Amazon CloudWatch vs AWS Config

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AWS Config vs Amazon CloudWatch: What are the differences?

Key Differences Between AWS Config and Amazon CloudWatch

AWS Config and Amazon CloudWatch are two important services offered by Amazon Web Services (AWS) that provide monitoring and management capabilities for your resources in the AWS cloud. While they both help in collecting and analyzing data, there are significant differences between the two.

  1. Scope of Monitoring: AWS Config focuses on monitoring the configuration of your AWS resources, providing a detailed inventory of how they are configured and how they change over time. On the other hand, Amazon CloudWatch primarily focuses on monitoring performance metrics and log files generated by these resources, providing real-time insights into their operational health.

  2. Granularity of Monitoring: AWS Config offers a resource-level granularity in terms of monitoring, allowing you to track configuration changes at an individual resource level. In contrast, Amazon CloudWatch provides metrics at a more aggregated level, allowing you to monitor performance and health at a broader scale, such as an entire EC2 instance or a load balancer.

  3. Automation and Remediation: AWS Config enables you to define rules and evaluate the compliance of your AWS resources against these rules, allowing you to automate the remediation of non-compliant resources. In contrast, Amazon CloudWatch focuses more on triggering notifications and alerts based on predefined metrics thresholds, providing you with the ability to take manual actions to resolve issues.

  4. Data Collection and Retention: AWS Config retains a comprehensive history of all configurations and changes made to your resources, allowing you to go back in time and track the evolution of resource configurations. Amazon CloudWatch, however, has limited retention for metrics and log data, usually in the range of a few weeks, after which the data may be aggregated or overwritten.

  5. Use Case Focus: AWS Config is commonly used for compliance auditing, security analysis, and governance, allowing you to assess resource compliance against industry standards and best practices. On the other hand, Amazon CloudWatch is more focused on performance monitoring, capacity planning, and troubleshooting, providing real-time insights into the behavior and health of your resources.

  6. Integration with AWS Ecosystem: AWS Config integrates with other AWS services such as AWS CloudFormation and AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM) to provide a holistic view of your resource configurations and access control. Amazon CloudWatch integrates with a wide range of AWS services for collecting metrics and logs, enabling you to monitor various aspects of your application and infrastructure.

In summary, AWS Config and Amazon CloudWatch differ in their scope of monitoring, granularity, automation capabilities, data retention, use case focus, and integration with the AWS ecosystem. While AWS Config focuses on configuration monitoring and compliance, Amazon CloudWatch focuses on performance monitoring and troubleshooting.

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Pros of Amazon CloudWatch
Pros of AWS Config
  • 76
    Monitor aws resources
  • 46
    Zero setup
  • 30
    Detailed Monitoring
  • 23
    Backed by Amazon
  • 19
    Auto Scaling groups
  • 11
    SNS and autoscaling integrations
  • 5
    Burstable instances metrics (t2 cpu credit balance)
  • 3
    HIPAA/PCI/SOC Compliance-friendly
  • 1
    Native tool for AWS so understand AWS out of the box
  • 4
    Backed by Amazon
  • 2
    One stop solution

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Cons of Amazon CloudWatch
Cons of AWS Config
  • 2
    Poor Search Capabilities
  • 2
    Not user friendly

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What is Amazon CloudWatch?

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.

What is 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.

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What companies use Amazon CloudWatch?
What companies use AWS Config?
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Jul 9 2019 at 7:22PM

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What are some alternatives to Amazon CloudWatch and AWS Config?
Datadog
Datadog is the leading service for cloud-scale monitoring. It is used by IT, operations, and development teams who build and operate applications that run on dynamic or hybrid cloud infrastructure. Start monitoring in minutes with Datadog!
Splunk
It provides the leading platform for Operational Intelligence. Customers use it to search, monitor, analyze and visualize machine data.
New Relic
The world’s best software and DevOps teams rely on New Relic to move faster, make better decisions and create best-in-class digital experiences. If you run software, you need to run New Relic. More than 50% of the Fortune 100 do too.
Prometheus
Prometheus is a systems and service monitoring system. It collects metrics from configured targets at given intervals, evaluates rule expressions, displays the results, and can trigger alerts if some condition is observed to be true.
AWS CloudTrail
With CloudTrail, you can get a history of AWS API calls for your account, including API calls made via the AWS Management Console, AWS SDKs, command line tools, and higher-level AWS services (such as AWS CloudFormation). The AWS API call history produced by CloudTrail enables security analysis, resource change tracking, and compliance auditing. The recorded information includes the identity of the API caller, the time of the API call, the source IP address of the API caller, the request parameters, and the response elements returned by the AWS service.
See all alternatives