Amazon CloudWatch Reviews

We use Amazon CloudWatch in our company to mainly troubleshoot Lambda functions. Then, we use CloudWatch to set up CloudWatch Alarms.

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.

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.

I have been using Amazon CloudWatch for a year. I am a customer of the solution.

I won't say it is a stable tool since there is the problem of missing logs.

It's a very scalable solution. Maybe at a time, ten people use it in our company.

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.

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.

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.

While we have used CloudWatch, we have not used it extensively. We should start monitoring our applications once it starts performing in production. We are not at that stage yet. However, we have implemented it. In the end, we will use it mainly to monitor our applications.

It's a very simple logging system. It's a very simple monitoring system, however, you have other advanced services as well if you choose to go more advanced. This is a simpler product that we can use right away.

The implementation process is very simple.

It's not an advanced way of monitoring.

I haven’t used the solution for that long.

Until now, we haven't seen any stability issues. There are no bugs or glitches. It doesn’t crash or freeze. It is reliable.

I’m not aware of the level of scalability on offer.

Right now, for monitoring, what we do is, we have a login into an SQL server.

It's very easy to implement. It's simple. These are solutions that are very simple to use, and therefore, there isn’t really any complexity involved.

You may not need so much technical knowledge or information to use this product. That said, there are some policies where you would need to know how to write the script. Still, it would be simple for anyone to use quickly.

I'm not aware of the pricing.

Since it is a cloud solution, we are likely on the latest version, although I don’t know the exact version number.

This is a basic version that you can start using right away, and there's nothing too technical to think about or to know. You can implement it right away and then try to scale up or advance on the monitoring.

I would rate the product eight out of ten.

We're using Amazon CloudWatch to monitor the entire application instances, client application, and backend communication. We're also using the solution to monitor service availability and application development.

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.

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.

I've been using Amazon CloudWatch for three years.

Amazon CloudWatch is a stable solution.

Amazon CloudWatch is a scalable solution, and what I mean by this is that it will hold the logs until the next deployment. If you do the deployment, then all the logs will go, but right now, my company doesn't have any requirement that says the logs should be stored for one year. Amazon CloudWatch may be scalable in the future, but my company has never tried scaling it, and there was never any instance when the solution ran out of memory.

We've never contacted the technical support team for Amazon CloudWatch because we found all the information we need in the AWS documentation.

The initial setup for Amazon CloudWatch was easy. It wasn't difficult. It was easy for my team to develop a microservices web application, but it would still depend on your experience and the way you use the solution. Whatever my team did was completed within one day.

What's were using is the free service of Amazon CloudWatch, so they're not charging us. As for hidden fees, we're not aware of them because we're using what our clients provided us.

We never looked at other options because we decided to go with AWS, which meant going with Amazon CloudWatch as well.

I'm a solution architect who works for a service-based company, so I have different clients. I provide software development services for architecture support for multiple global insurance companies and the bank financial sector. Some companies use Amazon CloudWatch, and I've worked on that solution. I've also provided Azure Managed Grafana services for one of the clients.

There's no particular version for Amazon CloudWatch, but whatever the latest version is, that's what I'd be configuring. I don't focus too much on the version of the solution. It's on AWS Cloud.

My company runs almost forty to fifty projects, mostly using AWS and Amazon CloudWatch, so at least thirty to forty people use the solution.

What I would advise anyone looking into using Amazon CloudWatch is to go for it especially when you're on the AWS environment. To be frank, I've only used Amazon CloudWatch, so I'm recommending it because I've never faced any major challenge with it. I haven't found any new software that's as user-friendly as Amazon CloudWatch. I did have a few problems with it such as log storing, log back up, and log searching, and if I see any other tool that's better than Amazon CloudWatch, then I'll put that up for discussion, but right now, other people also recommend the solution and I know it, so I'm going ahead with Amazon CloudWatch. I'm looking at other solutions in the market, but I'm not comfortable, and I haven't even done a POC with other solutions yet.

