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.
"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."
"The most valuable feature of Amazon CloudWatch is collecting the logs from Lambda."
"The most valuable feature of Amazon CloudWatch is reliability."
"We can set CPU thresholds using the solution."
"CloudWatch immediately hooks up and connects to the KPIs and all the metrics."
"The monitoring features are valuable."
"The most valuable feature of Amazon CloudWatch is intrusion prevention."
"The solution effectively monitors golden signals like CPU, page requests, and queues."
"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."
"UDP is a fast and lightweight protocol, perfect for sending large volumes of logs with minimal overhead."
"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 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."
"Real-time UDP/GELF logging and full text-based searching."
"Open source and user friendly."
"We run a containerized microservices environment. Being able to set up streams and search for errors and anomalies across hundreds of containers is why a log aggregation platform like Graylog is valuable to us."
"The product is scalable. The solution is stable."
"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 solution's pricing is a bit higher."
"I would like to monitor inbound and outbound transfer. I would also like to control the traffic for load balancing."
"The drill-down aspect on the dashboard of the solution needs improvement. We get a very good high-level overview, but when we drill down, it becomes a little less clear. We have given this feedback to AWS as well and hope they will improve this in the future."
"The solution could benefit from a price decrease."
"The monitoring part and GUI are areas in Amazon CloudWatch that have shortcomings currently and can be considered for improvements in the future."
"The technical support must be improved."
"Dashboards, stream alerts and parsing could be improved."
"With technical support, you are on your own without an enterprise license."
"Graylog can improve the index rotation as it's quite a complex solution."
"I would like to see some kind of visualization included in Graylog."
"The infrastructure cost is the main issue. I like the rest. If the infrastructure costs could be lower, it would be fantastic."
"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-"
"Graylog needs to improve their authentication. Also, the fact that Graylog displays logs from the top down is just ridiculous."
"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) and Dynatrace, whereas Graylog is most compared with Grafana Loki, Wazuh, syslog-ng, Splunk Enterprise Security and Fortinet FortiAnalyzer. 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.
