Amazon CloudWatch vs Graylog comparison

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Amazon CloudWatch

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Executive SummaryUpdated on Jan 12, 2025

Amazon CloudWatch and Graylog compete in the real-time data and log management category. Amazon CloudWatch seems to have the upper hand due to its seamless AWS integration, offering comprehensive monitoring services that efficiently simplify infrastructure management.

Features: Amazon CloudWatch integrates seamlessly within the AWS ecosystem, providing comprehensive real-time data, detailed metrics, and robust analytics services. It is known for its ease of use, stability, scalability, and reasonable pricing. It efficiently monitors infrastructure, providing useful alerts and notifications. Graylog, on the other hand, offers a strong open-source log management solution with solid search functionality. Its integration with Elasticsearch and capability to handle large log volumes efficiently, along with real-time data access, are highly valued.

Room for Improvement: Amazon CloudWatch could enhance its drill-down capabilities on dashboards and improve monitoring for non-core AWS services. It needs better pricing strategies and integration with third-party tools. Users also desire improved API features and a better UI. Graylog could improve its alerting system, documentation, and ease of creating rules. Users seek better Kubernetes integration and cost management due to high resource requirements.

Ease of Deployment and Customer Service: Amazon CloudWatch is designed for public cloud environments, offering professional, tiered support that may become expensive. It benefits from AWS's established infrastructure for good documentation and support. Graylog supports both on-premises and cloud deployments, providing flexibility with a free version and community support, although it lacks the structured support system Amazon offers unless opting for the enterprise version.

Pricing and ROI: Amazon CloudWatch features a pay-as-you-go model, which may become costly with extensive use but is justified by its seamless integration and insights, offering a clear ROI by reducing manual monitoring tasks. Graylog offers a cost-effective open-source model with an enterprise edition for higher needs, making the free version robust for small-scale deployments.

To learn more, read our detailed Amazon CloudWatch vs. Graylog Report (Updated: March 2025).

Amazon CloudWatch vs. Graylog

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Review summaries and opinions

We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use. Here are some excerpts of what they said:

Categories and Ranking

Amazon CloudWatch

Ranking in Log Management

14th

Average Rating

8.0

Reviews Sentiment

7.2

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability (13th), Cloud Monitoring Software (10th)

Graylog

Ranking in Log Management

16th

Average Rating

8.0

Reviews Sentiment

6.7

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

No ranking in other categories

Mindshare comparison

As of March 2025, in the Log Management category, the mindshare of Amazon CloudWatch is 1.8%, up from 1.0% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Graylog is 6.4%, up from 5.6% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.

Log Management

Featured Reviews

Rasanpreet Singh

Senior Consultant at Infosys

Reliable AWS monitoring and logging

The choice of logging solution should always be determined by the specific business requirements. It is crucial to align the logging strategy with what type of logs are needed and how they should be used. There are instances where we require custom solutions to retrieve logs, especially application logs that may not be easily accessible through CloudWatch or similar services. When we heavily rely on AWS native services, CloudWatch is indeed a robust choice. However, in certain scenarios, we might need integration capabilities with other tools, and if they can incorporate such features, it would enhance overall logging capabilities. I would rate it eight out of ten.