I'd compare Amazon CloudWatch with my old style of reading the logs as a developer, and I would rate the solution as seven out of ten. Amazon CloudWatch benefits me by streaming all the logs together, and this means that across all the services, I can search for specific transactions. The solution also has a single dashboard that shows me all services via log steaming.

My company is a service provider, partner, and manager of AWS.

We use Amazon CloudWatch for monitoring infrastructure for EC2 instances. We created CPU, memory, system, status, and disk utilization checks. Based on those checks, we created actions such as disk cleaning by running a command, integrating with Lambda, and sending email notifications. We use the basic functionalities of Amazon CloudWatch.

Amazon CloudWatch helped improve my company through notification and automation. The tool is integrated with actions, so if an alarm gets triggered, you can execute an action through Amazon CloudWatch. Task automation through Amazon CloudWatch has improved the company's overall efficiency in terms of the time to resolve issues, so the tool has been beneficial.

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.

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.

Amazon CloudWatch is a pretty complete tool with many features, so apart from the improvements I mentioned, there isn't anything else I want to change in Amazon CloudWatch.

I've been using Amazon CloudWatch for almost two years.

Amazon CloudWatch is a very stable tool.

Amazon CloudWatch is a scalable tool because it has no limitations in the number of systems and alarms you can create.

I'd rate support for Amazon CloudWatch four out of five, but this is because my company has AWS premium support, so I'm unsure how it is with others with a different level of support with AWS.

We didn't use a different solution before using Amazon CloudWatch.

The initial setup for Amazon CloudWatch was quite okay, particularly for the standard alarms provided by Amazon. Still, for the custom alarms, such as memory and disk alarms, you have to put in some effort because if you make changes to the system, you'd also have to make changes in the scripts as well, so if that could be automated, it would be beneficial.

We implemented Amazon CloudWatch in-house. We're in consulting, so in a way, we're the third party who can implement the tool.

As my company only had to put in a small investment for Amazon CloudWatch, and the tool helped in terms of monitoring, alerting, etc., and is quite a good tool, in my opinion, it gave my company good ROI.

Amazon CloudWatch has very cheap pricing, and it hardly costs my company $25-$30 a month for fifty systems, so it's pretty affordable.

My company didn't evaluate other options because Amazon CloudWatch was pretty native. It was the only tool that was there, so Amazon CloudWatch was the only tool my company used and nothing else.

Amazon CloudWatch is a web-based tool, so there's no version control for it, so you could say it's always the latest version provided by Amazon. It's deployed on the cloud.

Almost everyone from the technical team within my company uses Amazon CloudWatch, so that's five to six people in total.

One to two people is enough to handle the deployment and maintenance of Amazon CloudWatch because it's a one-time process. Once it's done, you don't need to change it in a way, so one to two people would be fine.

As Amazon CloudWatch is an essential tool for my company, usage of it will gradually increase with new projects or instances because of the basic infrastructure monitoring and similar features it provides; however, there's no plan to expand in terms of doing more with Amazon CloudWatch.

My advice to others looking into implementing Amazon CloudWatch is that Amazon has pretty sufficient documentation on installing the tool and configuring the alerts. Still, it would be better to have a script deployed through Lambda to create alarms or use the Amazon SSM Agent to create the alarms instead of manually doing it.

I'd rate Amazon CloudWatch as eight out of ten because it does whatever it promises, and it's a good tool for monitoring and alerting.

I use it for log monitoring and log capture. That's the main purpose. 

Alerts and notifications functions help with the operational response. For example, if you have a critical server and want to set an alert if CPU utilization exceeds 90%, a notification will be raised. You can link an action to that notification, not just notify. 

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. AWS has become very rich in functionality over time, and the same piece of functionality can solve different problems.

CloudWatch automation works through notifications linked to Lambda functions, which can then perform any automation you like.

CloudWatch has many things. It gives you metrics and logs. You can set up alerts and notifications for the metrics and do a lot of automation once you have the notifications. 

You can also create dashboards, although it's an additional fee that AWS charges. We can create a different dashboard with Grafana kind of thing. 

The use cases are different for different people, but three things everyone uses are: 

• Metrics monitoring
• Log monitoring, and 
• Alerting and notification.

