status of our machines or components in the network.
What is most valuable?
Scheduling is a valuable feature.
What needs improvement?
When you set up CloudWatch, you can't even take a lot without checking on them or without going through the whole configuration because we're configuring. It's not a frequent feature you always work on.
The integration requires a lot of permissions and the tool delays in providing notifications. Sometimes, receiving a notification after an update takes a long time. So, we prefer using a monitoring tool like New Relic or Grafana.
Another area of improvement is scheduling. CloudWatch is complicated when it comes to scheduling. If you want to monitor the component, the configuration is not straightforward. You need good knowledge for something to be added there.
For how long have I used the solution?
I have been using Amazon CloudWatch for two years. We use the latest version of CloudWatch.
What do I think about the stability of the solution?
I rate the solution’s scalability an eight out of ten.
What do I think about the scalability of the solution?
I rate the solution’s scalability an eight out of ten.
How was the initial setup?
It is hard to configure; it is not a straightforward tool.
What was our ROI?
We see an ROI.
What's my experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing?
The price is okay.
What other advice do I have?
If someone wants to use the product. It depends on whether the company can use another tool. If so, I recommend AWS, which, too, has a monitoring tool. However, it may still be too expensive for a small company. I recommend using CloudWatch for a small company if they don’t have money.
Overall, I rate the solution an eight out of ten.
Which deployment model are you using for this solution?
Public Cloud
Disclosure: I am a real user, and this review is based on my own experience and opinions.
Useful, easy to set yo, and offers good logs
Pros and Cons
- "Our team finds it overall quite useful."
- "We'd like the interface to be as easy as Datadog."
What is our primary use case?
We're only using it for collecting the logs and forwarding it, and then in some areas, we use it for scheduling stuff and there are some new alerts that come in, and then from there, they had to trigger some Lambdas.
We build the monitoring and everything on top of the Datadog.
What is most valuable?
I'm a technical manager and they use CloudWatch to forward all the requests to Datadog. I don't know the specific features inside the CloudWatch that they found useful.
Our team finds it overall quite useful.
Everything is based off of CloudWatch. Logs stream through CloudWatch and then everything is piggybacked, the telemetry and everything is coming out of that.
It's pretty simple to set up.
What needs improvement?
I haven't heard any complaints about the product.
It would be nice if they could make it in such a way that we wouldn't have to rely on Datadog as much.
We'd like the interface to be as easy as Datadog.
For how long have I used the solution?
The department has been using the solution for about two and a half to three years. They've used it for a while and I recently joined the team.
What do I think about the stability of the solution?
It's stable. The performance is good. It's reliable. There are no bugs or glitches. It doesn't crash or freeze.
What do I think about the scalability of the solution?
We haven't heard so much about any scalability issues. It scales well. It's about the volume and we pump so many logs, particularly in the space of the Datadog, it becomes expensive. We've put restrictions around it based on price and not based on that it can't be done. We just stick to the logs, indexed in size, so people complain that it costs so much.
When it comes to writing the PI data into the logs, we always ask: should we do it, not do it? It's all to do with your teams. Overall, for us, it has become a widely accepted solution to be used in the public cloud.
We have about five dozen technologists that use the solution currently. We might have between 100 and 500 end-users in different business groups.
How are customer service and support?
We've used support in the past and they are always available to us when we need them. We haven't had issues getting help.
We have their solution architects available for us. We can call them anytime and they come in. They're extremely good with us.
How would you rate customer service and support?
Positive
Which solution did I use previously and why did I switch?
We also use Datadog.
People find the dashboarding of Datadog to be very comfortable and very elegant. That's one of the main things that come out. They take the data from the CloudWatch and they tally with the costing aspect as well, however, mainly, people find it useful on the dashboard. They like the alerts et cetera. The usability and search are great.
How was the initial setup?
The initial setup is pretty straightforward and simple. It's easy. It's not overly complex.
The usage in both CloudWatch and Datadog is about the volume. People simply have to be mindful of how much they want and how they want to index and manage them. Otherwise, it's pretty straightforward.
What's my experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing?
I'm not sure what the exact cost is.
What other advice do I have?
We're an enterprise group. We may have a partnership with Amazon. I'm not sure.
We mainly use the public cloud. We also have hybrid setups.
I'd rate the solution an eight out of ten. It does what it does and it does well. However, the UI could always be better.
Which deployment model are you using for this solution?
