Amazon CloudWatch vs Logstash

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Amazon CloudWatch

11.1K
7.4K
+ 1
214
Logstash

10.9K
8K
+ 1
102
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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.

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Pros of Amazon CloudWatch
Pros of Logstash
  • 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
  • 68
    Free
  • 18
    Easy but powerful filtering
  • 12
    Scalable
  • 2
    Kibana provides machine learning based analytics to log
  • 1
    Great to meet GDPR goals
  • 1
    Well Documented

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Cons of Amazon CloudWatch
Cons of Logstash
  • 1
    Poor Search Capabilities
  • 4
    Memory-intensive
  • 1
    Documentation difficult to use

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- No public GitHub repository available -

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 Logstash?

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.

Need advice about which tool to choose?Ask the StackShare community!

What companies use Amazon CloudWatch?
What companies use Logstash?
See which teams inside your own company are using Amazon CloudWatch or Logstash.
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What tools integrate with Amazon CloudWatch?
What tools integrate with Logstash?

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Blog Posts

Jul 9 2019 at 7:22PM

Blue Medora

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May 21 2019 at 12:20AM

Elastic

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What are some alternatives to Amazon CloudWatch and Logstash?
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