Amazon CloudWatch vs Sentry

Overview

Sentry

Stacks15.1K

Followers9.4K

Votes864

GitHub Stars42.4K

Forks4.5K

Amazon CloudWatch

Stacks12.0K

Followers8.2K

Votes214

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.

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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.

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Advice on Sentry, Amazon CloudWatch

Nicholas

Jun 1, 2020

Decided

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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Detailed Comparison

Sentry	Amazon CloudWatch
Sentry’s Application Monitoring platform helps developers see performance issues, fix errors faster, and optimize their code health.	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.
Real-Time Updates: For the first time, developers can fix code-level issues anywhere in the stack well before users even encounter an error.;Complete Context: Spend more time where it matters, rather than investing in low-impact issues.;Integrate Everywhere: Drop-in integration for every major platform, framework, and language -- JavaScript, Python, PHP, Ruby, Node, Java, .NET, mobile.;Root Cause: See the events that lead to errors so you always debug the right thing the first time.;Private & Secure: Sentry is SOC-2 compliant with GDPR, PCI DSS, HIPAA, and Privacy Shield by default.;Open Source: Sentry is 100% open source and available on GitHub.	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
GitHub Stars 42.4K	GitHub Stars -
GitHub Forks 4.5K	GitHub Forks -
Stacks 15.1K	Stacks 12.0K
Followers 9.4K	Followers 8.2K
Votes 864	Votes 214
Pros & Cons
Pros 238 Consolidates similar errors and makes resolution easy 121 Email Notifications 108 Open source 84 Slack integration 71 Github integration Cons 12 Confusing UI 4 Bundle size	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
Sprint.ly C# PagerDuty Twilio Auth0 Golang Datadog Backbone.js Django Swift	No integrations available

What are some alternatives to Sentry, Amazon CloudWatch?

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

Bugsnag

Bugsnag captures errors from your web, mobile and back-end applications, providing instant visibility into user impact. Diagnostic data and tools are included to help your team prioritize, debug and fix exceptions fast.

Raygun

Raygun gives you a window into how users are really experiencing your software applications. Detect, diagnose and resolve issues that are affecting end users with greater speed and accuracy.

Opbeat

Opbeat is application monitoring for developers, and gives you performance metrics, error logging, release tracking and workflow in one smart product.

Airbrake

Airbrake collects errors for your applications in all major languages and frameworks. We alert you to new errors and give you critical context, trends and details needed to find and fix errors fast.

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.

Honeybadger

Honeybadger does more than report errors, it helps you work with your team to fix them. Errors can be assigned. You can comment via email. And a fine-grained permissions system means you control who has access to each specific project.

Errbit

Errbit is a tool for collecting and managing errors from other applications. It is Airbrake (formerly known as Hoptoad) API compliant, so if you are already using Airbrake, you can just point the airbrake gem to your Errbit server.

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.

OverOps

OverOps maps the DNA of code as it’s executing in pre-prod and production to Identify all issues and anomalies, and deliver True Root Cause to the right person, without relying on logs.

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