Amazon CloudWatch vs Splunk Observability Cloud comparison

Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Splunk are both solutions in the Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability category. Amazon Web Services (AWS) is ranked #12 with an average rating of 8.2, while Splunk is ranked #11 with an average rating of 8.5. Amazon Web Services (AWS) holds a 1.4% mindshare in APM, compared to Splunk’s 0.9% mindshare. Additionally, 89% of Amazon Web Services (AWS) users are willing to recommend the solution, compared to 94% of Splunk users who would recommend it.

Amazon CloudWatch

Read 45 Amazon CloudWatch reviews

2,384 Views
2,077 Comparison Views

89% willing to recommend

Splunk Observability Cloud

Read 50 Splunk Observability Cloud reviews

1,838 Views
1,115 Comparison Views

94% willing to recommend

Amazon CloudWatch

Splunk Observability Cloud

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Executive SummaryUpdated on Feb 6, 2025

Splunk Observability Cloud and Amazon CloudWatch are competitors in the field of monitoring solutions. Splunk seems to have the upper hand for users who need detailed insights and advanced troubleshooting capabilities, while CloudWatch is preferred for AWS resource monitoring due to its seamless AWS integration.

Features: Splunk Observability Cloud excels in data integration, dashboard creation, and log analytics. It provides comprehensive visibility and ease of data manipulation and offers advanced features for troubleshooting and in-depth log analysis. Amazon CloudWatch is integrated tightly with AWS, offering streamlined monitoring for AWS resources, excellent scalability, and capability to trigger events based on metrics like CPU utilization.

Room for Improvement: Splunk users report a need for better integration with other tools, lower costs, and improved UI navigation. It faces criticism for pricing complexity and high expansion costs. CloudWatch users highlight a need for more robust reporting, improved third-party tool integration, and more granular monitoring across platforms. Its pricing and scalability models can also become expensive if not managed well.

Ease of Deployment and Customer Service: Splunk Observability Cloud can be deployed across on-premises, hybrid, and public cloud environments, requiring technical expertise. Users experience varied technical support, generally responsive but sometimes lacking in speed. Amazon CloudWatch, mainly on the public cloud, benefits from seamless AWS integration, simplifying AWS setup but lacks flexibility outside of AWS. Customer service experience is seen as adequate but not exceptional.

Pricing and ROI: Splunk Observability Cloud is considered expensive but seen as worthwhile due to its advanced features and troubleshooting ease. In contrast, CloudWatch is more affordable and offers a pay-as-you-go pricing model that can be cost-effective if managed well. Splunk users report ROI through increased visibility and productivity, while CloudWatch users appreciate its cost alignment with cloud-native deployments.

To learn more, read our detailed Amazon CloudWatch vs. Splunk Observability Cloud Report (Updated: January 2025).

Buyer's Guide

Amazon CloudWatch vs. Splunk Observability Cloud

January 2025

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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 Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability

12th

Ranking in Cloud Monitoring Software

11th

Average Rating

8.0

Reviews Sentiment

7.2

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

Log Management (13th)

Splunk Observability Cloud

Ranking in Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability

11th

Ranking in Cloud Monitoring Software

9th

Average Rating

8.4

Reviews Sentiment

7.4

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

IT Infrastructure Monitoring (10th), Container Management (8th)

Mindshare comparison

As of February 2025, in the Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability category, the mindshare of Amazon CloudWatch is 1.4%, up from 1.2% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Splunk Observability Cloud is 0.9%, up from 0.5% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.

Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability

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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Lakshmi Padaga

Java Developer at U.S. Bank

Collaborates performance metrics with log data to pinpoint the exact cause of issues and offers error detection

Splunk APM is a robust tool with many capabilities. There are always areas for potential improvement to enhance its functionality and user experience. For Splunk APM, there could be simplified navigation, like streamlining the user interface to make navigation more intuitive for our users, especially those new to APM, which can enhance usability. We can provide more customization options for dashboards and visualizations to help users tailor the platform to their specific needs. There could be more integration capabilities with a wider range of third-party tools and platforms would also be beneficial. By focusing on these areas, Splunk APM can enhance its value proposition, improve user satisfaction, and better meet the evolving needs of organizations monitoring their application performance.

