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  1. Stackups
  2. DevOps
  3. Monitoring
  4. Cloud Monitoring
  5. Amazon CloudWatch vs Grafana

Amazon CloudWatch vs Grafana

OverviewDecisionsComparisonAlternatives

Overview

Amazon CloudWatch
Amazon CloudWatch
Stacks12.0K
Followers8.2K
Votes214
Grafana
Grafana
Stacks18.4K
Followers14.6K
Votes415
GitHub Stars70.7K
Forks13.1K

Amazon CloudWatch vs Grafana: What are the differences?

Both Amazon CloudWatch and Grafana are popular tools used for monitoring and visualization of system metrics and logs. Let's explore the key differences.between the two:

  1. Integration with AWS Services: A key difference is that Amazon CloudWatch is a native AWS service that provides monitoring for various AWS resources, such as EC2 instances, RDS databases, S3 buckets, and more. On the other hand, Grafana is a third-party tool that can be integrated with various data sources, including Amazon CloudWatch.

  2. Data Source Support: Another distinction is that Amazon CloudWatch mainly focuses on collecting and storing metrics and log data from AWS services. It offers a comprehensive set of metrics and insights specifically designed for AWS resources. In contrast, Grafana has a broader range of data source options, including databases, APIs, and other monitoring tools, making it more versatile for non-AWS environments.

  3. Visualization Capabilities: Amazon CloudWatch provides basic visualization capabilities, allowing users to create simple line charts, bar charts, and pie charts. On the other hand, Grafana excels in this area with its extensive collection of visualization options, including advanced graphs, gauges, tables, and heatmap, providing users with more flexibility and customization.

  4. Alerting and Notification: When it comes to alerting and notification, Amazon CloudWatch offers built-in alerting capabilities, allowing users to set alarms based on predefined thresholds and send notifications via various channels. Grafana, however, relies on external tools and plugins to provide alerting, leveraging integrations with services like Slack or email services.

  5. User-Friendly Interface: Amazon CloudWatch has a web-based console that provides an intuitive user interface designed specifically for AWS users. It offers a simplified and consistent experience across different AWS services. Grafana, on the other hand, provides a highly customizable and user-friendly web interface with drag-and-drop features, making it easy to build and design custom dashboards.

  6. Community and Plugin Ecosystem: Amazon CloudWatch benefits from being an AWS service, which means it has a large user base and extensive community support. Grafana, being an open-source tool, also has a vibrant community that actively develops and maintains plugins for various data sources and integrations.

In summary, Amazon CloudWatch is tightly integrated with AWS services and offers native monitoring capabilities, while Grafana is a versatile tool that can be integrated with various data sources and provides extensive visualization options.

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Advice on Amazon CloudWatch, Grafana

Leonardo Henrique da
Leonardo Henrique da

Pleno QA Enginneer at SolarMarket

Dec 8, 2020

Decided

The objective of this work was to develop a system to monitor the materials of a production line using IoT technology. Currently, the process of monitoring and replacing parts depends on manual services. For this, load cells, microcontroller, Broker MQTT, Telegraf, InfluxDB, and Grafana were used. It was implemented in a workflow that had the function of collecting sensor data, storing it in a database, and visualizing it in the form of weight and quantity. With these developed solutions, he hopes to contribute to the logistics area, in the replacement and control of materials.

402k views402k
Comments
StackShare
StackShare

Jun 25, 2019

Needs advice

From a StackShare Community member: “We need better analytics & insights into our Elasticsearch cluster. Grafana, which ships with advanced support for Elasticsearch, looks great but isn’t officially supported/endorsed by Elastic. Kibana, on the other hand, is made and supported by Elastic. I’m wondering what people suggest in this situation."

663k views663k
Comments
Susmita
Susmita

Senior SRE at African Bank

Jul 28, 2020

Needs adviceonGrafanaGrafana

Looking for a tool which can be used for mainly dashboard purposes, but here are the main requirements:

  • Must be able to get custom data from AS400,
  • Able to display automation test results,
  • System monitoring / Nginx API,
  • Able to get data from 3rd parties DB.

Grafana is almost solving all the problems, except AS400 and no database to get automation test results.

869k views869k
Comments

Detailed Comparison

Amazon CloudWatch
Amazon CloudWatch
Grafana
Grafana

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.

Grafana is a general purpose dashboard and graph composer. It's focused on providing rich ways to visualize time series metrics, mainly though graphs but supports other ways to visualize data through a pluggable panel architecture. It currently has rich support for for Graphite, InfluxDB and OpenTSDB. But supports other data sources via plugins.

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.
Create, edit, save & search dashboards;Change column spans and row heights;Drag and drop panels to rearrange;Use InfluxDB or Elasticsearch as dashboard storage;Import & export dashboard (json file);Import dashboard from Graphite;Templating
Statistics
GitHub Stars
-
GitHub Stars
70.7K
GitHub Forks
-
GitHub Forks
13.1K
Stacks
12.0K
Stacks
18.4K
Followers
8.2K
Followers
14.6K
Votes
214
Votes
415
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
  • 89
    Beautiful
  • 68
    Graphs are interactive
  • 57
    Free
  • 56
    Easy
  • 34
    Nicer than the Graphite web interface
Cons
  • 1
    No interactive query builder
Integrations
No integrations available
Graphite
Graphite
InfluxDB
InfluxDB

What are some alternatives to Amazon CloudWatch, Grafana?

Kibana

Kibana

Kibana is an open source (Apache Licensed), browser based analytics and search dashboard for Elasticsearch. Kibana is a snap to setup and start using. Kibana strives to be easy to get started with, while also being flexible and powerful, just like Elasticsearch.

Prometheus

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.

Nagios

Nagios

Nagios is a host/service/network monitoring program written in C and released under the GNU General Public License.

Netdata

Netdata

Netdata collects metrics per second & presents them in low-latency dashboards. It's designed to run on all of your physical & virtual servers, cloud deployments, Kubernetes clusters & edge/IoT devices, to monitor systems, containers & apps

Stackdriver

Stackdriver

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.

Zabbix

Zabbix

Zabbix is a mature and effortless enterprise-class open source monitoring solution for network monitoring and application monitoring of millions of metrics.

Sensu

Sensu

Sensu is the future-proof solution for multi-cloud monitoring at scale. The Sensu monitoring event pipeline empowers businesses to automate their monitoring workflows and gain deep visibility into their multi-cloud environments.

Graphite

Graphite

Graphite does two things: 1) Store numeric time-series data and 2) Render graphs of this data on demand

Lumigo

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.

StatsD

StatsD

It is a network daemon that runs on the Node.js platform and listens for statistics, like counters and timers, sent over UDP or TCP and sends aggregates to one or more pluggable backend services (e.g., Graphite).

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