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.
VU
Verified User
Engineer in Information Technology (Information Technology & Services company, 10,001+ employees)
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.
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.
Right now we are using Amazon CloudWatch to monitor some AWS instances that we are running with different technology services. We are using its built-in monitoring capabilities for AWS service to visualize resources consumption and behavior and to keep an eye over AWS instances contracted to reduce billing each month.
Pros
Monitor physical resources for EC2 instances.
You can integrate AWS Cloud Watch with EC2 Autoscaling service to create new instances.
You can notify any anomaly detected via Amazon SNS.
Cons
AWS can include User Experience monitoring for applications hosted on AWS.
AWS can include code-level traceability for transactions on monitored technologies.
CloudWatch could be deployable to other on-premise services from customers.
Likelihood to Recommend
AWS CloudWatch is perfectly suited for deployments where there are a lot of EC2 instances you need to control and where you need to scale in new EC2 instances depending on users or network load, you can take advantage of multiple integrations AWS CloudWatch have to improve your application platform performance.
Amazon Cloudwatch has been useful for aggregating metrics around our cloud environment, as well as a way to set up alerts based on various criteria for those environments. In addition to alerting and metrics, Cloudwatch has a logging facility to aggregate logs from various Amazon sources. It has given us a good view of our AWS infrastructure.
Pros
Set up alarms to alert teams and is a useful monitoring tool.
Integration into other products.
Dashboards.
Cons
It takes time to get a hang of the tool.
The graph metrics and view could be improved.
Likelihood to Recommend
To monitor all cloud environments. To integrate with other monitoring platforms such as SolarWinds and Nagios.
VU
Verified User
Team Lead in Information Technology (Information Technology and Services company, 5001-10,000 employees)
We use CloudWatch to monitor logs of cloud services and other infrastructure. Mostly being used by our development and engineering departments. It gives us a good idea about the health of infrastructure and helps us prioritize maintenance activities.
Pros
Easy integration with other services.
Seamless Configuration.
Variety of matrix, graphs and dashboards.
Support to third party libraries.
Cons
User Interface can be improved.
High cost of implementation.
No Phone notifications.
Likelihood to Recommend
It is a great tool for infrastructure monitoring. Very beneficial to monitor any web or cloud services.
VU
Verified User
Professional in Information Technology (Design company, 10,001+ employees)
Our engineering team uses CloudWatch to collect logs and monitor our back-end infrastructure and services. We use AWS ECS, Lambda, API Gateway, SageMaker and Step Functions; CloudWatch collects logs for these products out-of-the-box. It is easy to configure log retention policies; e.g., after three months, we can move logs to S3 infrequent-access or Glacier to save money. CloudWatch's log search in the console lacks many of the search features you would find in PaperTrail or Log.ly, but I find it is serviceable. Searching JSON-lines logs in the console might be an unpleasant experience. Similarly, CloudWatch metrics are provided out-of-the-box for all of the AWS products we use; it is easy to create alarms for these metrics and integrate them with PagerDuty.
Pros
Integration with other AWS products is CloudWatch's greatest feature. CloudWatch logs and metrics are provided out-of-the-box for ECS, Lambda, Sagemaker, and most other AWS products. Log aggregation and instrumentation are difficult to configure and manage; it is great to defer that work to AWS.
Configuring log retention policies is simple with AWS. If your business is required to retain logs for years, being able to automatically move old logs to S3 IA or Glacier with a few clicks is convenient.
Configuring alerts from metrics is simple, and it is easy to integrate alerts with PagerDuty or email.
Cons
The console's log search lacks many of the features you would find in PaperTrail or Log.ly. Regex search is either not supported, or very difficult to find.
It can be difficult to understand how the CloudWatch bill breaks down by log group.
The date/time picker in the console could be easier to use.
Likelihood to Recommend
If you are using other AWS products, including EC2, ECS, or Lambda, using CloudWatch is an easy decision. You will get log aggregation and instrumentation out-of-the-box. The lack of log search features may be a sticking point, though your organization does not have to use CloudWatch exclusively. If your platform does not rely on AWS products, CloudWatch should not be considered.
VU
Verified User
Engineer in Engineering (Research company, 11-50 employees)