Read full review

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."

"I have found the memory metrics and the CPU metrics valuable."

"The product helps us collect and store various metrics to set test alarms."

"The detection is the most valuable feature."

"The monitoring feature is valuable."

"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."

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

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

More Amazon CloudWatch pros

"Splunk's GUI and dashboard capacity are the most valuable features of Splunk Infrastructure Monitoring."

"The initial setup was straightforward. We didn't find it to be too complex."

"Splunk Infrastructure Monitoring gives us complete visibility without the need for storage."

"The features are pretty much ready out of the box."

"This solution is very quick to deploy as it is a SaaS solution and integrates with tools like ServiceNow."

"Splunk APM helps us to find errors immediately and resolve them."

"The most valuable feature is log reporting."

"The most valuable feature is dashboard creation."

More Splunk Observability Cloud pros

Cons

"Adding conditional expressions would enhance its functionality."

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

"Incorporating a straightforward method or a plug-and-play solution for integrating these databases with our systems, facilitating smooth data transfer, and enabling the creation of dashboards for monitoring and analysis would be beneficial."

"Improvement of SSSD logs would be beneficial."

"The product should provide more features."

"The technical support must be improved."

"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."

"The product’s documentation must be improved."

More Amazon CloudWatch cons

"There are always areas for potential improvement to enhance its functionality and user experience."

"In the next release, I would like to see more integration with other solutions."

"We never had any issues when it comes to the type of use cases we are using it for. We did not need more advancement on it, but I know that, in general, everything can be updated. There are tiny little tweaks that can be made regardless of whether it looks better or has a different flow to it than it does right now, but it works pretty well for what we use it for."

"The monitoring of workloads when using SignalFx could be improved."

"A lot of customers had a hard time effectively searching within the data in Splunk. There is a learning curve from searches to indexes and using all the macros that we have created. It is a little difficult for somebody who has not used it quite a bit and does not have a lot of practice with it, but the AI features that we have been hearing about through Splunk will make it a lot easier for us to use human language to search this data. That is big. That is pretty powerful, and that will help a lot with our customers."

"They do not have all the features that I expect right now."

"I would like to see an improvement and some innovation in the customer interface."

"The dashboards are used mainly to visualize information about the infrastructure, but it isn't easy to construct or use the dashboards. While we tried to resolve the issue by calling support, it would be easier if they had an AI co-pilot to identify the problem and help you solve it."

More Splunk Observability Cloud cons

Pricing and Cost Advice

"It’s an open-source solution."

"Amazon CloudWatch is a cheap solution."

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

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

"The tool is not expensive."

"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."

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

More Amazon CloudWatch pricing and cost advice

"Splunk's infrastructure monitoring costs can be high because our billing is based on data volume measured in terabytes, rather than the number of devices being monitored."

"Splunk offers a 14-day free trial and after that, we have to pay but the cost is reasonable."

"Licensing cost is the biggest argument I get from those divesting from Splunk. There are those within our organization who say we are going to go to other tools since Splunk is too expensive."

"Splunk APM is expensive."

"The solution's pricing is competitive. I rate the solution's pricing a seven out of ten. The price of the solution could be cheaper."

"It appears to be expensive compared to competitors."

"The pricing is reasonable."

"The solution's pricing is costly."

More Splunk Observability Cloud pricing and cost advice

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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews

Computer Software Company

18%

Financial Services Firm

16%

Manufacturing Company

University

Financial Services Firm

18%

Computer Software Company

16%

Manufacturing Company

10%

Retailer

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.

See all answers

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.

