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: April 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 April 2025, in the Log Management category, the mindshare of Amazon CloudWatch is 1.9%, up from 1.0% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Graylog is 6.6%, up from 5.7% 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

"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."

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

"The most valuable feature of Amazon CloudWatch is intrusion prevention."

"Amazon CloudWatch is a cheap and easy-to-use solution."

"The tool's UI is good. One can scroll through the logs very easily."

"It's a very simple logging system."

"I can put it in a simple term, its simplicity is always there."

"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

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

"One of the most valuable features is that you are able to do a very detailed search through the log messages in the overview."

"It has data adapters and lookup tables that utilize HTTP calls to APIs."

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

"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."

"We have scaled from a single machine installation (a VM with a Graylog + ES + MongoDB) to (2 Graylog + 2 ES + 3 MongoDB). This was done smoothly with a minimal impact on logging."

"The product is scalable. The solution is stable."

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

More Graylog pros

Cons

"Adding conditional expressions would enhance its functionality."

"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 product should provide more features."

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

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

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

"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."

"There's a learning curve with Amazon CloudWatch since we have to learn to write the queries to extract the keys and logs."

More Amazon CloudWatch cons

"I hope to see improvements in Graylog for more interactivity, user-friendliness, and creating alerts. The initial setup is complex."

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

"More customization is always useful."

"I would like to see a date and time in the Graylog Grok patterns so that I can save time when searching for a log. I like how the streams and the search query work, but adding a date and time will allow me to pull out a log in a milli-second."

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

"We ran into problems with Elasticsearch throwing a circuit-breaking exception due to field data size being too large. It turned out that the heap size directly impacted this size in a high-throughput environment, causing unexplained instability in Graylog. We were able to troubleshoot on the Elasticsearch size, but we should have been able to reference some minimum requirements for Graylog to know that our settings weren't sufficient."

"Over six months, I had two similar issues where searches were performed on field "messages". It exhausted all the memory of the ES node causing an ES crash and a Graylog halt."

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

More Graylog cons

Pricing and Cost Advice

"I consider it as a medium-priced solution."

"The solution is expensive."

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

"The product's cost is relatively inexpensive."

"The price is okay for me."

"The pricing can be considered reasonable, especially when already operating on a cloud platform."

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

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

More Amazon CloudWatch pricing and cost advice

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

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

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

"I use the free version of Graylog."

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

"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."

"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."

"I am using a community edition. I have not looked at the enterprise offering from 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

18%

Comms Service Provider

10%

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?

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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Compared 24% of the time

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Compared 11% of the time

Security Onion vs Graylog

Compared 5% of the time

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Product Reports

Amazon CloudWatch

Download Amazon CloudWatch product report

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Also Known As

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Graylog2

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