CloudWatch is extremely helpful for automation and other things for experienced users, but it's not very intuitive. It doesn't have drag-and-drop functionality to trigger actions from notifications. It's very capable, but it requires expert knowledge to leverage that capability.

So, for new or basic users, it's a bit complex to understand how it works. Basic users can see what is happening in the console, but building automation and other things requires expert knowledge.

Improvement in log patterns and metrics: 

There are a lot of things. For example, there are log patterns and metric patterns. But if you have to do anomaly detection, I think the latest version added that, but they didn't have it before. Users can build it; Users can stream the log, build log analytics, and do anomaly detection, but it is not very straightforward. It's a very powerful tool, but you need expert knowledge to do those things.

Region-specific service puts certain limits:

Also, CloudWatch is a very region-specific service. People struggle with that, for example, if you have an application distributed in different geographies like Europe, India, and the USA. There is no way to aggregate CloudWatch logs in one place for workloads in every region. You need a third-party tool to get a holistic view of your application. CloudWatch has the data, but you need advanced skills to aggregate it and create insights.

Suggestions for additional functionality for CloudWatch: 

Cloudwatch needs better built-in analytics capability. CloudWatch has a lot of data, but it's difficult to gain insights unless you stream it to a third-party log analytics tool. If there were built-in capabilities to analyze the data, that would be great.

I have been using Amazon CloudWatch for ten years. We do work on a lot of AWS services, like CloudWatch, SageMaker, and even their generative AI solution like Bedrock.

I would rate the stability a ten out of ten. There are no issues with stability. 

I would rate the scalability a ten out of ten. 

There are around 50 end users, and all the ops people use CloudWatch.

AWS provides multiple support levels, including basic, business, and enterprise support. Your experience can differ depending on your support level.

My company uses business support. Quality-wise, it's okay most of the time, but sometimes, you get people with less experience. Response time could be improved because, for production applications, you want immediate support. Sometimes, it can take up to an hour to get someone on chat support.

Neutral

Azure also has something like CloudWatch. All cloud vendors have something similar.

The initial setup is very simple. 

CloudWatch also has an API, so I can send logs to CloudWatch by calling the API. But natively, it only integrates with AWS services.

Integration capabilities: 

AWS has built different frameworks, like the simple notification service (SNS). From AWS SNS, I can fire Lambda or integrate with the event bus, AWS EventBridge. From an integration point of view among the peers, AWS is probably one of the best that offers you the integration capability.

I would rate the pricing in the middle. It is a five out of ten, with one being high price, and ten being low price. 

Everyone needs it. There is no other way to capture central logs, so it's for everyone, irrespective of the size of the company.

I would recommend it. Overall, I would rate it an eight out of ten. 

CloudWatch is used to monitor not only for the cloud but also for on-premises services. So, you could think of it as a comprehensive monitoring tool. It's just proprietary monitoring software.

Every time we get an alarm or have an incident, CloudWatch is always there. We use it not only for resources we've spun up in the cloud but also for some of our on-premises resources. There are many advantages you can set up on CloudWatch, so it has improved the overall stability of our environment and financial monitoring. If anything goes out of budget, CloudWatch notifies us.

The most valuable feature is monitoring. 

There is room for improvement in the pricing because they have a premium version, but it's not really a premium version. It's just an enhanced monitoring version, and it can be a bit expensive depending on your usage.

I have used it for five years in a row. I currently use the latest version because it's a SaaS. 

I would rate the stability a ten out of ten. 

I would rate the scalability a ten out of ten.

The initial setup has medium complexity. You have to know what you're looking for.

I have seen an ROI.

I would say to someone who wants to use it, read the recommendations thoroughly before you start using it.

Overall, I would rate the solution a ten out of ten.

We use Amazon CloudWatch for monitoring applications. We use it for Synthetics and also RAM. Amazon CloudWatch has been very helpful for monitoring our applications. We have been able to create a monitoring account where we get metrics, traces, and application monitoring data in one account. One noteworthy feature is that this is free of cost.

