Amazon CloudWatch Reviews

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 are primarily using the solution to monitor some of the instances that we have on Amazon for our testing development. It is also the go-to solution used by our organization to track logs and organize metrics across all applications deployed on Amazon Web Services

We are able to, on a real-time basis, understand the capacity utilization and the latency aspects, and, to that extent, we can now know the productivity of the tests and if the development team has increased them in any way. The tool provides an easy integration to monitor and aggregate metrics for any deployment on AWS cloud.

The solution works well as part of an overall Amazon ecosystem.

The solution is easy to set up.

The solution gives us very good real-time data.

Ability to aggregate performance metrics.

Getting  real time alerts on AWS environment.

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. It could also do a much better job of monitoring performance when core AWS services are not used. 

I've been using the solution for about three and a half years now.

The solution is very stable. We haven't had issues with bugs, glitches, or crashes.

The solution scales quite well.

It's the infrastructure team that is using the solution at our organization. It's a team of about seven or eight people and they are using it to monitor the performance of the cloud instances to address any degradation.

The solution is currently being used in 100% of the Amazon instances that we are leveraging. Unless we increase the number of instances on Amazon, we are not planning to scale this product beyond what we are using. We are already using it to the maximum.

Amazon's technical support is a tiered support system. In our case, we have somebody who's available to us and they call us to assist if we need them to.

We didn't previously use a different solution. We've only ever used Amazon.

The solution's initial setup was fairly simple and straightforward. 

The deployment took less than a week. Once we started, our first task was to understand the solution and how we could best leverage it for our environment. Once we had that configured, we then started working towards deploying it.

We worked directly with Amazon. We didn't work with an integrator or reseller.

We have monthly licensing costs. The licenses are probably in the vicinity of about $300 - $350/month.

There are no other costs or hidden fees beyond the licensing.

We didn't evaluate any other solutions. This is because this was the product that was native to Amazon and so this, we knew, would suit us. There was no need for us to look at another product at that time we set this solution up.

We're not using the latest version of the solution. We might be using the latest version minus one.

I would advise other users that they need to understand the solution and what it is capable of doing. From there, they should build out their use case and try to see if the solution will fit into it. It's a good idea to do a POC.

Unless you do a technical evaluation and a proof of concept, you will not be 100% thorough in your preparations before implementing any kind of solution. 

I'd rate the solution eight out of ten. 

We use CloudWatch to monitor our infrastructure and resources, such as bandwidth, etc. It comes with the AWS package we use, and it's easier when all your services come from one vendor. 

The alarms are one thing I love about AWS CloudWatch. It has alerts that notify us when resource use is approaching the limit. 

The graphical interface has room for improvement. CloudWatch only gives you a breakdown of what's wrong. However, it would be nice if it could automatically remedy the problems it identifies. You should be able to configure it so that when a specific condition arises, it will take a predefined action.

I've been using CloudWatch for two years.

I rate AWS CloudWatch nine out of 10 for ease of setup. Deployment is practically instant. 

The price is worth it because it saves you money in the long run. 

I rate AWS CloudWatch nine out of 10. It gives me an idea about my resources through logs, metrics, etc. I recommend it. It's easy to understand, with graphs showing the services running on your applications and the resources they're consuming. You can also track your billings, and identify the services consuming too many resources and terminate instances if necessary. 

Our company used the solution for a project that included data message and data lake architecture, performance testing, and an engineering solution to monitor virtual machines or the S3 bucket. 

The solution monitored key performance indicators for almost all services including Aurora, Fargate, Lambda, Snowflake NoSQL databases, and Sumo Logic.  

The solution effectively monitors golden signals like CPU, page requests, and queues. 

The solution's integration could be easier for laypersons. 

The solution should move from being a performance monitoring tool to a full stack content management system with a hybrid DPM tool that integrates front-end, browser-specific, and footprint-specific monitoring metrics and synthetics. 

The solution's interface could be improved to enhance user experience by including Kendo UI or React.js frameworks. 

I have been using the solution for four years. 

The stability is quite impressive with a 99% availability rate. 

The solution uses metrics and measurements to scale data which then gets routed to a NQ at an Amazon data center. 

Data on the front end takes time to appear because of how the solution is designed. The UI interface takes some time to refresh large volumes of data so on occasion there is a lag. 