See all answers

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.

See all answers

What do you like most about SignalFx?

The most valuable feature is dashboard creation.

See all answers

What needs improvement with SignalFx?

There is room for improvement in the alerting system, which is complicated and has less documentation available. We sometimes encountered issues in setting up alerts. The custom detector could be m...

See all answers

What is your primary use case for SignalFx?

The main purpose of using Splunk APM is to optimize our application. We use Splunk APM primarily to understand how the application works, how it uses resources, and its response time in connection ...

See all answers

Comparisons

Grafana Loki vs Amazon CloudWatch

Compared 18% of the time

Amazon OpenSearch Service vs Amazon CloudWatch

Compared 16% of the time

Zabbix vs Amazon CloudWatch

Compared 16% of the time

Dynatrace vs Amazon CloudWatch

Compared 8% of the time

Graylog vs Amazon CloudWatch

Compared 2% of the time

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Observe vs Splunk Observability Cloud

Compared 23% of the time

Splunk ITSI (IT Service Intelligence) vs Splunk Observability Cloud

Compared 8% of the time

Dynatrace vs Splunk Observability Cloud

Compared 6% of the time

Rancher Labs vs Splunk Observability Cloud

Compared 5% of the time

Monte Carlo vs Splunk Observability Cloud

Compared 4% of the time

More Splunk Observability Cloud Competitors

Product Reports

Buyer's Guide

Amazon CloudWatch

February 2025

Download Amazon CloudWatch product report

Buyer's Guide

Splunk Observability Cloud

January 2025

Download Splunk Observability Cloud product report

Also Known As

No data available

Splunk Infrastructure Monitoring

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)

Splunk Observability Cloud combines log search, data integration, and dashboards for seamless monitoring, enhancing infrastructure visibility and security. Its cloud integration and scalability support diverse environments, improving operational efficiency.

Splunk Observability Cloud offers comprehensive monitoring tools with user-friendly interfaces, enabling end-to-end infrastructure visibility. Its real-time alerting and predictive capabilities enhance security monitoring, while centralized dashboards provide cross-platform visibility. Users benefit from fast data integration and extensive insights into application performance. Despite its advantages, improvements could be made in integration with other tools, data reliability, scalability, and cost management. Users face challenges in configuration complexity and require better automation and endpoint protection features. Enhancing AI integration, alerts, and adaptation for high-throughput services could further improve usability.

What are the key features of Splunk Observability Cloud?

Log Search: Efficiently search and analyze log data for enhanced insights.
Data Integration: Fast integration across platforms for comprehensive visibility.
Custom Dashboards: Powerful and adaptable dashboards for real-time monitoring.
Cloud Integration: Seamless integration with cloud services for scalable solutions.
Application Performance Monitoring: Advanced tools for improving application performance.

What benefits and ROI should be expected?

Infrastructure Monitoring: Improved visibility and monitoring across infrastructure components.
Operational Efficiency: Enhancements in data analysis lead to efficient operations.
Business Resilience: Supports adaptability and swift responses to changing needs.
Security Management: Enhances threat identification and response through real-time alerts.
Compliance Support: Aids in meeting compliance and auditing requirements effectively.

In industries like finance and healthcare, Splunk Observability Cloud is implemented for application performance monitoring and infrastructure metrics. Its ability to track incidents and analyze machine data benefits network infrastructure, while distributed tracing and log analysis aid in tackling security threats. Organizations often integrate it for compliance and auditing purposes, enhancing visibility into network traffic and optimizing performance.

Splunk

Sample Customers

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

Sunrun, Yelp, Onshape, Tapjoy, Symphony Commerce, Chairish, Clever, Grovo, Bazaar Voice, Zenefits, Avalara

Buyer's Guide

Amazon CloudWatch vs. Splunk Observability Cloud

January 2025

Free Report: Amazon CloudWatch vs. Splunk Observability Cloud

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