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 solution gives us very good real-time data."
"Our team finds it overall quite useful."
"What I found most valuable in Amazon CloudWatch is that it gives you detailed information, which I found helpful because it can even provide you with data for the past one minute, which is quite granular. That was what helped me most in terms of finding the root causes. Task automation is another valuable feature of Amazon CloudWatch."
"I have found the memory metrics and the CPU metrics valuable."
"You can enable alarms and metrics, and it has robust integration with AWS services. You can also trigger events. For example, if the CPU utilization is above 80%, it can launch a new instance for you."
"The most valuable feature of Amazon CloudWatch is reliability."
"We can create events and alerts. We use the information to dive down into the infrastructure performance."
"What my company likes best about Amazon CloudWatch is that it's on AWS. My team also likes it for its log feature. As the solution is on AWS, it also has good pricing and resource availability, plus it's what clients choose. My company also chose AWS for Forge ECS, and at the time, there was a need for the log features provided by Amazon CloudWatch, so it's the solution my team went with."
"One of the most valuable features is that you are able to do a very detailed search through the log messages in the overview."
"This had increased productivity for the dev and support teams, because we are directly notifying them."
"The build is stable and requires little maintenance, even compared to some extremely expensive products."
"Open source and user friendly."
"The solution's most valuable feature is its new interface."
"Everything stands out as valuable, including the fact that I can quantify and qualify the logs, create pipelines and process the logs in any way I like, and create charts or data maps."
"Storing logs in Elasticsearch means log retrieval is extremely fast, and full text search is available by default."
"It is used as a log manager/SIEM. It provides visibility into the infrastructure and security related events."
"The solution's auto-scaling could be improved."
"There's a learning curve with Amazon CloudWatch since we have to learn to write the queries to extract the keys and logs."
"The solution's pricing is a bit higher."
"The graphical interface has room for improvement. CloudWatch only gives you a breakdown of what's wrong. However, it would be nice if it could automatically remedy the problems it identifies. You should be able to configure it so that when a specific condition arises, it will take a predefined action."
"What would make Amazon CloudWatch better is if it includes more on-site checks, particularly status checks on the CPU, network input/output, etc. It would also be helpful if there's built-in swap space, disk, and memory monitoring in Amazon CloudWatch because, at the moment, my team has to configure it manually through a shell script."
"CloudWatch's scalability could be improved."
"The product’s documentation must be improved."
"We'd like the interface to be as easy as Datadog."
"I would like to see a default dashboard widget that shows the topology of the clusters defined for the graylog install."
"Lacks sufficient documentation."
"Over six months, I had two similar issues where searches were performed on field "messages". It exhausted all the memory of the ES node causing an ES crash and a Graylog halt."
"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-"
"There should be some user groups and an auto sign-in feature."
"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."
"The biggest problem is the collector application, as we wanted to avoid using Graylog Collector Sidecar due to its architecture."
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.