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Andrey Mostovykh

Senior Data Architect at a non-tech company with 201-500 employees

Real-time analysis, easy setup, and open source

We stopped using it for analytics because of its price, and at the moment, we are using it mostly for log centralization. If you use it with high traffic for analytical purposes, as well as for the logs, the infrastructure costs are unbelievable. Graylog is a great product backed by Elasticsearch as the storage and query engine. It is just an interface on top of Elasticsearch and some Elasticsearch management. The indexes that are kept in Elasticsearch are managed by Graylog software. Elasticsearch is a decent product, but it's very infrastructure-heavy. It requires lots of resources, and if you make a mistake with provisioning, you are likely to not get a cluster back. We had a couple of outages like that, and we hated that. So, we ended up over-provisioning resources just to avoid such situations from happening. If you have a whole team trying to fix the Graylog instance for two days, that's a bit too much. That may be my Norwegian take on it, but the engineering resources are expensive. It's better to just provision the infrastructure. Overall, the product is great, and the features are just fine, but the infrastructure cost is what is killing it. The infrastructure cost is the main issue. I like the rest. If the infrastructure costs could be lower, it would be fantastic. I'm not sure if they can improve the infrastructure cost with the way Elasticsearch is. If they keep using Elasticsearch, maybe there are some opportunities there, or they can support other backends with cheaper storage. They could have a different backend to replace Elasticsearch or do some tweaks to Elasticsearch to reduce the costs. There could be partial parsing of logs or parsing on demand so that when you write data through Graylog to Elasticsearch, it doesn't need to crunch in every detail requiring that much CPU.

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Quotes from Members

We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use. Here are some excerpts of what they said:

Pros

"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."

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

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

"Scheduling is a valuable feature."

"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."

"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."

"We have found the pricing to be reasonable."

"The solution gives us very good real-time data."

More Amazon CloudWatch pros

"We're using the Community edition, but I know that it has really good dashboarding and alerts."

"Graylog is very handy."

"I am very proud of how very stable the solution is."

"We run a containerized microservices environment. Being able to set up streams and search for errors and anomalies across hundreds of containers is why a log aggregation platform like Graylog is valuable to us."

"Everything stands out as valuable, including the fact that I can quantify and qualify the logs, create pipelines and process the logs in any way I like, and create charts or data maps."

"It is used as a log manager/SIEM. It provides visibility into the infrastructure and security related events."

"The solution's most valuable feature is its new interface."

"The build is stable and requires little maintenance, even compared to some extremely expensive products."

More Graylog pros

Cons

"CloudWatch doesn’t monitor disk throughput by default."

"The solution's integration could be easier for laypersons."

"Amazon CloudWatch's pricing needs improvement."

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

"CloudWatch's scalability could be improved."

"For monitoring applications or for APM, CloudWatch has some limitations. You cannot monitor application performance from CloudWatch, and you have to go for a third-party tool."

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

"The solution should provide human-readable metrics."

More Amazon CloudWatch cons

"I would like to see some kind of visualization included in Graylog."

"When it comes to configuring the processing pipeline, writing the rules can be very tedious, especially since the documentation isn't extensive on how the functions provided for these rules work."

"More customization is always useful."

"There should be some user groups and an auto sign-in feature."

"Graylog could improve the process of creating rules. We have to create them manually by doing parses and applying them. Other SIEM solutions have basic rules and you can create and get more events of interest."

"The infrastructure cost is the main issue. I like the rest. If the infrastructure costs could be lower, it would be fantastic."

"Lacks sufficient documentation."

"It would be great if Graylog could provide a better Python package in order to make it easier to use for the Python community."

More Graylog cons

Pricing and Cost Advice

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

"The solution is expensive."

"The tool is not expensive."

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

"It’s an open-source solution."

"The product's cost is relatively inexpensive."

"It is a free-of-charge service."

"Amazon CloudWatch is a cheap solution."

More Amazon CloudWatch pricing and cost advice

"We're using the Community edition."

"We are using the free version of the product. However, the paid version is expensive."

"Consider Enterprise support if you have atypical needs or setup requirements."

"You get a lot out-of-the-box with the non-enterprise version, so give it a try first."

"There is an open source version and an enterprise version. I wouldn't recommend the enterprise version, but as an open source solution, it is solid and works really well."

"It's an open-source solution that can be used free of charge."

"If you want something that works and do not have the money for Splunk or QRadar, take Graylog."

"I use the free version of Graylog."

More Graylog pricing and cost advice

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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews

Computer Software Company

18%

Financial Services Firm

17%

Manufacturing Company

University

Computer Software Company

17%

Comms Service Provider

10%

Government

University

Company Size

By reviewers

Large Enterprise

Midsize Enterprise

Small Business

Questions from the Community

What do you like most about Amazon CloudWatch?

