StackShareStackShare
Follow on
StackShare

Discover and share technology stacks from companies around the world.

Follow on

© 2025 StackShare. All rights reserved.

Product

  • Stacks
  • Tools
  • Feed

Company

  • About
  • Contact

Legal

  • Privacy Policy
  • Terms of Service
  1. Stackups
  2. DevOps
  3. Monitoring
  4. Monitoring Aggregation
  5. Amazon CloudWatch vs PagerDuty

Amazon CloudWatch vs PagerDuty

OverviewDecisionsComparisonAlternatives

Overview

PagerDuty
PagerDuty
Stacks1.0K
Followers703
Votes119
Amazon CloudWatch
Amazon CloudWatch
Stacks12.0K
Followers8.2K
Votes214

Amazon CloudWatch vs PagerDuty: What are the differences?

Introduction

Amazon CloudWatch and PagerDuty are two popular tools used in the field of monitoring and incident response. While both serve the purpose of monitoring and alerting, there are key differences that set them apart.

  1. Integration Capabilities: Amazon CloudWatch is tightly integrated with other Amazon Web Services (AWS) tools and services. It is specifically designed to monitor and manage resources within the AWS environment. On the other hand, PagerDuty has broader integration capabilities and can be used with various third-party tools and services, making it more versatile for monitoring systems across different environments.

  2. Alerting and Escalation: Amazon CloudWatch provides basic alerting features, allowing users to set alarms based on predefined thresholds. When an alarm is triggered, CloudWatch can send notifications via different channels such as email or SMS. However, the escalation process in Amazon CloudWatch can be limited, as it primarily relies on manual intervention. PagerDuty, on the other hand, has advanced incident routing and escalation capabilities. It provides on-call scheduling, automatic incident routing, and the ability to define escalation policies to ensure timely response and resolution of incidents.

  3. Collaboration and Communication: PagerDuty offers rich collaboration features that allow team members to communicate and collaborate during incident response. It provides real-time incident updates, status tracking, and the ability to add comments and notes to incidents. Amazon CloudWatch, on the other hand, focuses primarily on monitoring and alerting, with limited collaboration features. It provides basic notifications and alerts but lacks the collaborative functionality of PagerDuty.

  4. Analytics and Reporting: Amazon CloudWatch provides detailed metrics and logs for monitoring various AWS resources. It offers powerful analytics and visualization features, allowing users to gain insights into resource utilization, performance, and operational issues. PagerDuty, on the other hand, focuses more on incident response and management rather than detailed resource monitoring and analytics. It provides limited analytics capabilities, focusing more on tracking and managing incidents.

  5. Integration with DevOps tools: Amazon CloudWatch integrates well with other AWS DevOps tools such as AWS Lambda, AWS Auto Scaling, and AWS CloudFormation. This enables seamless automation and orchestration of tasks based on monitoring data. PagerDuty also offers integrations with various CI/CD and DevOps tools such as Jenkins, GitHub, and Slack, allowing users to trigger actions and notifications based on monitoring events.

  6. Pricing Structure: Amazon CloudWatch has a pay-as-you-go pricing model, where users are charged based on the number of metrics, alarms, log data, and events they generate. The pricing is transparent and provides flexibility for different use cases. PagerDuty, on the other hand, has a subscription-based pricing model, which includes a base fee and additional charges based on the number of users and integrations. This pricing model may be more suitable for organizations with specific budget constraints or requirements.

In Summary, Amazon CloudWatch is tightly integrated with AWS services, while PagerDuty offers broader integration capabilities and collaboration features. PagerDuty excels in incident routing and escalation, collaboration, and integration with third-party tools. Amazon CloudWatch focuses more on monitoring and analytics, with strong integration with AWS DevOps tools. The pricing models also differ, with Amazon CloudWatch offering a pay-as-you-go model and PagerDuty having a subscription-based pricing structure.

Share your Stack

Help developers discover the tools you use. Get visibility for your team's tech choices and contribute to the community's knowledge.

View Docs
CLI (Node.js)
or
Manual

Advice on PagerDuty, Amazon CloudWatch

Michael
Michael

Systems Engineer at BetterHelp

Apr 8, 2020

Needs adviceonPagerDutyPagerDutySquadcastSquadcast

I'm currently on PagerDuty, but I'm about to add enough users to go out of the starter tier, which will dramatically increase my license cost. PagerDuty is, in my experience, quite clunky, and I'm looking for alternatives. Squadcast is one I've found, and another is xMatters. Between the three, I'm currently leaning towards xMatters, but I'd like to know what people suggest.

