Amazon CloudWatch Reviews

Amazon CloudWatch is a monitoring and availability service designed to collect and check metrics and collect and monitor log files. We can set alarms, and Amazon CloudWatch allows users to gain operational insight into their application resource and services. The solution also helps users to ensure the reliability, performance, and availability of their infrastructure.

The most valuable features of Amazon CloudWatch are metrics, dashboards, alarms, logs, events, logs insight, and application insights.

The solution should provide human-readable metrics. Amazon CloudWatch should add custom metrics, like static metrics or any data relevant to our use case.

I have been using Amazon CloudWatch for more than three years.

More than five people are using Amazon CloudWatch in our organization.

The solution’s technical support is good.

The solution’s initial setup is easy.

Amazon CloudWatch is a cheap solution.

We don't need to update or do any maintenance on Amazon CloudWatch. The solution has more features available, like metrics. Amazon CloudWatch provides a wide range of metrics for AWS resources, including EC2 and all AWS services. Users can create a custom dashboard to visualize and monitor metrics from various AWS services on a single screen on the dashboard.

This helps in checking the health and performance of the application and resources. Amazon CloudWatch logs allow users to monitor and install log files from the application. The solution's alarms allow users to set thresholds on metrics.

Overall, I rate the solution ten out of ten.

It serves as a diagnostic and profiling tool, particularly useful for dissecting the intricacies of applications, especially in scenarios like Microsoft's best applications. When a user triggers transactions through the GUI, such as purchasing tickets for events like cricket or concerts, the process involves multiple layers—starting from the front-end GUI to the back-end middle tier, microservices, and concluding with database interactions. It allows me to meticulously analyze and monitor these processes by creating and examining various logs. I can delve into the details of each stage, from API calls to network components, and server processing (involving Java Virtual Machine), and even gauge how long specific APIs or queries take to execute. This tool proves invaluable in identifying bottlenecks, such as waiting times or timeouts and understanding the performance of APIs, queries, and even the efficiency of gateways.

When working with AWS services like Lambda functions and AWS Step Functions, it facilitates the creation of insightful dashboards. These dashboards offer a comprehensive view of Lambda function performance, allowing me to gauge capacity utilization and identify areas requiring optimization. In recent experiences, its profiling capabilities have been instrumental in creating detailed dashboards for monitoring.

It is a robust analytical tool and it goes beyond mere functionality and extends into the realm of providing comprehensive insights. It empowers me with analytical skills and capabilities, offering a detailed snapshot of the entire process of requests within an application. Its strength lies in its ability to paint a vivid picture of the application's performance by breaking down the journey of each request, revealing which components are causing delays, and identifying specific pain points.

There is a need for seamless integration with databases, whether they are open-source or proprietary like InfluxDB. 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.

Over the past six to seven months, I've been actively using it for one of our ongoing projects, but my broader experience extends over two to three years, particularly in migration projects from on-premises to cloud-based solutions.

I find it remarkably stable. Its effectiveness in helping me discern patterns, understand the behavior of components, requests, queries, or even aspects related to application performance is noteworthy.

Approximately forty to fifty individuals within the current organization use it actively.

When issues arise or specific requirements demand assistance, the process of reaching out to support can be somewhat cumbersome. Resolving concerns involve navigating through channels, creating or accessing accounts, and then connecting with support.

While I have some hands-on involvement, the extent of my practical experience has been limited as the detailed implementation is usually managed by specialized teams.

The pricing can be considered reasonable, especially when already operating on a cloud platform. The cost is justifiable given the expertise it offers and its capabilities in addressing challenges associated with cloud environments.

Leveraging CloudWatch is advantageous due to its seamless integration with cloud services, making it a valuable asset for monitoring and gaining insights into the platform's performance. Overall, I would rate it eight out of ten.

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.

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.

The most valuable feature is the insights are good.

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.

I have been using Amazon CloudWatch for the past four to five years now.

The performance is very good and there are no problems accessing it.

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.

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.

The setup is very straightforward and took less than thirty minutes to install.

All of our implementations took place in-house.

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.

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.

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.

The most valuable feature of Amazon CloudWatch is collecting the logs from Lambda.

The solution's auto-scaling could be improved.

Log analytics features should be included in the next release of Amazon CloudWatch.

I have used Amazon CloudWatch for the last two years.

I rate Amazon CloudWatch an eight out of ten for stability.

I rate Amazon CloudWatch an eight out of ten for scalability.

Amazon CloudWatch helped us meet our business requirement goals.

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.

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.

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.

Scheduling is a valuable feature.

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.

I have been using Amazon CloudWatch for two years. We use the latest version of CloudWatch.

I rate the solution’s scalability an eight out of ten.

I rate the solution’s scalability an eight out of ten.

It is hard to configure; it is not a straightforward tool.

We see an ROI. 

The price is okay. 

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

It's stable. The performance is good. It's reliable. There are no bugs or glitches. It doesn't crash or freeze.

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. 

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.

Positive

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.

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.

I'm not sure what the exact cost is. 

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. 

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.

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.

I've been using Amazon CloudWatch for over six years.

Amazon CloudWatch is scalable to some extent.

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.

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.

I evaluated Nagios.

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.

We collect the CloudWatch logs and use them to analyze security. It helps us to monitor malicious activity.

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.

The integration with third-party tools must be made easier.

I have been using the solution for five to six years.

I rate the product’s stability a nine out of ten. We do not face any downtimes.

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.

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.

Positive

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.

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.