Amazon CloudWatch vs. Grafana

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.

Incentivized

Just about any organization with more than one server and more than one cluster as it scales very well. Configuration of the application takes time and finesse to fine tune to where the balance of load time and getting data quickly meets. The plugins add load time but fine tuning for the application to meet demand needs nailed down at implementation

Incentivized

• 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.

Incentivized

• Alerting through many different medium as Slack, Email, Webhook etc
• Beautiful and unlimited number of dashboards to view your metrics and tweak them as you please
• Log aggregation and powerful Logql to filter and view your logs
• Microservices monitoring
• Large number of plugins and data sources to collect your metrics from almost anywhere

Incentivized

• Memory metrics on EC2 are not available on CloudWatch. Depending on workloads if we need visibility on memory metrics we use Solarwinds Orion with the agent installed. For scalable workloads, this involves customization of images being used.
• Visualization out of the box. But this can easily be addressed with other solutions such as Grafana.
• By design, this is only used for AWS workloads so depending on your environment cannot be used as an all in one solution for your monitoring.

Incentivized

• Documentation needs to be more clarified since it can be confusing for beginners
• Notification alert message templates need to be simplified

Incentivized

Although the tool itself is easy to integrate and is readily available for use, it has its limitations. The key limitations of cloudwatch are with respect to cost incurred on log retention and log querying. While for key use cases this is sufficient, for more advanced use cases, Amazon CloudWatch doesn't work out. Also, obviously it is tightly coupled with AWS, which makes you look away if you need a single tool for all monitoring

Incentivized

Great usage in terms of monitoring of any application from backend to frontend and even any AWS resource via cloud watch and other connectors. Easy to use and configure personalised dash boarding and alerting features. Cost efficient and easy to setup and run, no mazor scaling challenges in terms of managing and maintaining the stack, easy to configure via Prometheus, influx and other connectors

Incentivized

Support is effective, and we were able to get any problems that we couldn't get solved through community discussion forums solved for us by the AWS support team. For example, we were assisted in one instance where we were not sure about the best metrics to use in order to optimize an auto-scaling group on EC2. The support team was able to look at our metrics and give a useful recommendation on which metrics to use.

Incentivized

We use Cloudwatch for simpler monitoring, but these metrics and logs often feed into bigger ecosystems across our organization. The metrics and logs in Cloudwatch allow our developers quick and easy access to the data they need whilst easily integrating the same data into more prominent platforms for wider analysis, including Service desk support, SecOps, and ITOps monitoring within the organization.

Incentivized

Grafana is more flexible, readily adopts other tools frameworks instead of forcing you to use their agent, doesn't force you into Vendor lock-in, and embraces open source, self-hosted, and Enterprise. Similar companies would like you to use their specific tooling and don't offer nearly as much flexibility. The other thing I like about Grafana is their storage usage is much lower compared to similar tools and competitors

Incentivized

• Positive for alarms and alert notifications once configured/customized.
• Has upfront learning curve, and cost can increase as does the alarm activity and monitoring details you may require.
• Cost-effective for any size organization keeping with AWS and utilizing its native tools is a savings in long-term ROI.

Incentivized

• It has kicked out some of our paid monitoring and visualization tools.
• Now Monitoring, Visualization and Alerting is being done in a single platform.
• It made monitoring and visualization very easy for us.