We compared Amazon CloudWatch and Graylog based on our users' reviews in five categories. We reviewed all of the data and you can find the conclusion below.
Features: Amazon CloudWatch users liked the solution’s simplicity, intuitive interface, and ability to handle large workloads. Users also praised CloudWatch’s comprehensive monitoring and alerts. Graylog stands out with its exceptional search functions, seamless integration with Elasticsearch, and real-time data access. Some reviews mentioned that Amazon CloudWatch could improve performance and dashboard visualization. Others noted that the solution lacked compatibility with some databases. Graylog could benefit from additional customization options and an improved rule-creation process.
Service and Support: Customers generally have positive opinions about Amazon's customer service. They commended the support team for its availability and timely issue resolution. Graylog's customer service is generally well-regarded, with reviewers noting effective solutions and satisfactory experiences. While response times may differ, Graylog's support is considered superior compared to that of other products.
Ease of Deployment: Amazon CloudWatch is generally described as easy to set up. Some Graylog users said the setup was easy. Other reviewers faced challenges, but these were easily resolved with help from the vendor’s support staff. Graylog is easier to set up in smaller environments, but it could get complicated in large clusters.
Pricing: Amazon CloudWatch offers a flexible pricing structure based on usage and processing, without any separate licensing cost. Some users said that scaling up can be costly due to the need for additional storage space. Graylog offers an enterprise edition and an open-source option with a daily capacity restriction. Some users said that data costs can be expensive.
ROI: Amazon CloudWatch offers a return on investment by minimizing the need for manual monitoring. Graylog can offer some cost savings. The precise ROI may vary depending on the organization’s size and use case.
"The most valuable feature of Amazon CloudWatch is its ease of use and logs. You do not have to go to each separate system to see the logs, such as Syslog and they are located in one dashboard GUI."
"We have found the pricing to be reasonable."
"What my company likes best about Amazon CloudWatch is that it's on AWS. My team also likes it for its log feature. As the solution is on AWS, it also has good pricing and resource availability, plus it's what clients choose. My company also chose AWS for Forge ECS, and at the time, there was a need for the log features provided by Amazon CloudWatch, so it's the solution my team went with."
"The detection is the most valuable feature."
"It offers direct integrations with various storage providers, making it convenient to push logs from CloudWatch to these external platforms."
"The tool's UI is good. One can scroll through the logs very easily."
"We can create events and alerts. We use the information to dive down into the infrastructure performance."
"The most valuable feature of Amazon CloudWatch is the monitoring and UI."
"We're using the Community edition, but I know that it has really good dashboarding and alerts."
"The product is scalable. The solution is stable."
"The build is stable and requires little maintenance, even compared to some extremely expensive products."
"The solution's most valuable feature is its new interface."
"I like the correlation and the alerting."
"One of the most valuable features is that you are able to do a very detailed search through the log messages in the overview."
"We have scaled from a single machine installation (a VM with a Graylog + ES + MongoDB) to (2 Graylog + 2 ES + 3 MongoDB). This was done smoothly with a minimal impact on logging."
"This had increased productivity for the dev and support teams, because we are directly notifying them."
"For monitoring applications or for APM, CloudWatch has some limitations. You cannot monitor application performance from CloudWatch, and you have to go for a third-party tool."
"The monitoring part and GUI are areas in Amazon CloudWatch that have shortcomings currently and can be considered for improvements in the future."
"What would make Amazon CloudWatch better is if it includes more on-site checks, particularly status checks on the CPU, network input/output, etc. It would also be helpful if there's built-in swap space, disk, and memory monitoring in Amazon CloudWatch because, at the moment, my team has to configure it manually through a shell script."
"The product's configuration has some challenges. The solution needs to be more user-friendly."
"The dashboard and the UI could improve in Amazon CloudWatch. Additionally, they should focus on visibility inside the servers with AI and machine learning integrations. This would allow users who are using the solution to see what is happening within the system better."
"It's not an advanced way of monitoring."
"I do not know whether or not CloudWatch can be integrated with on-prem services."
"It would be beneficial for CloudWatch to provide an API interface and some kind of custom configuration."
"Graylog could improve the process of creating rules. We have to create them manually by doing parses and applying them. Other SIEM solutions have basic rules and you can create and get more events of interest."
"It would be great if Graylog could provide a better Python package in order to make it easier to use for the Python community."
"Since container orchestration systems are popular and Graylog fits the niche well, perhaps they could officially support running in docker containers on Kubernetes as a StatefulSet as a use case. That way, the declarative nature of Kubernetes config files would document their best case deployment scenario-"
"We ran into problems with Elasticsearch throwing a circuit-breaking exception due to field data size being too large. It turned out that the heap size directly impacted this size in a high-throughput environment, causing unexplained instability in Graylog. We were able to troubleshoot on the Elasticsearch size, but we should have been able to reference some minimum requirements for Graylog to know that our settings weren't sufficient."
"Elasticsearch recommendations for tuning could be better. Graylog doesn't have direct support for running the system inside of Kubernetes, so it can be challenging to fill in the gaps and set up containers in a way that is both performant and stable."
"There should be some user groups and an auto sign-in feature."
"Over six months, I had two similar issues where searches were performed on field "messages". It exhausted all the memory of the ES node causing an ES crash and a Graylog halt."
"I would like to see a date and time in the Graylog Grok patterns so that I can save time when searching for a log. I like how the streams and the search query work, but adding a date and time will allow me to pull out a log in a milli-second."
Amazon CloudWatch is ranked 12th in Log Management with 40 reviews while Graylog is ranked 11th in Log Management with 18 reviews. Amazon CloudWatch is rated 8.0, while Graylog is rated 8.0. The top reviewer of Amazon CloudWatch writes "Instantaneous response when monitoring logs and KPIs". On the other hand, the top reviewer of Graylog writes "Great detailed search features and easy Java integration, but needs improvement in integration with Python". Amazon CloudWatch is most compared with Zabbix, Datadog, Google Cloud's operations suite (formerly Stackdriver), Dynatrace and Splunk Infrastructure Monitoring, whereas Graylog is most compared with Grafana Loki, Wazuh, syslog-ng, Fortinet FortiAnalyzer and Splunk Enterprise Security. See our Amazon CloudWatch vs. Graylog report.
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We monitor all Log Management reviews to prevent fraudulent reviews and keep review quality high. We do not post reviews by company employees or direct competitors. We validate each review for authenticity via cross-reference with LinkedIn, and personal follow-up with the reviewer when necessary.