Public Cloud
Disclosure: My company has a business relationship with this vendor other than being a customer: Partner
Cloud Architect at Mercedes-Benz
Easy to set up metrics repository with good data analytics, but lacks real-time data stream monitoring
Pros and Cons
- "Setting up this product was easy. I found data analytics as its most valuable feature."
- "This product lacks some features: real-time data stream monitoring, application performance monitoring, mobile app monitoring, and live dashboards. Its workflows also need improvement."
What is most valuable?
In Amazon CloudWatch, I found their data analytics services most valuable. They are what we are looking for. We are utilizing Kinesis Data Firehose, Logstash Elastic, and CloudWatch Logs. There are many services that we are using, and in our case, we are using three.
What needs improvement?
An area for improvement that we want to see in Amazon CloudWatch is a more realistic monitoring. It's real-time data stream monitoring we are looking for. Our application is a huge application that will run on AWS. It has a lot of services that are running, so we want to monitor those services, e.g. message review and frontend application in ELB (Elastic Load Balancing).
It's not only monitoring that we want to do. We also want to visualize that monitoring data through dashboards. This is the main reason we plan to try Datadog because in Datadog, we can create a dashboard and we can visualize the log data through the dashboard.
We are not happy about the dashboards. In Amazon CloudWatch, they can fetch all the logs, but the service is not good at delivering the data into the dashboard, plus there's the lack of real data, e.g. in application performance monitoring. We find this product lacking and this is why we want to look for a new service that can cover our needs.
Additional features we would like to see in the future on this product include more API performance features, e.g. application performance monitoring. We also want live dashboards and well-designed workflows.
We also want integrative services, e.g. custom logs we can check, as we are not satisfied with what Amazon CloudWatch currently has. We are looking for more competency on these services: dashboards, real-time monitoring, real user monitoring, and application performance monitoring. We also have more and more mobile apps, so mobile app monitoring is also important.
These are the key areas that people are looking for, and what we'd like to see on this product in the future.
For how long have I used the solution?
I've been using Amazon CloudWatch for over six years.
What do I think about the scalability of the solution?
Amazon CloudWatch is scalable to some extent.
How are customer service and support?
Technical support for this product is okay. They have a different support standard which they are maintaining. When you pay for premium support, you'll get your issue resolved within two hours. If it is standard support, it takes one to two days. The support you get depends on the type of support you paid for.
How was the initial setup?
This solution is easy to set up. It's not complex. You just need to run the Amazon CloudWatch agent in all the services. Once we install the agent into our services, we'll be able to fetch the log regularly.
Which other solutions did I evaluate?
I evaluated Nagios.
What other advice do I have?
We're using Amazon CloudWatch. Our clients are using different monitoring services. Some are using Prometheus, while some are using Nagios, but in our platform overall, all the services are located in AWS only.
I have no advice for people looking into using Amazon CloudWatch, but in our case, all our services are running on the AWS platform, so initially we thought of using all their cloud-based native services to save on admin and infrastructure costs, including other connectivities. That was our plan initially, but now client requirements have been more demanding.
The client wants a real-time monitoring solution which is something we are unable to get from the product, so we are looking for a new solution like Datadog, or New Relic, or Prometheus.
My rating for Amazon CloudWatch is a seven out of ten.
I'm a consumer and I'm working in a company like Accenture. It's a service-based organization. It's a MNC (multinational corporation), so it's global and we have multiple clients. These multiple clients have different strategies and they want their applications to be set up in the Cloud. I'm the AWS architect, so I do the solutions and provide solutions for them, e.g. cost optimization, infrastructure optimization, etc.
What clients find most challenging thing in the Cloud is monitoring, so we are looking for a centralized monitoring solution where we can get everything in a single window, but we want a service that's similar to Amazon CloudWatch. We collect data and we need to analyze that log and analyze the metrics, so we create a refined monitoring data, then we publish it by using the Amazon QuickSight dashboard. There are three different services we have to use, so instead of using all these different services, we want to use only one service: a centralized monitoring service to meet all our needs. This is what we are looking to have in the future.
Disclosure: I am a real user, and this review is based on my own experience and opinions.
Cloud security manager at HID Global
Enables live monitoring, retains logs, and helps track threats easily
Pros and Cons
- "The tool enables live monitoring."
- "The integration with third-party tools must be made easier."
What is our primary use case?
We collect the CloudWatch logs and use them to analyze security. It helps us to monitor malicious activity.
What is most valuable?
Amazon CloudWatch is an important tool in AWS. If we have an AWS-based infrastructure, the product must be enabled in all environments. If we have different environments in the cloud, CloudWatch is mandatory. The tool enables live monitoring. It is easier for us to track who logs in and out of the systems and how the computing services work.
