What do you like best about Amazon CloudWatch?
The native AWS integration represents CloudWatch’s strongest advantage, seamlessly collecting metrics from virtually every AWS service without requiring complex configurations. This deep integration extends across the entire AWS ecosystem, from EC2 instances and RDS databases to Lambda functions and DynamoDB tables, providing a unified monitoring experience that eliminates the fragmentation common with third-party solutions.
The real-time monitoring capabilities excel at providing immediate visibility into system performance. CloudWatch automatically tracks essential metrics like CPU utilization, memory usage, network I/O, and disk performance, while simultaneously allowing custom metric collection from applications and services.
This dual approach ensures comprehensive coverage of both infrastructure and application-level performance indicators.
CloudWatch Alarms provide sophisticated alerting mechanisms that go beyond simple threshold monitoring. The service supports composite alarms, anomaly detection, and metric math expressions, enabling complex monitoring scenarios. The integration with SNS, Auto Scaling, and Lambda creates powerful automated response workflows that can resolve issues before they impact users.
The dashboard functionality offers exceptional visualization capabilities with customizable widgets, real-time graphs, and flexible time range selections. You can create multiple dashboards tailored to different teams or use cases, from high-level executive summaries to detailed technical monitoring views. The ability to share dashboards and embed them in external applications enhances collaboration across teams.
CloudWatch Logs provides centralized log management with advanced querying capabilities through Logs Insights. The service supports structured logging, real-time log streaming, and powerful search functionality using SQL-like queries. Log groups and streams organize data logically, while retention policies manage storage costs effectively. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.
What do you dislike about Amazon CloudWatch?
The pricing model becomes expensive at scale, particularly for high-frequency custom metrics and log ingestion. While the free tier covers basic needs, production environments with extensive logging and detailed monitoring can generate significant monthly costs.
The pricing structure around API calls, storage, and data transfer can make cost forecasting challenging for growing applications. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.
