Overview

Amazon CloudWatch

Stacks11.8K

Followers8.2K

Votes214

Graphite

Stacks389

Followers419

Votes42

GitHub Stars6.0K

Forks1.3K

Amazon CloudWatch vs Graphite: What are the differences?

Introduction

Amazon CloudWatch and Graphite are both monitoring and logging tools used by companies to monitor the performance and health of their systems. However, there are key differences between the two that make them suitable for different use cases. This article will outline six specific differences between Amazon CloudWatch and Graphite.

Data Storage and Retention: The primary difference between Amazon CloudWatch and Graphite is how they handle data storage and retention. Amazon CloudWatch is a managed service offered by Amazon Web Services (AWS) that automatically stores and retains monitoring data for up to 15 months. On the other hand, Graphite is an open-source tool that requires users to manage their own data storage and retention settings. This means that with Graphite, users have more control over how long data is stored and retained, but it also requires more manual effort.
Scalability and Availability: Another significant difference between Amazon CloudWatch and Graphite is their scalability and availability. Amazon CloudWatch is designed to be highly scalable and available, capable of handling millions of metrics with high reliability. It is built on AWS infrastructure and automatically scales as needed. Graphite, on the other hand, may require additional setup and configuration to achieve similar scalability and availability. While it is possible to scale Graphite to handle large amounts of data, it may require manual intervention and adjustments.
Integration with Other AWS Services: Amazon CloudWatch is tightly integrated with other AWS services, such as EC2, S3, RDS, and Lambda. It provides built-in monitoring and logging capabilities for these services, making it easy to collect and analyze data from various sources. Graphite, being an open-source tool, may require additional configuration or custom development to integrate with AWS services. This can add complexity and increase the time and effort required to set up monitoring for AWS resources.
Monitoring Capabilities: Amazon CloudWatch offers a wide range of monitoring capabilities, including metrics, logs, and alarms. It can collect and display metrics from various sources, such as operating systems, applications, and AWS services. It also provides built-in alarms and notifications for monitoring thresholds and anomalies. Graphite, while it can collect and display metrics, may require additional setup and configuration to achieve the same level of monitoring capabilities as Amazon CloudWatch. Users may need to set up their own alerts and notifications using third-party tools or custom scripts.
Cost Structure: The cost structure of Amazon CloudWatch and Graphite is also different. Amazon CloudWatch has a pay-as-you-go pricing model, where users pay based on the number of metrics, logs, and alarms monitored, as well as the volume of data ingested and stored. Graphite, being an open-source tool, does not have any direct costs associated with it. However, users will still incur costs for hosting and maintaining their own infrastructure, as well as any additional tools or services required for data storage, visualization, and alerting.
Managed vs. Self-hosted: The final difference between Amazon CloudWatch and Graphite is the level of management required. Amazon CloudWatch is a managed service, meaning that AWS takes care of the infrastructure, maintenance, and updates. Users can focus on using the service and analyzing the monitoring data. Graphite, being an open-source tool, requires users to set up, manage, and maintain their own infrastructure. This includes installing and configuring the necessary software, managing the servers, and performing upgrades and updates. This can add complexity and increase the workload for users.

In Summary, Amazon CloudWatch is a managed service tightly integrated with AWS, providing scalable and highly available monitoring capabilities with automatic data storage and retention. Graphite, on the other hand, is an open-source tool that requires more manual effort and infrastructure management but offers flexibility and control over data storage and retention settings.

Advice on Amazon CloudWatch, Graphite

Susmita

Senior SRE at African Bank

Jul 28, 2020

Needs adviceon

Grafana

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.

868k views868k

Comments

Detailed Comparison

Amazon CloudWatch	Graphite
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.	Graphite does two things: 1) Store numeric time-series data and 2) Render graphs of this data on demand
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.	carbon - a Twisted daemon that listens for time-series data;whisper - a simple database library for storing time-series data (similar in design to RRD);graphite webapp - A Django webapp that renders graphs on-demand using Cairo
Statistics
GitHub Stars -	GitHub Stars 6.0K
GitHub Forks -	GitHub Forks 1.3K
Stacks 11.8K	Stacks 389
Followers 8.2K	Followers 419
Votes 214	Votes 42
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 16 Render any graph 9 Great functions to apply on timeseries 8 Well supported integrations 6 Includes event tracking 3 Rolling aggregation makes storage managable
Integrations
No integrations available	Sensu Nagios Logstash Windows Server Netdata Riemann Diamond Telegraf collectd Ganglia

What are some alternatives to Amazon CloudWatch, Graphite?

Grafana

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.

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

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

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

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.

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

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).