Amazon CloudWatch Reviews and Ratings

Rating: 7.7 out of 10

Score

7.7 out of 10

Reviews

40 Reviews

Cloudwatch provides quick and easy access to your AWS Service metrics with dashboarding and alerting.

Rating: 7 out of 10

Incentivized

December 18, 2024

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

We use Amazon Cloudwatch to monitor the health of our infrastructure running on Amazon Web Services (AWS). Particularly the health of EC2 instances and RDS to ensure that our services are performing as expected. The service provides us with visibility and alerting helps us address problems quickly before they have an impact on customers.

Pros

Cloudwatch allows us to configure thresholds to trigger alerts
We can combine different metrics onto dashboards for different stakeholders
We can go back and look at trends over time for particular metrics

Cons

Dashboards are relatively basic
Its not possible, or difficult to write queries to correlate easily between different metrics
Searching through logs can be difficult if they are not structured well in advance

Likelihood to Recommend

For out business we find that AWS Cloudwatch is good at providing real-time metrics for monitoring and analysing the performance and usage of our platform by customers. It is possible to create custom metrics from log events, such people adding items to a basket, checking out or abandoning their orders.

Verified User

Consultant in Engineering (1-10 employees)

Vetted Review

7 years of experience

CloudWatch - Centralize logging for your AWS workload.

Rating: 8 out of 10

Incentivized

December 18, 2024

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

If you use any AWS service, CloudWatch is a must-have. Imagine having multiple services deployed & running on AWS. The services work interdependently. CloudWatch allows viewing logs of all those services in a central place. With CloudWatch Log Insights, you can make custom queries for your log across multiple streams. If you set up AWS Organizations, CloudWatch can help centralize logs from all accounts.

Pros

Easy to use GUI to browse & query log events.
Query & view events spanning multiple log streams.
Centralized logging at organization level.

Cons

The query syntax could have better examples.
Log Insights should support saving a "view" of a certain set of log streams.
The whole log group vs log stream hierarchy takes time getting used to.

Likelihood to Recommend

If you use any AWS services, CloudWatch is the natural choice to monitor & troubleshoot your workload. Thankfully, for most AWS services, CloudWatch is either built-in or very easy to set up. However, being proficient in browsing & tracking the log events would take some training & practice. Having some experienced people on the team would help immensely, especially in spreading the skill to the rest of the team.

Verified User

Team Lead in Engineering (501-1000 employees)

Vetted Review

3 years of experience

Amazon CloudWatch review from a dev

Rating: 8 out of 10

Incentivized

December 17, 2024

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

We majorly use Amazon CloudWatch to track and get alerts on the metrics of RDS, Elasticache and other services of AWS in use. We do have it for logging Lamda runs in some cases, but not a significant requirement for us, as we use lambda with minimal logic and nothing complicated at all

Pros

Track and trace of metrics
Provide easy way to build dashboards

Cons

Log retention is quite expensive as querying cost increases as well with log size
Query lookup can be slow if the ingest data is of significant volume
Dashboarding is simple, however is limited in customizations

Likelihood to Recommend

If there are a lot of AWS native solutions or infra in place, Amazon CloudWatch is certainly helpful and probably the best. Also, real-time alerting and metrics are easy to bring up using Amazon CloudWatch. Helps with troubleshooting in case of any issues in AWS resources. It also helps in triggering any events or incidents based on measured metrics Amazon CloudWatch may not be the best solution for monitoring resources spanning across multiple clouds or on-prem instances. It will also be an expensive solution when the volume of logs is high and the reads are frequent. While the visualization is limited compared to tools like Grafana, Amazon CloudWatch's internal visualization servers the purpose most of the time

Verified User

Engineer in Engineering (201-500 employees)

Vetted Review

3 years of experience

Amazon Cloud Watch Publication

Rating: 8 out of 10

April 28, 2022

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

Amazon Cloud watch is primarily used for watching all the requests coming into any of the AWS services our organization is using. It can tracks all the requests, with the IP address and can help in monitoring the requests/ sec. Also helps to filter what requests need to be searched based on different criteria like Access Key, and IP address.

Pros

Tracking all the incoming requests.
Filtering the requests.
It can collect and access all your performance and operational data in the form of logs and metrics from a single platform rather than monitoring them in a server, database, or network.

Cons

Integration of Cloud watch to other tools to export data and analyze it on premise.
Improved formatting of log datas in various formats.
Better searching capability and narrow down searching capability to controlled users.