90.6k views90.6k
Comments

Detailed Comparison

PagerDuty
PagerDuty
Amazon CloudWatch
Amazon CloudWatch

PagerDuty is an alarm aggregation and dispatching service for system administrators and support teams. It collects alerts from your monitoring tools, gives you an overall view of all of your monitoring alarms, and alerts an on duty engineer if there's a problem.

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.

Alerting that works (and wakes you up)- When your systems go down, PagerDuty will wake you up. You choose how you want to be alerted - via phone, SMS or email, to multiple numbers, with retries.;Integrate all your existing monitoring tools- PagerDuty works great with almost all monitoring tools including: Nagios (and Icinga), Keynote, New Relic, Pingdom, Circonus, Red Gate SQL Monitor, Server Density, Zenoss, Monit, Munin, SolarWinds and many others. If it can send email, it will work with PagerDuty.;Native apps with push notifications- iOS and Android native apps with push notifications and a cross-platform mobile website ensure you can respond to alerts wherever you are, even on the go.;On-call duty scheduling- Easily set up schedules to fairly share on-call duty responsibilities with your team.;Automatic escalation of alerts- If you're paged but don't respond in time, the alert is auto-escalated to a team member. Ensures nothing slips through the cracks - ever.;Reliable, distributed architecture- PagerDuty's infrastructure is fully replicated in multiple data centers, with fast failover when problems occur.;Works internationally (Yes, really!)- Phone alerts can be delivered to over 170 countries and territories; SMS alerts are available virtually world-wide. (Is my country included?)
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.
Statistics
Stacks
1.0K
Stacks
12.0K
Followers
703
Followers
8.2K
Votes
119
Votes
214
Pros & Cons
Pros
  • 55
    Just works
  • 23
    Easy configuration
  • 14
    Awesome alerting hub
  • 11
    Fantastic Alert aggregation and on call management
  • 9
    User-customizable alerting modes
Cons
  • 7
    Expensive
  • 3
    Ugly UI
Pros
  • 76
    Monitor aws resources
  • 46
    Zero setup
  • 30
    Detailed Monitoring
  • 23
    Backed by Amazon
  • 19
    Auto Scaling groups
Cons
  • 2
    Poor Search Capabilities
Integrations
Scout
Scout
Nagios
Nagios
New Relic
New Relic
HipChat
HipChat
Datadog
Datadog
Logentries
Logentries
Sensu
Sensu
Logstash
Logstash
Jira
Jira
Okta
Okta
No integrations available

What are some alternatives to PagerDuty, Amazon CloudWatch?

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.

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.

VictorOps

VictorOps

VictorOps is a real-time incident management platform that combines the power of people and data to embolden DevOps teams so they can handle incidents as they occur and prepare for the next one.

OpsGenie

OpsGenie

OpsGenie is a cloud-based service for dev & ops teams, providing reliable alerts, on-call schedule management, and escalations. OpsGenie integrates with monitoring tools & services and ensures that the right people are at the right time.

Zenduty

Zenduty

End to end incident management platform for SRE, DevOps, Network Operations, Infrastructure and Security Operations teams

CAST.AI

CAST.AI

It is an AI-driven cloud optimization platform for Kubernetes. Instantly cut your cloud bill, prevent downtime, and 10X the power of DevOps.

Bigpanda

Bigpanda

Bigpanda helps you manage and respond to ops incidents faster. All your alerts: organized, assignable, trackable, snoozeable, and updated in real-time.

Cloudability

Cloudability

Cloudability aggregates expenditures into accessible and comprehensive reports, helps identify new opportunities for reducing spend and increasing cloud efficiency, offers budget alerts and recommendations via SMS and email, provides APIs for connecting cloud billing and usage data to any business or financial system, and more.

Spike.sh

Spike.sh

Spike.sh is an incident response platform built for modern teams. Spike.sh integrates with your monitoring tools and alerts on phone call, SMS, Slack, MS Teams, Whatsapp, and Telegram.

Healthchecks.io

Healthchecks.io

Healthchecks.io is a monitoring service for your cron jobs, background services and scheduled tasks. It works by listening for HTTP "pings" from your services. You can set up various alert methods: email, Slack, Telegram, PagerDuty, etc.

Related Comparisons

GitHub
Bitbucket

Bitbucket vs GitHub vs GitLab

GitHub
Bitbucket

AWS CodeCommit vs Bitbucket vs GitHub

Kubernetes
Rancher

Docker Swarm vs Kubernetes vs Rancher

gulp
Grunt

Grunt vs Webpack vs gulp

Graphite
Kibana

Grafana vs Graphite vs Kibana