I rate stability an eight out of ten. 

The scalability is based purely on your stack and requirements. 

Our project involved processing billions of records and performance expectancy was 99% which is pretty impressive. 

I rate scalability an eight out of ten. 

The initial setup was a bit complex because we were new to AWS. 

It took us time to integrate EHNs because we had difficulty discovering traffic and TCP connections. 

The KPIs that needed to be monitored were books of medium to high complexity. 

As we became more proficient, we progressed quickly but that always depends on the complexity of the stack. 

For example, Java is easy but .Net is complex because many services are not API exposed so they have their own DLS running on machines. 

Our company worked with the client's IT operations team to implement the solution. 

More than ten architects worked both onsite and offshore to conduct engineering, performance testing, integrations, and monitoring. 

A big management team consisting of 30 onsite and offshore developers, QA technicians, and performance managers monitor the enterprise because it processes billions of records. These user groups have restricted access based on their roles. 

The pricing model is pay-as-you-go so you have to be mindful of usage to manage costs. 

Scalability is not limited because you can add components and integrations at any time.

Data gets stored on your EBS in RSN S3 buckets. Some free space is provided based on your configuration, but additional space is paid. Storage fees can be per unit or by the minute. 

The pricing model can get very expensive as the project's scope grows. 

The solution is expensive so a better option might be to use New Relic, Dynatrace, or Zabbix for open source monitoring. 

A central repository lock trail and analytics dashboard could be created in Tableau that stores metrics in one particular location and analyzes data using one particular dashboard. 

I rate the solution a seven out of ten. 

Amazon CloudWatch for infrastructure and serverless monitoring.

The most valuable feature of Amazon CloudWatch is the monitoring and UI.

Some of our customers want to use Kubernetes to monitor their CICD flow but Amazon CloudWatch does not support it. We need to use another solution, such as Datadog or Dynatrace has the needed capability.

In a future release, the vendor could add automation for quicker integration and improve the visualization similar to other solutions.

I have been using Amazon CloudWatch for approximately five years.

There has been some leg in the use of the solution.

We have five or six customers using the solution.

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

I have used Datadog. If we want to do any basic infrastructure monitoring, such as CPU. If our customers want to do automation, Kubernetes, and application monitoring, we use Datadog because Amazon CloudWatch does not have these features.

The initial setup of Amazon CloudWatch is simple. Everyone can do it if they learn how to do it.

The price of Amazon CloudWatch is reasonable for detailed basic monitoring.

I have evaluated many tools, such as SolarWinds New Relic.

Most of my customers are using Datadog.

I rate Amazon CloudWatch a six out of ten.

We use the solution for monitoring purposes. We also use it for events and alerts. 

We can create events and alerts. We use the information to dive down into the infrastructure performance.

The product's configuration has some challenges. The solution needs to be more user-friendly. 

I have been working with the product for five years. 

The tool's stability good. 

I would rate the solution's scalability a nine out of ten. My company has 10-15 users for the product. 

The product's setup is easy. The tool's deployment depends on scenarios like the metrics, events we create, etc. 

I would rate the solution a nine out of ten. 

We use it for testing environments.

There is room for improvement in terms of stability. 

I have been using this solution for two years. 

I would rate the stability an eight out of ten. 

I would rate the scalability a ten out of ten.

The initial setup is easy. 

I deployed the solution myself. We need cloud architects and engineers for the deployment and maintenance of the solution.

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

We use the solution to set alerts. We can set up thresholds to trigger alerts if an instance in AWS reaches the threshold value. Based on the alerts, we check the issue in the instance.

We can set CPU thresholds using the solution.

The technical support must be improved.

I have been using the solution for more than two years.

The tool is very stable.

We have more than 600 customers hosted in the AWS environment.

Recently, we faced a payment issue in AWS. Our payments were not happening through the default account. My organization contacted the support team. Sometimes, we get good support. Sometimes, we do not get good support.

We have the complete documentation to set up AWS. We use Confluence for our documents. The steps to set up AWS are clearly mentioned in the documentation.

The solution charges $0.09 for 1GB of data we store in AWS.

We use AWS for our infrastructure. Overall, I rate the product a six out of ten.