Likelihood to Recommend

CloudWatch allows to ingest, store, filter, search and archive the logs reducing operational burden Allows to focus on application and business rather than logging Specific scenarios where it is less appropriate: When different users have different permission to view a specific set of logs, it does not allow that Product managers or Business people cannot easily make charts to view the stats from each customer for their purpose. Easy integration with the product team is not viable.

Mayank Thirani

Senior Software Engineer in Engineering at Dremio (201-500 employees)

Vetted Review

1 year of experience

View profile

Best monitoring tool for instances

Rating: 9 out of 10

Incentivized

February 21, 2022

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

Amazon CloudWatch assists us in monitoring the performance of our applications, resource use, and overall operation health. Our employees must comply to a CloudWatch threshold anytime they use our amazon EC2 instances, as well as whenever an employee is logged in to the EC2 instance for hours longer than those given to them. Also, they must comply to the threshold if they do anything that could compromise the application's health and operation.

Pros

EC2 instances are easy to integrate into a system
Simple to use

Cons

Need improvement on dashboards
Improve altering regarding unusual IP addresses

Likelihood to Recommend

Amazon CloudWatch is best suited in a large firm with many employees, where machines work overtime and manual labour is ineffective at monitoring software longevity. In small firms, when each person can manually keep track of their application threshold, it is less suitable.

Verified User

Engineer in Information Technology (10,001+ employees)

Vetted Review

1 year of experience

A multipurpose tool for cloud services users, best for monitoring all the cloud resources

Rating: 9 out of 10

December 20, 2021

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

1. With Amazon CloudWatch, we monitor the cloud resources used for our product. 2. Create various alarms for auto-scaling, increasing CPU load on EC2 instance. 3. Create custom rules to trigger other cloud resources in our product. Since we use AWS Cloud for our application, our scope is all the resources being used by our application and CloudWatch helps in monitoring all the resources across our application.

Pros

Provides various metrics for cloud resources
Logging functionality across all the cloud resources.
Ability to trigger events on exceptions or any user-defined actions.

Cons

AWS Lambda CloudWatch logs become a little tricky to analyze when used in multiple threads.
Searching on CloudWatch is slow if we apply multiple text filters.

Likelihood to Recommend

Amazon CloudWatch is well suited for an application which is native AWS cloud based application and all the resources can be monitored and controlled using Amazon CloudWatch. If an application is deployed on Azure, Google Cloud Platform, etc. Amazon CloudWatch is not supported or well-suited in those cases and less appropriate.

Sunny Hemnani

Senior Software Engineer in Engineering at Coditas (501-1000 employees)

Vetted Review

4 years of experience

View profile

Amazon CloudWatch Review

Rating: 9 out of 10

Incentivized

June 27, 2021

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

Our organization has utilized monitoring and events for overall health in the AWS environment. The custom dashboards allow us to manage the display of critical metrics and alarms for any resource in the regional virtual private cloud. This has proven more valuable than setting up another vendor system (Orion by SolarWinds, or Nagios, etc) within AWS space. Having the available alarms and cost metrics all in one place has been a better overall solution since nearly all our systems are cloud-based.

Pros

Alarms on disk and thresholds for CPU and all vitals on ec2 systems.
Billing and cost metric for advisor alerts to manage bills.
DNS alerting for and critical issues with resolution to any of our sites.

Cons

Possible better visual graphs are basic.
More exports of the data types.
Easier topics for initial setup to alams data.

Likelihood to Recommend

Cloud watch is great and essential if you decide to invest in AWS and have any need to monitor the health of all aspects of your VPC resources, or at the organizational level (multiple accounts). Another benefit of the service is constant upgrades at no additional costs; the software evolves to develop modules and interface improvements. For first-time users in AWS, this is going to take a bit to understand, so the learning curve to this metrics environment can seem overwhelming at first glance/use.

Rob Domenico

Senior Systems Administrator in Information Technology at Bentek Inc. (51-200 employees)

Vetted Review

4 years of experience

View profile

CloudWatch - Excellent Service to Monitor Cloud Applications

Rating: 8 out of 10

Incentivized

June 23, 2021

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

We use Amazon CloudWatch for monitoring cloud and deriving the lot of useful metrics. We have deployed applications with micro-service architecture and observe them for CPU usage, Network usage and Disk usage with help of CloudWatch default Dashboard. We have also created custom dashboards observe certain exceptions. All the deployments which we have done on AWS, CloudWatch is the one which is used for sure. It also helps us to trigger the alarm when billing goes up than a standard limit.

