Amazon CloudWatch vs Stackdriver

Overview

Amazon CloudWatch

Stacks12.0K

Followers8.2K

Votes214

Stackdriver

Stacks318

Followers349

Votes67

Amazon CloudWatch vs Stackdriver: What are the differences?

Introduction:

Amazon CloudWatch and Stackdriver are two popular cloud monitoring and logging services offered by Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Google Cloud Platform (GCP) respectively. Both services aim to help users monitor, troubleshoot, and optimize their cloud-based applications and infrastructure. However, there are several key differences between them that set them apart.

Data sources and integrations: One key difference between Amazon CloudWatch and Stackdriver lies in the range of data sources and integrations they support. CloudWatch primarily focuses on monitoring resources within the AWS ecosystem, such as EC2 instances, RDS databases, and Lambda functions. In contrast, Stackdriver is designed to monitor resources across multiple cloud providers and on-premises infrastructure, making it a more versatile choice for users with diverse cloud environments.
Pricing structure: Another significant difference between CloudWatch and Stackdriver is their pricing structure. CloudWatch pricing is based on a pay-as-you-go model where users pay for the volume of data ingested, metric and log storage, and additional features like alarms and dashboards. On the other hand, Stackdriver offers tiered pricing based on usage, with different pricing tiers for monitoring, logging, and monitoring agents. Users need to carefully evaluate their specific requirements and usage patterns to determine which pricing model is more cost-effective for their needs.
Alerting and notification capabilities: CloudWatch and Stackdriver also differ in how they handle alerting and notifications. CloudWatch provides users with the ability to create alarms based on customizable thresholds and send notifications via various channels like email, SMS, and Simple Notification Service (SNS). Stackdriver, on the other hand, offers a broader range of notification options, including email, SMS, Slack integration, and integration with incident management tools like PagerDuty and Opsgenie. This allows users to choose the notification method that best suits their team's workflow and preferences.
Logging and log analysis: When it comes to logging and log analysis, Stackdriver offers more robust capabilities compared to CloudWatch. Stackdriver Logging enables centralized log management, aggregation, and analysis of logs from multiple sources, including cloud resources, applications, and custom log streams. Stackdriver also provides advanced log analysis features like log-based metrics and powerful query capabilities with its Logging and Monitoring Query Language (LMQL). While CloudWatch has its own logging capabilities, it may be more suitable for simple use cases and lacks some of the advanced features offered by Stackdriver.
Dashboards and visualizations: Both CloudWatch and Stackdriver provide dashboards and visualizations for monitoring purposes, but they differ in terms of flexibility and customization. CloudWatch offers basic visualization options like line charts, stacked area charts, and text widgets, but the customization options are limited. Stackdriver, on the other hand, provides a broader range of visualization options through its Dashboarding service, including custom charts, scorecards, and heat maps. Stackdriver's dashboards also support more interactive features like filtering and linking to specific logs or metrics.
Third-party integrations and ecosystem: While both CloudWatch and Stackdriver offer integrations with various AWS and GCP services, Stackdriver has a broader ecosystem and supports a wider range of third-party integrations. Stackdriver integrates with popular development and monitoring tools like Jenkins, GitHub, and Grafana, enabling users to incorporate data and insights from these tools into their monitoring workflows. CloudWatch, although tightly integrated with the AWS ecosystem, may have slightly limited options for third-party integrations.

In summary, Amazon CloudWatch and Stackdriver differentiate themselves in terms of data sources, pricing structure, alerting capabilities, logging and log analysis, dashboards and visualizations, and third-party integrations. Users should carefully evaluate their specific needs and preferences to determine which monitoring and logging service suits their requirements better.

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Detailed Comparison

Amazon CloudWatch	Stackdriver
It helps you gain system-wide visibility into resource utilization, application performance, and operational health. It retrieve your monitoring data, view graphs to help take automated action based on the state of your cloud environment.	Google Stackdriver provides powerful monitoring, logging, and diagnostics. It equips you with insight into the health, performance, and availability of cloud-powered applications, enabling you to find and fix issues faster.
Basic Monitoring for Amazon EC2 instances: ten pre-selected metrics at five-minute frequency, free of charge.;Detailed Monitoring for Amazon EC2 instances: seven pre-selected metrics at one-minute frequency, for an additional charge.;Amazon EBS volumes: eight pre-selected metrics at five-minute frequency, free of charge.;Elastic Load Balancers: thirteen pre-selected metrics at one-minute frequency, free of charge.;Amazon RDS DB instances: thirteen pre-selected metrics at one-minute frequency, free of charge.;Amazon SQS queues: eight pre-selected metrics at five-minute frequency, free of charge.;Amazon SNS topics: four pre-selected metrics at five-minute frequency, free of charge.;Amazon ElastiCache nodes: twenty-nine pre-selected metrics at one-minute frequency, free of charge.;Amazon DynamoDB tables: seven pre-selected metrics at five-minute frequency, free of charge.;AWS Storage Gateways: eleven pre-selected gateway metrics and five pre-selected storage volume metrics at five-minute frequency, free of charge.;Amazon Elastic MapReduce job flows: twenty-three pre-selected metrics at five-minute frequency, free of charge.;Auto Scaling groups: seven pre-selected metrics at one-minute frequency, optional and charged at standard pricing.;Estimated charges on your AWS bill: you can also choose to enable metrics to monitor your AWS charges. The number of metrics depends on the AWS products and services that you use, and these metrics are free of charge. Learn more about this option.	Monitoring;Logging;Diagnostics;Application Tracing;Error Reporting;Alerting;Uptime Monitoring;Multi-cloud;Production Debugger;
Statistics
Stacks 12.0K	Stacks 318
Followers 8.2K	Followers 349
Votes 214	Votes 67
Pros & Cons
Pros 76 Monitor aws resources 46 Zero setup 30 Detailed Monitoring 23 Backed by Amazon 19 Auto Scaling groups Cons 2 Poor Search Capabilities	Pros 19 Monitoring 11 Logging 8 Alerting 7 Tracing 6 Uptime Monitoring Cons 2 Not free

What are some alternatives to Amazon CloudWatch, Stackdriver?