Amazon CloudWatch has been very helpful for monitoring our applications. We have been able to create a monitoring account where we get metrics, traces, and application monitoring data in one account. One noteworthy feature is that this is free of cost.

The most valuable part is the metrics part, which is really good. They recently introduced Application Signals, which we like the most. Additionally, the Synthetics feature is something that we love.

There is some delay in logging that they need to improve on. While CloudWatch is good, when compared to Dynatrace, there are several areas for improvement. For instance, Dynatrace has better distributed tracing and a feature like back trace, which CloudWatch lacks. In terms of alerts, we use PagerDuty, but composite alarms and similar features need more work.

I would say I have almost three years of experience with Amazon CloudWatch.

Amazon CloudWatch is stable. However, there is some delay in logging that needs improvement.

It is pretty scalable. We have not had any problems so far.

Amazon's customer service is very good. They are both responsive and knowledgeable. Depending on the ticket, they connect us with the right resource without having us jump through different channels.

Positive

Previously, we used Dynatrace, which is an APM tool. We recently moved to CloudWatch but still use Dynatrace.

The initial setup of Amazon CloudWatch is very simple. On a scale of one to ten, I would rate the ease of setup between nine and ten.

Multiple squads and teams, approximately 200 different teams, have been using Amazon CloudWatch.

Return on this investment is still to be discovered. Currently, we are in the middle of migration, paying for both on-prem and CloudWatch, as well as Dynatrace and CloudWatch. Once everything is settled in the cloud, we will have a clearer picture.

In general, Amazon CloudWatch is cheaper compared to Dynatrace. However, there are potential costs to be mindful of, like running a log query that returns trillions of bytes of data.

I have experience with Dynatrace. Comparing CloudWatch against Dynatrace highlights many areas for improvement.

I would definitely recommend CloudWatch if your applications are running in AWS. If your applications are in a different environment or cloud, I am not sure I would recommend it.

I'd rate the solution six out of ten.

Whenever we launch any instances or use any service we receive default metrics from Amazon CloudWatch. It is easy to track what is happening in the services that we are using. Additionally, it provides metrics logs from servers and what is happening from the infrastructure.

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.

If someone changes some configurations in other tools, such as Grafana, someone has to deep dive to see what has happened. These issues do not happen in Amazon CloudWatch because it is easy to use. It is managed by Amazon AWS.

The dashboard and the UI could improve in Amazon CloudWatch. Additionally, they should focus on visibility inside the servers with AI and machine learning integrations. This would allow users who are using the solution to see what is happening within the system better.

I have used Amazon CloudWatch within the last 12 months.

The stability of the solution is good.

I rate the stability of Amazon CloudWatch a ten out of ten.

The scalability of Amazon CloudWatch is good. We do not have to do anything to scale the solution it is done by the vendor.

We have more than 10,000 people using the solution.

I rate the scalability of Amazon CloudWatch a nine out of ten.

I rate the support of Amazon CloudWatch a ten out of ten.

Positive

The initial setup of Amazon CloudWatch is simple. The deployment of the solution only took minutes.

I rate the initial setup of Amazon CloudWatch a nine out of ten.

If someone is utilizing a limited set of services on Amazon AWS and their application is hosted on Docker or Kubernetes products, they may choose to use an alternative monitoring tool instead of relying on Amazon CloudWatch. However, the developers of Amazon CloudWatch are continually improving the tool, and adding features to address any issues that are not currently available on the cloud version will eventually be incorporated into Amazon CloudWatch. If the infrastructure and the software services are relatively simple I would recommend this solution. The Amazon CloudWatch agent can provide additional metrics, but for those seeking a more visually appealing and understandable approach, different tools may be more suitable.

I rate Amazon CloudWatch an eight out of ten.

I rated the solution an eight out of ten because of its user-friendly interface and the presence of a helpful single dashboard. This solution also offers unique tools, like application insights, which rely on artificial intelligence. This means that regardless of the traffic or type of users accessing our server, the insights provided are based on AI technology. The role of application insights is expected to grow significantly in the coming years as the solution continues to incorporate AI into its functionality. For example, it can provide information on how much memory was occupied by your machine at a particular time.