Amazon CloudWatch vs Sentry

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Amazon CloudWatch

11.7K
7.9K
+ 1
214
Sentry

14.5K
9.1K
+ 1
863
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Amazon CloudWatch vs Sentry: What are the differences?

Amazon CloudWatch and Sentry are both powerful tools used in monitoring and error tracking for software applications. Let's explore the key differences between them.

  1. Data Collection and Monitoring: Amazon CloudWatch primarily focuses on collecting and monitoring data from various AWS resources and services. It provides detailed insights into AWS infrastructure, including EC2 instances, RDS databases, and S3 buckets. On the other hand, Sentry specializes in application monitoring and error tracking. It captures and analyzes application-level events and errors, enabling developers to identify and resolve issues in real-time.

  2. Monitoring Capabilities: While both tools offer monitoring capabilities, their scope differs. Amazon CloudWatch provides granular monitoring of AWS resources, allowing users to track metrics, visualize logs, and set up alarms for specific events or thresholds. On the other hand, Sentry focuses on application-level monitoring, providing a comprehensive view of errors, performance issues, and user feedback. It offers features like error aggregation, release monitoring, and transaction tracing.

  3. Integration and Compatibility: Amazon CloudWatch is tightly integrated with AWS services and resources, offering native support for monitoring various metrics and generating alerts. It seamlessly integrates with other AWS services, making it an ideal choice for organizations heavily reliant on AWS infrastructure. On the contrary, Sentry supports a wide range of programming languages and frameworks, making it compatible with different application stacks. It provides SDKs and plugins for popular languages like Python, JavaScript, and Java.

  4. Alerting and Notification: Both Amazon CloudWatch and Sentry support alerting and notification mechanisms, but their focus and flexibility differ. Amazon CloudWatch allows users to define alarms based on customizable metrics, enabling proactive notifications for specific events or threshold breaches. It can notify users through various channels like email, SMS, or SNS topics. Sentry, on the other hand, provides fine-grained control over alerting, allowing users to set up rules based on error severity, frequency, or specific criteria. It offers integrations with popular messaging and collaboration tools like Slack, making it easier to streamline incident response.

  5. Log Management and Analysis: One key difference between Amazon CloudWatch and Sentry lies in their log management and analysis capabilities. Amazon CloudWatch is designed to collect and analyze logs generated by AWS resources, providing valuable insights into resource utilization, application health, and system-level events. On the other hand, Sentry focuses on application-specific logs and error traces. It aggregates, filters, and indexes application logs, enabling developers to diagnose and troubleshoot errors efficiently.

  6. Scalability and Performance: Amazon CloudWatch is a fully managed service with built-in scalability, capable of handling large-scale infrastructure monitoring and data collection. It seamlessly scales based on the volume of metrics, logs, and events generated by AWS resources. In contrast, Sentry is designed to handle high-throughput application logs and error events, providing reliable performance and scalability for application-level monitoring. It offers features like rate limiting and event buffering to handle peak loads efficiently.

In summary, Amazon CloudWatch is an AWS-native service that specializes in monitoring and collecting data from AWS resources and services. It excels in infrastructure-level monitoring, while Sentry focuses on application-level monitoring, error tracking, and log analysis.

Decisions about Amazon CloudWatch and Sentry

I essentially inherited a Shopify theme that was originally created by an agency. After discovering a number of errors being thrown in the Dev Console just by scrolling through the website, I needed more visibility over any errors happening in the field. Having used both Sentry and TrackJS, I always got lost in the TrackJS interface, so I felt more comfortable introducing Sentry. The Sentry free tier is also very generous, although it turns out the theme threw over 15k errors in less than a week.

I highly recommend setting up error tracking from day one. Theoretically, you should never need to upgrade from the free tier if you're keeping on top of the errors...

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Pros of Amazon CloudWatch
Pros of Sentry
  • 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
  • 237
    Consolidates similar errors and makes resolution easy
  • 121
    Email Notifications
  • 108
    Open source
  • 84
    Slack integration
  • 71
    Github integration
  • 49
    Easy
  • 44
    User-friendly interface
  • 28
    The most important tool we use in production
  • 18
    Hipchat integration
  • 17
    Heroku Integration
  • 15
    Good documentation
  • 14
    Free tier
  • 11
    Self-hosted
  • 9
    Easy setup
  • 7
    Realiable
  • 6
    Provides context, and great stack trace
  • 4
    Feedback form on error pages
  • 4
    Love it baby
  • 3
    Gitlab integration
  • 3
    Filter by custom tags
  • 3
    Super user friendly
  • 3
    Captures local variables at each frame in backtraces
  • 3
    Easy Integration
  • 1
    Performance measurements

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Cons of Amazon CloudWatch
Cons of Sentry
  • 1
    Poor Search Capabilities
  • 12
    Confusing UI
  • 4
    Bundle size

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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 Sentry?

Sentry’s Application Monitoring platform helps developers see performance issues, fix errors faster, and optimize their code health.

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

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What are some alternatives to Amazon CloudWatch and Sentry?
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.
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