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Amazon CloudWatch vs Papertrail: What are the differences?
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Key difference 1: Data Source
- Amazon CloudWatch: It is primarily used for monitoring cloud resources and applications within the AWS ecosystem. It collects and tracks metrics, log files, and events from AWS services.
- Papertrail: On the other hand, Papertrail is a cloud-based log management tool, focusing mainly on managing and analyzing logs from various sources like systems, applications, and cloud environments.
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Key difference 2: Log Retention
- Amazon CloudWatch: It provides long-term data retention with a flexible storage duration, allowing users to retain logs for up to 15 years.
- Papertrail: In contrast, Papertrail has a shorter log retention window, offering 2 to 365 days of log storage depending on the pricing plan.
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Key difference 3: Log Search
- Amazon CloudWatch: It supports log searching capabilities within the CloudWatch console, enabling users to search logs based on keywords, time range, and filter patterns. However, the search functionality may not be as robust as dedicated log management solutions.
- Papertrail: In Papertrail, log search is a core feature, providing advanced search options such as regular expressions, saved searches, and live tailing. It offers a more comprehensive log search experience.
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Key difference 4: Alerting
- Amazon CloudWatch: It offers powerful alerting capabilities, allowing users to define thresholds and trigger notifications based on metric values, log events, anomaly detection, and composite alarms.
- Papertrail: While Papertrail does provide basic alerting options, it may not have the same level of flexibility and integration options as CloudWatch when it comes to alerting on logs.
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Key difference 5: Integration
- Amazon CloudWatch: As an integral part of the AWS ecosystem, CloudWatch seamlessly integrates with various AWS services, allowing users to collect metrics and logs from the entire infrastructure.
- Papertrail: Although Papertrail can integrate with some AWS services using agents or third-party solutions, it is not designed specifically for AWS, and its integration options might be more limited.
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Key difference 6: Pricing Model
- Amazon CloudWatch: It follows a pay-as-you-go pricing model, where users are billed based on the volume of metrics, logs, and events ingested, as well as additional features utilized.
- Papertrail: On the other hand, Papertrail typically offers a flat-rate pricing structure based on the maximum log volume per day, with additional charges for add-on features or volume overages.
In Summary, Amazon CloudWatch is primarily focused on monitoring AWS resources, offers long-term data retention, powerful alerting, deep AWS integration, and flexible pricing. On the other hand, Papertrail is a cloud-based log management tool with a wider scope, advanced log search capabilities, and more flexible log retention options.
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Learn MorePros of Amazon CloudWatch
Pros of Papertrail
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 Papertrail
- Log search85
- Easy log aggregation across multiple machines43
- Integrates with Heroku43
- Simple interface37
- Backup to S326
- Easy setup, independent of existing logging setup19
- Heroku add-on15
- Command line interface3
- Alerting1
- Good for Startups1
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Cons of Amazon CloudWatch
Cons of Papertrail
Cons of Amazon CloudWatch
- Poor Search Capabilities2
Cons of Papertrail
- Expensive2
- External Network Goes Down You Wont Be Logging1
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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 Papertrail?
Papertrail helps detect, resolve, and avoid infrastructure problems using log messages. Papertrail's practicality comes from our own experience as sysadmins, developers, and entrepreneurs.
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What companies use Amazon CloudWatch?
What companies use Papertrail?
What companies use Papertrail?
See which teams inside your own company are using Amazon CloudWatch or Papertrail.
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What tools integrate with Amazon CloudWatch?
What tools integrate with Papertrail?
What tools integrate with Amazon CloudWatch?
What tools integrate with Papertrail?
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What are some alternatives to Amazon CloudWatch and Papertrail?
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.