The product is more than enough for what we need daily. Amazon improves things year on year. It is quite straightforward for us. We are using the solution to monitor our live environment. If an attack happens, we can track it down using the logs easily and act fast to isolate the threat. The retention of the logs and live tracking features are useful for us.
What needs improvement?
The integration with third-party tools must be made easier.
For how long have I used the solution?
I have been using the solution for five to six years.
What do I think about the stability of the solution?
I rate the product’s stability a nine out of ten. We do not face any downtimes.
What do I think about the scalability of the solution?
We have more than 600 users in our organization. Every user in the organization is asked to enable CloudWatch in every environment. I rate the scalability a nine out of ten. Whenever we add more accounts, CloudWatch is enabled in those accounts.
How are customer service and support?
The technical support is pretty good. The team is always available. The support persons are readily available to get into a call and sort out our issues.
How would you rate customer service and support?
Positive
What's my experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing?
Amazon CloudWatch is a native service of AWS, and the bill is included with the other services in AWS. We receive a collective bill. The tool is not expensive. I rate the pricing an eight out of ten.
What other advice do I have?
I will recommend the product to others. CloudWatch brings in a lot of value. It enables live monitoring. We have ten engineers in our technical team. The tool is self-sufficient. It does not require much maintenance. We enable it, ensure the logs are pushed to the third-party tools, and monitor them. It does not require any deployment process. We are more aligned with Amazon’s services when building our products. It is suitable for our business purposes. Overall, I rate the product a nine out of ten.
Which deployment model are you using for this solution?
Public Cloud
Disclosure: I am a real user, and this review is based on my own experience and opinions.
Last updated: Jun 19, 2024
Flag as inappropriateSoftware Engineer at Readyly
Though at times there are issues due to missing logs, it provides a good UI
Pros and Cons
- "The tool's UI is good. One can scroll through the logs very easily."
- "Amazon CloudWatch needs improvement. The main thing is we have noticed missing logs."
What is our primary use case?
We use Amazon CloudWatch in our company to mainly troubleshoot Lambda functions. Then, we use CloudWatch to set up CloudWatch Alarms.
What is most valuable?
It maintains all the streams and all the logs in an orderly manner, and it maintains it indefinitely unless otherwise configured with a retention period. CloudWatch Alarms is another useful service. It will send us a notification if our usage exceeds the limit we've set. Also, we have to use CloudWatch Alarms to comply with some security standards. Watching the logs and troubleshooting Lambda is the main use of Amazon CloudWatch for us. The tool's UI is good. One can scroll through the logs very easily.
What needs improvement?
Amazon CloudWatch needs improvement. The main thing is we have noticed missing logs. Like, we know that the Lambda function was executed because we have been able to see the output in another downstream system, but we do not see the logs of that execution on CloudWatch. Sometimes we face problems like our program didn't produce the correct output, and the customer reports it. However, we don't see any logs when we go to CloudWatch.
CloudWatch can also improve the logs search functionality. Searching with keywords over the log streams can produce very unreliable results.
For how long have I used the solution?
I have been using Amazon CloudWatch for a year. I am a customer of the solution.
What do I think about the stability of the solution?
I won't say it is a stable tool since there is the problem of missing logs.
What do I think about the scalability of the solution?
It's a very scalable solution. Maybe at a time, ten people use it in our company.
How was the initial setup?
One doesn't have to do any setup for CloudWatch logs. Only CloudWatch Alarms need setting up. Whenever you create a Lambda function, it automatically logs to CloudWatch.
Which other solutions did I evaluate?
Actually, we had chosen Amazon Lambda for our serverless programming, and Lambda logs to CloudWatch by default. We can log in to other services, which can be a storage like S3 and all, but it will require more work from us. CloudWatch is the default standard for Lambda logging. Another reason for choosing Amazon CloudWatch is because we use CloudWatch Alarms. If we don't set up CloudWatch Alarms, we will fail certain security compliance standards.
What other advice do I have?
You should be careful about using Amazon CloudWatch if your Lambda is running continuously since that is when you suffer log missing problems. If you are running a Lambda function only intermittently, then it is okay. I would suggest that if you intend it to run your Lambda function continuously, like, every single second, then maybe use another service for logs. It is better to write your own logs to S3 or something.
I rate the overall solution a five out of ten.
Disclosure: I am a real user, and this review is based on my own experience and opinions.
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