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.
"We use Amazon CloudWatch for logging."
"Monitoring time and ensuring ease in it is the most valuable feature."
"The monitoring features are valuable."
"Our team finds it overall quite useful."
"Setting up this product was easy. I found data analytics as its most valuable feature."
"The alarms are one thing I love about AWS CloudWatch. It has alerts that notify us when resource use is approaching the limit."
"The detection is the most valuable feature."
"We have found the pricing to be reasonable."
"The product is scalable. The solution is stable."
"I like the correlation and the alerting."
"UDP is a fast and lightweight protocol, perfect for sending large volumes of logs with minimal overhead."
"Real-time UDP/GELF logging and full text-based searching."
"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."
"The best feature of Graylog is the Elasticsearch integration. We can integrate and we can run filters, such as an event of interest, and those logs we can send to any SIEM tool or as an analytic. Additionally, there are clear and well-documented implementation instructions on their website to follow if needed."
"We're using the Community edition, but I know that it has really good dashboarding and alerts."
"The product's configuration has some challenges. The solution needs to be more user-friendly."
"Incorporating a straightforward method or a plug-and-play solution for integrating these databases with our systems, facilitating smooth data transfer, and enabling the creation of dashboards for monitoring and analysis would be beneficial."
"Right now, in relation to monitoring services, there are too many services and too many metrics per service."
"For monitoring applications or for APM, CloudWatch has some limitations. You cannot monitor application performance from CloudWatch, and you have to go for a third-party tool."
"CloudWatch doesn’t monitor disk throughput by default."
"The technical support must be improved."
"There is room for improvement in the pricing, because they have a premium version, but it's not really a premium version. It's just an enhanced monitoring version, and it can be a bit expensive depending on your usage."
"The configuration capabilities could be better."
"More customization is always useful."
"Graylog needs to improve their authentication. Also, the fact that Graylog displays logs from the top down is just ridiculous."
"Graylog can improve the index rotation as it's quite a complex solution."
"It would be great if Graylog could provide a better Python package in order to make it easier to use for the Python community."
"The infrastructure cost is the main issue. I like the rest. If the infrastructure costs could be lower, it would be fantastic."
"Dashboards, stream alerts and parsing could be improved."
"Elasticsearch recommendations for tuning could be better. Graylog doesn't have direct support for running the system inside of Kubernetes, so it can be challenging to fill in the gaps and set up containers in a way that is both performant and stable."
"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."
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.
See our list of best Log Management vendors.
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.
