We compared Amazon CloudWatch and Graylog based on our users' reviews in five categories. We reviewed all of the data and you can find the conclusion below.
Features: Amazon CloudWatch users liked the solution’s simplicity, intuitive interface, and ability to handle large workloads. Users also praised CloudWatch’s comprehensive monitoring and alerts. Graylog stands out with its exceptional search functions, seamless integration with Elasticsearch, and real-time data access. Some reviews mentioned that Amazon CloudWatch could improve performance and dashboard visualization. Others noted that the solution lacked compatibility with some databases. Graylog could benefit from additional customization options and an improved rule-creation process.
Service and Support: Customers generally have positive opinions about Amazon's customer service. They commended the support team for its availability and timely issue resolution. Graylog's customer service is generally well-regarded, with reviewers noting effective solutions and satisfactory experiences. While response times may differ, Graylog's support is considered superior compared to that of other products.
Ease of Deployment: Amazon CloudWatch is generally described as easy to set up. Some Graylog users said the setup was easy. Other reviewers faced challenges, but these were easily resolved with help from the vendor’s support staff. Graylog is easier to set up in smaller environments, but it could get complicated in large clusters.
Pricing: Amazon CloudWatch offers a flexible pricing structure based on usage and processing, without any separate licensing cost. Some users said that scaling up can be costly due to the need for additional storage space. Graylog offers an enterprise edition and an open-source option with a daily capacity restriction. Some users said that data costs can be expensive.
ROI: Amazon CloudWatch offers a return on investment by minimizing the need for manual monitoring. Graylog can offer some cost savings. The precise ROI may vary depending on the organization’s size and use case.
"The initial setup is easy."
"The most valuable feature of Amazon CloudWatch is collecting the logs from Lambda."
"It's a very simple logging system."
"The monitoring feature is valuable."
"The most valuable feature of Amazon CloudWatch is intrusion prevention."
"The tool's UI is good. One can scroll through the logs very easily."
"The most valuable features of Amazon CloudWatch are metrics, dashboards, alarms, logs, events, logs insight, and application insights."
"We have found the pricing to be reasonable."
"We're using the Community edition, but I know that it has really good dashboarding and alerts."
"It is used as a log manager/SIEM. It provides visibility into the infrastructure and security related events."
"The ability to write custom alerts is key to information security and compliance."
"I am very proud of how very stable the solution is."
"Real-time UDP/GELF logging and full text-based searching."
"What I like about Graylog is that it's real-time and you have access to the raw data. So, you ingest it, and you have access to every message and every data item you ingest. You can then build analytics on top of that. You can look at the raw data, and you can do some volumetric estimations, such as how big traffic you have, how many messages of data of a type you have, etc."
"The build is stable and requires little maintenance, even compared to some extremely expensive products."
"Open source and user friendly."
"When customers want to see the CPU or memory utilization there is a cost. This should be free to see the utilization."
"I would like to monitor inbound and outbound transfer. I would also like to control the traffic for load balancing."
"The solution could benefit from a price decrease."
"Right now, in relation to monitoring services, there are too many services and too many metrics per service."
"CloudWatch doesn’t monitor disk throughput by default."
"The product’s documentation must be improved."
"The solution's integration could be easier for laypersons."
"I do not know whether or not CloudWatch can be integrated with on-prem services."
"Since container orchestration systems are popular and Graylog fits the niche well, perhaps they could officially support running in docker containers on Kubernetes as a StatefulSet as a use case. That way, the declarative nature of Kubernetes config files would document their best case deployment scenario-"
"We ran into problems with Elasticsearch throwing a circuit-breaking exception due to field data size being too large. It turned out that the heap size directly impacted this size in a high-throughput environment, causing unexplained instability in Graylog. We were able to troubleshoot on the Elasticsearch size, but we should have been able to reference some minimum requirements for Graylog to know that our settings weren't sufficient."
"With technical support, you are on your own without an enterprise license."
"Lacks sufficient documentation."
"More complex visualizations and the ability to execute custom Elasticsearch queries would be great."
"There should be some user groups and an auto sign-in feature."
"I would like to see some kind of visualization included in Graylog."
"Its scalability gets complicated when we have to update or edit multiple nodes."
Amazon CloudWatch is ranked 12th in Log Management with 40 reviews while Graylog is ranked 11th in Log Management with 18 reviews. Amazon CloudWatch is rated 8.0, while Graylog is rated 8.0. The top reviewer of Amazon CloudWatch writes "Instantaneous response when monitoring logs and KPIs". On the other hand, the top reviewer of Graylog writes "Great detailed search features and easy Java integration, but needs improvement in integration with Python". Amazon CloudWatch is most compared with Zabbix, Datadog, Google Cloud's operations suite (formerly Stackdriver), Dynatrace and Splunk Infrastructure Monitoring, whereas Graylog is most compared with Grafana Loki, Wazuh, syslog-ng, Fortinet FortiAnalyzer and Splunk Enterprise Security. See our Amazon CloudWatch vs. Graylog report.
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We monitor all Log Management reviews to prevent fraudulent reviews and keep review quality high. We do not post reviews by company employees or direct competitors. We validate each review for authenticity via cross-reference with LinkedIn, and personal follow-up with the reviewer when necessary.