The monitoring features are valuable.

What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Amazon CloudWatch?

Amazon CloudWatch charges more for custom metrics as well as for changes in the timeline, which I see as a disadvantage given the price.

What needs improvement with Amazon CloudWatch?

Amazon CloudWatch charges extra for custom metrics, which is a significant disadvantage. Another aspect that needs improvement is the look and feel of custom dashboards, which currently do not matc...

What do you like most about Graylog?

The product is scalable. The solution is stable.

What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Graylog?

We are using the free version of the product. However, the paid version is expensive.

What needs improvement with Graylog?

When it comes to configuring the processing pipeline, writing the rules can be very tedious, especially since the documentation isn't extensive on how the functions provided for these rules work. P...

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Product Reports

Amazon CloudWatch

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Also Known As

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Overview

Amazon CloudWatch is used for monitoring, tracking logs, and organizing metrics across AWS services. It detects anomalies, sets dynamic alarms, and automates actions to optimize cloud utilization, troubleshoot, and ensure service availability.

Organizations leverage Amazon CloudWatch for collecting and analyzing logs, triggering alerts, and profiling application performance. It's also employed for monitoring bandwidth, virtual machines, Lambda functions, and Kubernetes clusters. Valuable features include seamless integration with AWS, real-time data and alerts, detailed metrics, and a user-friendly interface. It provides robust monitoring capabilities for infrastructure and application performance, log aggregation, and analytics. Users appreciate its scalability, ease of setup, and affordability. Additional key aspects are the ability to create alarms, dashboards, and automated responses, along with detailed insights into system and application health. Room for improvement includes dashboards and UI enhancements for better visualization and customizability, log streaming speed, advanced machine learning and reporting capabilities, pricing, and integration with non-AWS services and databases. Users also seek more real-time monitoring and comprehensive application performance features, and simpler alerts and configuration processes.

What are the most important features?

Seamless integration with AWS: Ensures smooth operation with AWS services.
Real-time data and alerts: Provides immediate insights and notifications.
Detailed metrics: Offers in-depth data on infrastructure and application performance.
Scalability: Supports growing needs with ease.
Ease of setup: Quick and straightforward installation.
Affordability: Cost-effective monitoring solution.
Alarms and dashboards: Customizable alerts and visual insights.
Automated responses: Facilitates automatic actions based on set criteria.
System and application health insights: Delivers comprehensive health reports.

What benefits and ROI can users expect?

Optimized cloud utilization: Ensures efficient use of resources.
Improved troubleshooting: Identifies and resolves issues quickly.
Enhanced service availability: Keeps services running smoothly.
Effective log analysis: Provides valuable insights from collected logs.
Performance profiling: Assesses and optimizes application performance.
Scalable monitoring: Adapts to growing business needs.

Amazon CloudWatch is implemented across a range of industries, including technology, finance, healthcare, and retail. Technology firms use it to monitor application performance and traffic, while financial organizations leverage it for ensuring compliance and system reliability. Healthcare entities rely on it for maintaining service availability and monitoring data flow, and retail companies utilize it for tracking customer interactions and optimizing server usage.

Amazon Web Services (AWS)

Graylog is purpose-built to deliver the best log collection, storage, enrichment, and analysis. Graylog is:

Considerably faster analysis speeds.
More robust and easier-to-use analysis platform.
Simpler administration and infrastructure management.
Lower cost than alternatives.
Full-scale customer service.
No expensive training or tool experts required.

Sample Customers

AirAsia, Airbnb, Aircel, APUS, Avazu, Casa & Video, Futbol Club Barcelona (FCBarcelona), National Taiwan University, redBus

Blue Cross Blue Shield, eBay, Cisco, LinkedIn, SAP, King.com, Twilio, Deutsche Presse-Agentur

Amazon CloudWatch vs. Graylog