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Amazon CloudWatch vs Grafana Loki comparison

 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive SummaryUpdated on Oct 9, 2024

Review summaries and opinions

We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use. Here are some excerpts of what they said:
 

Categories and Ranking

Amazon CloudWatch
Ranking in Log Management
13th
Average Rating
8.0
Reviews Sentiment
7.2
Number of Reviews
47
Ranking in other categories
Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability (13th), Cloud Monitoring Software (10th)
Grafana Loki
Ranking in Log Management
4th
Average Rating
8.2
Reviews Sentiment
7.8
Number of Reviews
18
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
 

Mindshare comparison

As of July 2025, in the Log Management category, the mindshare of Amazon CloudWatch is 2.2%, up from 1.1% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Grafana Loki is 8.6%, up from 4.9% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Log Management
 

Featured Reviews

Rahul Kundu - PeerSpot reviewer
Proactively address issues with seamless monitoring while enhancing custom metrics functionality
We use CloudWatch for monitoring and logging. It helps us monitor our applications' performance, particularly in ensuring that every API hit returns a response within four seconds, which is our SLA. We also monitor invocation errors in Lambda and use CloudWatch alerts to notify us of any issues…
Volodymyr Bondarchuk - PeerSpot reviewer
Integrations enhance monitoring but problem-solving proves challenging
Different types of integrations with various sources are the most helpful and useful features of Grafana Loki that I found for myself. As part of Kubernetes technology, I noticed benefits from using this product such as availability, configuration balancing, high availability solutions for high performance, and failover clustering. It provides a clear picture about the state of the system and gives needed information for taking action and quickly fixing problems.

Quotes from Members

We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use. Here are some excerpts of what they said:
 

Pros

"Every time we get an alarm or have an incident, CloudWatch is always there. We use it not only for resources we've spun up in the cloud, but also for some of our on-premises resources."
"The tool enables live monitoring."
"CloudWatch provides essential monitoring capabilities that integrate seamlessly with other AWS services."
"What I found most valuable in Amazon CloudWatch is that it gives you detailed information, which I found helpful because it can even provide you with data for the past one minute, which is quite granular. That was what helped me most in terms of finding the root causes. Task automation is another valuable feature of Amazon CloudWatch."
"The monitoring feature is valuable."
"Our team finds it overall quite useful."
"It is a robust analytical tool and it goes beyond mere functionality and extends into the realm of providing comprehensive insights."
"I have found the memory metrics and the CPU metrics valuable."
"Different types of integrations with various sources are the most helpful and useful features of Grafana Loki that I found for myself."
"The tool can be used in multi-cluster environments."
"The most valuable part of Loki is the ability to filter logs by keywords and devices."
"Loki significantly saves time in troubleshooting by quickly pinpointing network issues."
"Grafana agent is very lightweight and does not cost significant resources of our cluster."
"The most valuable feature of the solution is the tool's GUI. The solution's GUI is very user-friendly."
"The effectiveness of filters is pivotal for optimizing the search process and extracting the specific information we need from the extensive log data."
"Loki also utilizes the same service discovery mechanism as used by Prometheus. So, whatever labeled metadata you see in Prometheus, you have the exact same metadata in the Loki system. Given this level of intricacy and the attempt to address these challenges, I firmly believe that Loki deserves praise for the work."
 

Cons

"The dashboard of Amazon CloudWatch is not very customizable right now."
"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."
"CloudWatch's scalability could be improved."
"Maybe Amazon Web Services can improve by providing a library for CloudWatch with some useful features."
"The solution's auto-scaling could be improved."
"The drill-down aspect on the dashboard of the solution needs improvement. We get a very good high-level overview, but when we drill down, it becomes a little less clear. We have given this feedback to AWS as well and hope they will improve this in the future."
"The product’s documentation must be improved."
"It's not an advanced way of monitoring."
"I would rate Grafana Loki a seven out of ten because it is open source, and sometimes there can be problems that are difficult to fix without official support."
"My main concern is the recommended production-grade setup. They suggest using tools like Tanka or Jsonnet. They should simplify the process to increase adoption."
"There is a need for some change in the alerting types of the product. In short, a few changes in the alert area are needed due to minor shortcomings."
"The correlation of requests is not simple in Grafana Loki and can be improved."
"I do not see any areas for improvement at the moment."
"The platform's stability needs improvement."
"The Docker container partition feature needs improvement as they do not reuse the space and goes into a pending state."
"We face some bugs when we install the latest version of Grafana Loki."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"The price of Amazon CloudWatch is reasonable for detailed basic monitoring."
"The tool is not expensive."
"Its pricing is reasonable. It is sometimes tricky, but it is reasonable as compared to others."
"The pricing can be considered reasonable, especially when already operating on a cloud platform."
"We have monthly licensing costs. The licenses are probably in the vicinity of about $300 - $350/month."
"What's were using is the free service of Amazon CloudWatch, so they're not charging us. As for hidden fees, we're not aware of them because we're using what our clients provided us."
"Amazon CloudWatch is a cheap solution."
"Amazon CloudWatch has very cheap pricing, and it hardly costs my company $25-$30 a month for fifty systems, so it's pretty affordable."
"You can use the free version of Grafana Loki on-premises."
"The cost is less than other paid services like CloudWatch."
"I find the licensing structure quite reasonable, as the free license effectively meets my requirements."
"My company doesn't need to pay for the licensing cost of the solution."
"Grafana Loki is an open-source solution."
"Since we are using the open-source version of Grafana Loki, we are not paying anything for the solution."
"The pricing structure varies based on the number of users; there might be specific taxes to pay for it."
"The solution is open source."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Financial Services Firm
17%
Computer Software Company
13%
Manufacturing Company
9%
Real Estate/Law Firm
5%
Computer Software Company
17%
Financial Services Firm
10%
Comms Service Provider
9%
Manufacturing Company
8%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
 

Questions from the Community

What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Amazon CloudWatch?
Overall, the pricing of Amazon CloudWatch is very expensive.
What needs improvement with Amazon CloudWatch?
Apart from traceability of network resources, Amazon CloudWatch needs to be more interoperable with other tools because many companies are starting to use AI-based dashboards. When using third-part...
What do you like most about Grafana Loki?
We are using Grafana Loki as a database for real-time metrics.
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Grafana Loki?
Since it is an open source tool, there are no charges or fees.
What needs improvement with Grafana Loki?
I have no ideas at this moment about what could be improved in Grafana Loki.
 

Comparisons

 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

AirAsia, Airbnb, Aircel, APUS, Avazu, Casa & Video, Futbol Club Barcelona (FCBarcelona), National Taiwan University, redBus
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Find out what your peers are saying about Amazon CloudWatch vs. Grafana Loki and other solutions. Updated: June 2025.
860,168 professionals have used our research since 2012.