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: January 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

13th

Average Rating

8.0

Reviews Sentiment

7.2

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability (11th), Cloud Monitoring Software (9th)

Graylog

Ranking in Log Management

18th

Average Rating

8.0

Reviews Sentiment

7.0

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

No ranking in other categories

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 comms service provider with 51-200 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

"It offers direct integrations with various storage providers, making it convenient to push logs from CloudWatch to these external platforms."

"We can set CPU thresholds using the solution."

"CloudWatch provides essential monitoring capabilities that integrate seamlessly with other AWS services."

"The monitoring feature is valuable."

"The detection is the most valuable feature."

"It is a stable solution...I rate the technical support a ten out of ten."

"It's a very simple logging system."

"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."

More Amazon CloudWatch pros

"Graylog's search functionality, alerting functionality, user management, and dashboards are useful."

"Open source and user friendly."

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

"The best feature of Graylog is the Elasticsearch integration. We can integrate and we can run filters, such as an event of interest, and those logs we can send to any SIEM tool or as an analytic. Additionally, there are clear and well-documented implementation instructions on their website to follow if needed."

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

"UDP is a fast and lightweight protocol, perfect for sending large volumes of logs with minimal overhead."

"Storing logs in Elasticsearch means log retrieval is extremely fast, and full text search is available by default."

"The ability to write custom alerts is key to information security and compliance."

More Graylog pros

Cons

"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."

"The solution's pricing is a bit higher."

"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."

"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."

"The technical support must be improved."

"It's not an advanced way of monitoring."

"It would be beneficial for CloudWatch to provide an API interface and some kind of custom configuration."

"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."

More Amazon CloudWatch cons

"Graylog can improve the index rotation as it's quite a complex solution."

"More customization is always useful."

"Its scalability gets complicated when we have to update or edit multiple nodes."

"Dashboards, stream alerts and parsing could be improved."

"I would like to see a default dashboard widget that shows the topology of the clusters defined for the graylog install."

"Since container orchestration systems are popular and Graylog fits the niche well, perhaps they could officially support running in docker containers on Kubernetes as a StatefulSet as a use case. That way, the declarative nature of Kubernetes config files would document their best case deployment scenario-"

"With technical support, you are on your own without an enterprise license."

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

More Graylog cons

Pricing and Cost Advice

"It’s an open-source solution."

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

"Its pricing is reasonable. It is sometimes tricky, but it is reasonable as compared to others."

"The price is okay for me."

"Amazon CloudWatch is a cheap solution."

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

"The price of Amazon CloudWatch is reasonable. When the rate of data collection is done the price will increase. The price is less than other solutions."

"The pricing is average."

More Amazon CloudWatch pricing and cost advice

"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."

"It's open source and free. They have a paid version, but we never looked into that because we never needed the features of the paid version."

"Graylog is a free open-source solution. The free version has a capacity limitation of 2 GB daily, if you want to go above this you have to purchase a license."

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

"Having paid official support is wise for projects."

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

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

More Graylog pricing and cost advice

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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews

Computer Software Company

17%

Financial Services Firm

17%

Manufacturing Company

University

Computer Software Company

17%

Comms Service Provider

Government

Educational Organization

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?

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.

What needs improvement with Amazon CloudWatch?

CloudWatch itself is fine. That said, maybe Amazon Web Services can improve by providing a library for CloudWatch with some useful features.

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?

Since it's a free tool, I don't have much to say. Troubleshooting is important to me. The initial setup is complex. I hope to see improvements in Graylog for more interactivity, user-friendliness, ...

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Product Reports

Amazon CloudWatch

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Also Known As

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Amazon Web Services (AWS)

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.

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