Pros

It provides lot many out of the box dashboard to observe the health and usage of your cloud deployments. Few examples are CPU usage, Disk read/write, Network in/out etc.
It is possible to stream CloudWatch log data to Amazon Elasticsearch to process them almost real time.
If you have setup your code pipeline and wants to see the status, CloudWatch really helps. It can trigger lambda function when certain cloudWatch event happens and lambda can store the data to S3 or Athena which Quicksight can represent.

Cons

Sometimes live metrics show older data and take time to refresh. It fills dashboard with stale data.
There is no provision of Webhooks. You must need to go via the route of Amazon Lambda. They should provide the way to integrate custom webhooks.
This service is bit costly.

Likelihood to Recommend

[Amazon] CloudWatch is the service which is required by almost all kind of applications. Whenever you need logging for your application and monitoring your cloud, you will require [Amazon] CloudWatch. Apart from default dashboards, you can create custom dashboards to check the health of your cloud or to debug the scenarios via logs. [Amazon] CloudWatch events can be triggered real time and appropriate actions can be taken on top of the events. When the cloud services are used for purpose like storage or simple notifications, you may not require CloudWatch. For any sophisticated cloud architecture, this service is must.

Apurv Doshi

Senior Solutions Architect at Infostretch (1001-5000 employees)

Vetted Review

3 years of experience

View profile

AWS CloudWatch - an easy to use monitoring tool for your AWS instances and resources

Rating: 10 out of 10

Incentivized

May 12, 2021

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

CloudWatch is used as our main monitoring tool for our EC2 instances and other relevant resources. CloudWatch is used both for online monitoring and [as a] logging tool. We also use CloudWatch dashboard as the main dashboard for the AWS-based infrastructure that we use. CloudWatch is also used as an alarm and notification solution for the health of our EC2 instances.

Pros

Easy to use
Easy to integrate to a system based on AWS EC2 instances and other AWS resources
Can trigger alerts

Cons

Integration with non-AWS applications
Not really online, there's a short delay
Need to improve in monitoring and alerting about irregular IP address/requests

Likelihood to Recommend

I [would] highly recommend AWS CloudWatch to a colleague if he is using AWS EC2 instances and other AWS services and resources. It is pretty easy to install and use CloudWatch and it can integrate, monitor and log relevant data from different AWS resources. The price is reasonable for the ease of use (you might be able to find cheaper solutions, but it will be more difficult to integrate with all of your AWS services and resources).

Verified User

Engineer (11-50 employees)

Vetted Review

2 years of experience

Best Choice For Your AWS Structure

Rating: 9 out of 10

Incentivized

December 15, 2020

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

We use Cloudwatch to see our EC2 instances and other AWS resources (like LoadBalancer, Elasticache, RDS, etc.). We designed custom dashboards for monitoring our performance and response time. You can create a particular alert with Cloudwatch alarms, and you can see your logs in Cloudwatch logs.

Pros

Stability and availability
Easy usage
Integration with other AWS Resources

Cons

Price is higher than other 3rd party monitoring tools and log shipping tools.
You can see 5-minute log intervals with standard monitoring.

Likelihood to Recommend

You shouldn't use it if your log IO is so much. If your all-Cloud structure is AWS, you should use Cloudwatch.

Verified User

Engineer in Engineering (201-500 employees)

Vetted Review

2 years of experience

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Reviews and Ratings

CloudWatch - Excellent Service to Monitor Cloud Applications

Rating: 8 out of 10

Incentivized

June 23, 2021

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

Pros

It provides lot many out of the box dashboard to observe the health and usage of your cloud deployments. Few examples are CPU usage, Disk read/write, Network in/out etc.
It is possible to stream CloudWatch log data to Amazon Elasticsearch to process them almost real time.
If you have setup your code pipeline and wants to see the status, CloudWatch really helps. It can trigger lambda function when certain cloudWatch event happens and lambda can store the data to S3 or Athena which Quicksight can represent.

Cons

Sometimes live metrics show older data and take time to refresh. It fills dashboard with stale data.
There is no provision of Webhooks. You must need to go via the route of Amazon Lambda. They should provide the way to integrate custom webhooks.
This service is bit costly.

Likelihood to Recommend

Apurv Doshi

Senior Solutions Architect at Infostretch (1001-5000 employees)

Vetted Review

3 years of experience

View profile