Try our new research platform with insights from 80,000+ expert users

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
12th
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 August 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 8.4%, up from 5.5% 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

"The most valuable feature of Amazon CloudWatch is collecting the logs from Lambda."
"I can put it in a simple term, its simplicity is always there."
"The detection is the most valuable feature."
"Monitoring time and ensuring ease in it is the most valuable feature."
"We have found the pricing to be reasonable."
"The most valuable part is the metrics part, which is really good."
"The scalability of Amazon CloudWatch rates as high scalability, scoring a perfect ten."
"Most of it's around optimizing utilization, their cloud utilization. They're making sure that they're getting the most out of their in-cloud environments and their instances. Making sure that there's no strange behavior in the environment."
"The most valuable feature of the solution is the tool's GUI. The solution's GUI is very user-friendly."
"The solution's stability has never been a problem. Stability-wise, I rate the solution a nine to ten out of ten."
"The most valuable feature of Grafana Loki is the dashboards which are really simple to create."
"Loki significantly saves time in troubleshooting by quickly pinpointing network issues."
"The most valuable part of Loki is the ability to filter logs by keywords and devices."
"The log collection feature is good and the solution is easily understandable. v"
"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."
"I appreciate the capability to process logs from microservices and seamlessly integrate them into Grafana."
 

Cons

"Better reporting is always something needed. That could be an answer to just about anything. But you always want better reporting, better dashboards, things that are just more dynamic and more accessible."
"It's not very intuitive. It doesn't have drag-and-drop functionality to trigger actions from notifications."
"There could be further enhancements through CloudWatch's partnerships."
"When customers want to see the CPU or memory utilization there is a cost. This should be free to see the utilization."
"Improvement of SSSD logs would be beneficial."
"This product lacks some features: real-time data stream monitoring, application performance monitoring, mobile app monitoring, and live dashboards. Its workflows also need improvement."
"I do not know whether or not CloudWatch can be integrated with on-prem services."
"CloudWatch doesn’t monitor disk throughput by default."
"The platform's stability needs improvement."
"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."
"The solution's scalability depends on the team managing the Grafana instance."
"Visualization-wise, Grafana Loki's dashboard looks a little outdated compared to other open-source visualization tools like Chronograf."
"It would be beneficial if Loki could directly access Windows Server logs or events directly from the servers."
"We face some bugs when we install the latest version of Grafana Loki."
"It's not intended for proprietary services, so you have to struggle with configuration a lot."
"In Grafana Loki, the creation of metrics is not so easy, making it an area that could be made easier."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"It’s an open-source solution."
"It is a free-of-charge service."
"I consider it as a medium-priced solution."
"The price is okay for me."
"The tool is not expensive."
"The price of Amazon CloudWatch is reasonable for detailed basic monitoring."
"Amazon CloudWatch has very cheap pricing, and it hardly costs my company $25-$30 a month for fifty systems, so it's pretty affordable."
"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."
"The cost is less than other paid services like CloudWatch."
"The solution is open source."
"My company doesn't need to pay for the licensing cost of the solution."
"I find the licensing structure quite reasonable, as the free license effectively meets my requirements."
"I use the open-source version of the product."
"We use a free version."
"Since we are using the open-source version of Grafana Loki, we are not paying anything for the solution."
"Grafana Loki is a free, open-source solution."
report
Use our free recommendation engine to learn which Log Management solutions are best for your needs.
865,295 professionals have used our research since 2012.
 

Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Financial Services Firm
16%
Computer Software Company
12%
Manufacturing Company
9%
University
5%
Computer Software Company
17%
Financial Services Firm
10%
Comms Service Provider
10%
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
Information Not Available
Find out what your peers are saying about Amazon CloudWatch vs. Grafana Loki and other solutions. Updated: July 2025.
865,295 professionals have used our research since 2012.