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Amazon CloudWatch vs Rollbar: What are the differences?
Introduction: Amazon CloudWatch and Rollbar are both monitoring and logging services used in software development. While they have similarities in their capabilities, there are key differences that set them apart. This article aims to highlight those differences in a concise manner.
- Architecture: The underlying architecture of Amazon CloudWatch and Rollbar differs significantly. Amazon CloudWatch operates within the Amazon Web Services (AWS) ecosystem and is tightly integrated with other AWS services. On the other hand, Rollbar is a standalone service that can be used across different cloud providers. This architectural distinction affects how the services interact with other components within the infrastructure.
- Scope of Monitoring: Amazon CloudWatch is designed to monitor metrics and logs for a wide range of AWS resources, including EC2 instances, RDS databases, S3 buckets, and Lambda functions. Rollbar, on the other hand, is primarily focused on monitoring application errors and exceptions. Rollbar captures error data from multiple sources such as web frameworks, mobile platforms, and backend services.
- Alerting Capabilities: Amazon CloudWatch provides robust alerting capabilities allowing users to set up alarms based on predefined thresholds or anomaly detection. These alarms can trigger notifications and automated actions. Rollbar, while offering basic alerting features, primarily focuses on capturing and reporting errors. It emphasizes error triaging, grouping, and assigning to help debugging and issue resolution.
- Log Management: Amazon CloudWatch provides centralized log management through its Log Groups and Log Streams. It enables custom log collection, storage, and analysis. In contrast, Rollbar is not primarily designed for log management. It focuses on capturing and processing error data, providing additional context and metadata for effective error debugging.
- Integration Ecosystem: Amazon CloudWatch has a vast integration ecosystem within AWS, enabling seamless interaction with other AWS services such as AWS Lambda, AWS Elastic Beanstalk, and AWS CloudTrail. Rollbar, on the other hand, provides integrations with various web frameworks, programming languages, and third-party tools. This makes it versatile for application error monitoring across different technologies.
- Pricing Model: The pricing models for Amazon CloudWatch and Rollbar differ significantly. Amazon CloudWatch follows a usage-based pricing model, where customers pay for the amount of monitoring data ingested and the number of metrics and logs monitored. Rollbar offers tiered pricing based on the volume of errors captured and additional functionalities like team collaboration and reporting.
In summary, Amazon CloudWatch is an integrated monitoring and logging solution within the AWS ecosystem, offering a comprehensive suite of tools for monitoring various AWS resources. Rollbar, on the other hand, is a specialized error and exception monitoring service with broad support for different application platforms and frameworks.
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Learn MorePros of Amazon CloudWatch
Pros of Rollbar
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 Rollbar
- Consolidates similar errors by impact74
- Centralize error management64
- Slack integration63
- Github integration58
- Usage based pricing47
- Insane customer support32
- Instant search23
- Heroku integration21
- Consolidate errors by OS18
- Great Free Plan15
- Trello integration15
- Flexible logging (not just exceptions)13
- Simple yet powerful error tracking tool11
- Multiple Language Support9
- Consolidate errors by browser7
- Easy setup6
- Query errors with RQL6
- Best rails exception handler5
- Deployment tracking is a nice free bonus5
- Awesome service5
- Simple and fast integration5
- Easy setup, friendly ui, demo, lots of integrations4
- Beat your users to the error report3
- Server-side + client-side3
- Errors Analysis3
- Clear and concise information.3
- Powerful3
- Mailgun integration2
- Easy integration with sails.js2
- Bitbucket integration2
- Clear errors on deploy or push1
- Easy Set up familiar UI that doesn't make you look dumb1
- Teams1
- Gitlab integration1
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Cons of Amazon CloudWatch
Cons of Rollbar
Cons of Amazon CloudWatch
- Poor Search Capabilities2
Cons of Rollbar
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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 Rollbar?
Rollbar is the leading continuous code improvement platform that proactively discovers, predicts, and remediates errors with real-time AI-assisted workflows. With Rollbar, developers continually improve their code and constantly innovate ra
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What companies use Amazon CloudWatch?
What companies use Rollbar?
See which teams inside your own company are using Amazon CloudWatch or Rollbar.
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What tools integrate with Amazon CloudWatch?
What tools integrate with Rollbar?
What tools integrate with Amazon CloudWatch?
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What are some alternatives to Amazon CloudWatch and Rollbar?
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.