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Amazon CloudWatch vs Logstash: What are the differences?
What is Amazon CloudWatch? Monitor AWS resources and custom metrics generated by your applications and services. With Amazon CloudWatch, you gain system-wide visibility into resource utilization, application performance, and operational health. Programmatically retrieve your monitoring data, view graphs, and set alarms to help you troubleshoot, spot trends, and take automated action based on the state of your cloud environment.
What is Logstash? Collect, Parse, & Enrich Data. Logstash is a tool for managing events and logs. You can use it to collect logs, parse them, and store them for later use (like, for searching). If you store them in Elasticsearch, you can view and analyze them with Kibana.
Amazon CloudWatch and Logstash are primarily classified as "Cloud Monitoring" and "Log Management" tools respectively.
Some of the features offered by Amazon CloudWatch are:
- 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.
On the other hand, Logstash provides the following key features:
- Centralize data processing of all types
- Normalize varying schema and formats
- Quickly extend to custom log formats
"Monitor aws resources" is the primary reason why developers consider Amazon CloudWatch over the competitors, whereas "Free" was stated as the key factor in picking Logstash.
Logstash is an open source tool with 10.3K GitHub stars and 2.76K GitHub forks. Here's a link to Logstash's open source repository on GitHub.
According to the StackShare community, Amazon CloudWatch has a broader approval, being mentioned in 706 company stacks & 321 developers stacks; compared to Logstash, which is listed in 550 company stacks and 270 developer stacks.
Pros of Amazon CloudWatch
- Monitor aws resources76
- Zero setup46
- Detailed Monitoring30
- Backed by Amazon23
- Auto Scaling groups19
- SNS and autoscaling integrations11
- Burstable instances metrics (t2 cpu credit balance)5
- HIPAA/PCI/SOC Compliance-friendly3
- Native tool for AWS so understand AWS out of the box1
Pros of Logstash
- Free68
- Easy but powerful filtering18
- Scalable12
- Kibana provides machine learning based analytics to log2
- Great to meet GDPR goals1
- Well Documented1
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Cons of Amazon CloudWatch
- Poor Search Capabilities1
Cons of Logstash
- Memory-intensive4
- Documentation difficult to use1