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Amazon CloudWatch vs Graylog comparison

 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive SummaryUpdated on Apr 20, 2025

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)
Graylog
Ranking in Log Management
15th
Average Rating
8.0
Reviews Sentiment
7.2
Number of Reviews
21
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 Graylog is 6.5%, up from 5.9% 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…
Ivan Kokalovic - PeerSpot reviewer
Facilitates backend service monitoring with efficient log retrieval and API flexibility
Graylog is valuable because it bridges technical knowledge to non-technical teams, presenting complex backend processes in a simple timeline. It boosts the knowledge of sales and customer support teams by allowing them to see the backend operations without needing to read the code. Its API is flexible for visualization, and its powerful search engine efficiently handles large volumes of log data. Moreover, its stability, fast search capabilities, and compatibility with languages like ANSI SQL enhance its utility in IT infrastructure.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"Scheduling is a valuable feature."
"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."
"It is a robust analytical tool and it goes beyond mere functionality and extends into the realm of providing comprehensive insights."
"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."
"The initial setup is easy."
"I have found the memory metrics and the CPU metrics valuable."
"The solution effectively monitors golden signals like CPU, page requests, and queues."
"Graylog's search functionality, alerting functionality, user management, and dashboards are useful."
"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."
"Message forwarding through the in-built module."
"It has data adapters and lookup tables that utilize HTTP calls to APIs."
"The best feature of Graylog is the Elasticsearch integration. We can integrate and we can run filters, such as an event of interest, and those logs we can send to any SIEM tool or as an analytic. Additionally, there are clear and well-documented implementation instructions on their website to follow if needed."
"The product is scalable. The solution is stable."
"Graylog is very handy."
 

Cons

"The product should provide more features."
"This product lacks some features: real-time data stream monitoring, application performance monitoring, mobile app monitoring, and live dashboards. Its workflows also need improvement."
"The solution's integration could be easier for laypersons."
"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 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."
"There is room for improvement in the pricing, because they have a premium version, but it's not really a premium version. It's just an enhanced monitoring version, and it can be a bit expensive depending on your usage."
"I found several areas for improvement in Amazon CloudWatch. First is that it's tough to track issues and find out where it's going wrong. The process takes longer. For example, if I get an exception error, I read the logs, search, go to AWS Cloud, then to the groups to find the keyword to determine what's wrong. Another area for improvement in Amazon CloudWatch is that it's slow in terms of log streaming. It requires an entire twenty-four hours for scanning, rather than just one hour. This issue can be solved with Elasticsearch streaming with Kibana, but it requires a lot of development effort and integration with Kibana or Splunk, and this also means I need a separate developer and software technical stack to do the indexing and streaming to Kibana. It's a manual effort that you need to do properly, so log streaming should be improved in Amazon CloudWatch. The AWS support person should also have a better understanding of the logs in Amazon CloudWatch. What I'd like added to the solution is a more advanced search function, particularly one that can tell you more information or special information. Right now, the search function is difficult to use because it only gives you limited data. For example, I got an error message saying that the policy wasn't created. I only know the amount the customer paid for the policy, the mobile number, and the customer name, but if I use those details, the information won't show up on the logs. I need to enter more details, so that's the type of fuzzy matching Amazon CloudWatch won't provide. If this type of search functionality is provided, it will be very helpful for businesses and companies that provide professional services to customers, like ours."
"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."
"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."
"When it comes to configuring the processing pipeline, writing the rules can be very tedious, especially since the documentation isn't extensive on how the functions provided for these rules work."
"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."
"The infrastructure cost is the main issue. I like the rest. If the infrastructure costs could be lower, it would be fantastic."
"More complex visualizations and the ability to execute custom Elasticsearch queries would be great."
"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-"
"With technical support, you are on your own without an enterprise license."
"Graylog needs to improve their authentication. Also, the fact that Graylog displays logs from the top down is just ridiculous."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"It’s an open-source solution."
"Amazon CloudWatch is a cheap solution."
"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 pricing is average."
"The price is okay for me."
"We have monthly licensing costs. The licenses are probably in the vicinity of about $300 - $350/month."
"The tool is not expensive."
"The product's cost is relatively inexpensive."
"I use the free version of Graylog."
"Having paid official support is wise for projects."
"There is an open source version and an enterprise version. I wouldn't recommend the enterprise version, but as an open source solution, it is solid and works really well."
"We're using the Community edition."
"It's open source and free. They have a paid version, but we never looked into that because we never needed the features of the paid version."
"I am using a community edition. I have not looked at the enterprise offering from Graylog."
"We are using the free version of the product. However, the paid version is expensive."
"​You get a lot out-of-the-box with the non-enterprise version, so give it a try first."
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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%
Comms Service Provider
10%
University
7%
Educational Organization
7%
 

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 Graylog?
The product is scalable. The solution is stable.
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Graylog?
I am not familiar with the pricing details of Graylog, as I was not responsible for that aspect. It was determined that we didn't need an enterprise plan, which is more suited for clients with less...
What needs improvement with Graylog?
An improvement I would suggest is in Graylog's user interface, such as allowing for font size adjustments. A potential enhancement could be the integration with Ollama to run large language models ...
 

Also Known As

No data available
Graylog2
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

AirAsia, Airbnb, Aircel, APUS, Avazu, Casa & Video, Futbol Club Barcelona (FCBarcelona), National Taiwan University, redBus
Blue Cross Blue Shield, eBay, Cisco, LinkedIn, SAP, King.com, Twilio, Deutsche Presse-Agentur
Find out what your peers are saying about Amazon CloudWatch vs. Graylog and other solutions. Updated: June 2025.
860,592 professionals have used our research since 2012.