Lumigo

Lumigo is an observability platform built for developers, unifying distributed tracing with payload data, log management, and real-time metrics to help you deeply understand and troubleshoot your systems.

CAST.AI

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Cloudability

Cloudability aggregates expenditures into accessible and comprehensive reports, helps identify new opportunities for reducing spend and increasing cloud efficiency, offers budget alerts and recommendations via SMS and email, provides APIs for connecting cloud billing and usage data to any business or financial system, and more.

AWS Config

AWS Config is a fully managed service that provides you with an AWS resource inventory, configuration history, and configuration change notifications to enable security and governance. With AWS Config you can discover existing AWS resources, export a complete inventory of your AWS resources with all configuration details, and determine how a resource was configured at any point in time. These capabilities enable compliance auditing, security analysis, resource change tracking, and troubleshooting.

CloudCheckr

CloudCheckr provides otherwise unavailable visibility and analytics to remove the complexity from AWS usage. Our users quickly and efficiently gain control of their deployment, reduce costs, and optimize infrastructure performance.

DigitalOcean Monitoring

Collect metrics for visibility, monitor Droplet performance, and receive alerts when problems arise in your infrastructure – at no additional cost.

stts

With a click of the menubar icon, you can see the status of your favorite services. You can also be notified when a service goes down or gets restored. stts is designed to be unobtrusive, only giving you the information you need and allowing you to access the status page with a single click.

$Infracost$

Infracost

It is a cloud cost estimates for Terraform in pull requests. It is an open-source tool that helps DevOps and developers continuously reduce their cloud waste. It shows engineering teams how their code changes will affect their cloud bills.

Dome9

It delivers full visibility, control and faster time to protection as organizations scale in AWS, Azure and Google Cloud environments.

Opsee

Effortless monitoring of your services and AWS environment. Built for on-call developers who want an easier way to be sure their services are working as expected.

Related Comparisons

Amazon CloudWatch vs Stackdriver: What are the differences?

Introduction:

Data sources and integrations: One key difference between Amazon CloudWatch and Stackdriver lies in the range of data sources and integrations they support. CloudWatch primarily focuses on monitoring resources within the AWS ecosystem, such as EC2 instances, RDS databases, and Lambda functions. In contrast, Stackdriver is designed to monitor resources across multiple cloud providers and on-premises infrastructure, making it a more versatile choice for users with diverse cloud environments.
Pricing structure: Another significant difference between CloudWatch and Stackdriver is their pricing structure. CloudWatch pricing is based on a pay-as-you-go model where users pay for the volume of data ingested, metric and log storage, and additional features like alarms and dashboards. On the other hand, Stackdriver offers tiered pricing based on usage, with different pricing tiers for monitoring, logging, and monitoring agents. Users need to carefully evaluate their specific requirements and usage patterns to determine which pricing model is more cost-effective for their needs.
Alerting and notification capabilities: CloudWatch and Stackdriver also differ in how they handle alerting and notifications. CloudWatch provides users with the ability to create alarms based on customizable thresholds and send notifications via various channels like email, SMS, and Simple Notification Service (SNS). Stackdriver, on the other hand, offers a broader range of notification options, including email, SMS, Slack integration, and integration with incident management tools like PagerDuty and Opsgenie. This allows users to choose the notification method that best suits their team's workflow and preferences.
Logging and log analysis: When it comes to logging and log analysis, Stackdriver offers more robust capabilities compared to CloudWatch. Stackdriver Logging enables centralized log management, aggregation, and analysis of logs from multiple sources, including cloud resources, applications, and custom log streams. Stackdriver also provides advanced log analysis features like log-based metrics and powerful query capabilities with its Logging and Monitoring Query Language (LMQL). While CloudWatch has its own logging capabilities, it may be more suitable for simple use cases and lacks some of the advanced features offered by Stackdriver.
Dashboards and visualizations: Both CloudWatch and Stackdriver provide dashboards and visualizations for monitoring purposes, but they differ in terms of flexibility and customization. CloudWatch offers basic visualization options like line charts, stacked area charts, and text widgets, but the customization options are limited. Stackdriver, on the other hand, provides a broader range of visualization options through its Dashboarding service, including custom charts, scorecards, and heat maps. Stackdriver's dashboards also support more interactive features like filtering and linking to specific logs or metrics.
Third-party integrations and ecosystem: While both CloudWatch and Stackdriver offer integrations with various AWS and GCP services, Stackdriver has a broader ecosystem and supports a wider range of third-party integrations. Stackdriver integrates with popular development and monitoring tools like Jenkins, GitHub, and Grafana, enabling users to incorporate data and insights from these tools into their monitoring workflows. CloudWatch, although tightly integrated with the AWS ecosystem, may have slightly limited options for third-party integrations.

Amazon CloudWatch vs Stackdriver

Overview