Amazon CloudWatch vs Graylog Enterprise comparison

Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Graylog are both solutions in the Log Management category. Amazon Web Services (AWS) is ranked #14 with an average rating of 8.1, while Graylog is ranked #8 with an average rating of 8.0. Amazon Web Services (AWS) holds a 1.8% mindshare in Log Management, compared to Graylog’s 4.4% mindshare. Additionally, 90% of Amazon Web Services (AWS) users are willing to recommend the solution, compared to 95% of Graylog users who would recommend it.

Amazon CloudWatch

Read 48 Amazon CloudWatch reviews

4,846 Views
2,811 Comparison Views

90% willing to recommend

Graylog Enterprise

Read 24 Graylog Enterprise reviews

7,856 Views
7,856 Comparison Views

95% willing to recommend

Amazon CloudWatch

Graylog Enterprise

Comparison Buyer's Guide

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Executive SummaryUpdated on Dec 14, 2025

Amazon CloudWatch and Graylog Enterprise both compete in the log management and monitoring space. While CloudWatch offers seamless AWS integration, Graylog Enterprise provides superior search functionality and alerting options.

Features: Amazon CloudWatch provides detailed real-time data and robust analytics, making it an ideal choice for AWS infrastructure and applications. It is scalable and offers the ability to automate actions based on triggers. Graylog Enterprise is renowned for advanced search functionality, flexibility in data processing, and extensive plugin support, essential for deep log analysis and customization.

Room for Improvement: Amazon CloudWatch could enhance dashboard functionality, improve UI for granular data analysis, and expand reporting capabilities across multiple cloud environments. Graylog Enterprise could benefit from more flexible alert systems, better documentation, and improved integration with Kubernetes. Its infrastructure costs can be high for large-scale settings.

Ease of Deployment and Customer Service: Amazon CloudWatch, as a cloud-based solution, is easy to deploy within AWS, though higher support tiers incur extra costs. Graylog Enterprise offers more control with on-premises deployments and community-driven support, but enterprise support can be more expensive.

Pricing and ROI: Amazon CloudWatch uses a pay-as-you-go model based on usage and storage, potentially costly at scale but cost-efficient for AWS users. Graylog Enterprise's free version is suitable for smaller operations, while enterprise features are priced at a premium, with costs increasing for large-scale operations due to infrastructure demands.

To learn more, read our detailed Amazon CloudWatch vs. Graylog Enterprise Report (Updated: December 2025).

Buyer's Guide

Amazon CloudWatch vs. Graylog Enterprise

December 2025

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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

14th

Average Rating

8.0

Reviews Sentiment

7.1

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability (14th), Cloud Monitoring Software (12th)

Graylog Enterprise

Ranking in Log Management

8th

Average Rating

8.0

Reviews Sentiment

5.4

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

No ranking in other categories

Mindshare comparison

As of February 2026, in the Log Management category, the mindshare of Amazon CloudWatch is 1.8%, up from 1.7% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Graylog Enterprise is 4.4%, down from 6.2% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.

Log Management Market Share Distribution
Product	Market Share (%)
Graylog Enterprise	4.4%
Amazon CloudWatch	1.8%
Other	93.8%

Log Management

Featured Reviews

Azam S M

Infrastructure Lead at Danat Fz LLC

Has provided reliable monitoring and alerting through extensive metric tracking and dashboard configuration

Amazon CloudWatch itself provides a lot of data. However, for visualization, we need to use third-party tools. We are in a process of integrating Grafana, Loki, and Prometheus to have better visualization on Amazon CloudWatch. We are also integrating Grafana with the application itself to get the application data and logs. Alternatively, there is AWS Kinesis and Glue where you can scrape the logs and have visualization, but a more easy option is Grafana. If you want to get a proper visual representation to see what is happening, then you need to integrate a third-party tool. Amazon CloudWatch has all the data, but to see what is happening, you need some third-party tool.

Read full review

NicolaeCIornii

Security Officer at JSC "Moldtelecom" S.A.

Log analysis has become clearer and faster but visualization and extensibility still need work

The problem was with the complexity and the cost to add extensions. We found this very expensive to buy another version with additional features. I think that Graylog Enterprise does not have customizable dashboards. I did not see them in Graylog Enterprise because most of the time we used the open source free version, which is limited. I think Graylog Enterprise should improve some things that they have in the paid version and perhaps provide users with a menu that gives examples of parsing logs and draws graphics so that people do not need to improve another system such as Grafana. This would be interesting. When it comes to functionalities, I found the log management in Graylog Enterprise acceptable. It is very simple to use and to collect logs. It has support for different protocols and different ports, and the sidecar is easy to use. However, in visualization, I think it needs to be much better.

Read full review

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"It offers direct integrations with various storage providers, making it convenient to push logs from CloudWatch to these external platforms."

"The most valuable feature of Amazon CloudWatch is collecting the logs from Lambda."

"Our team finds it overall quite useful."

"Amazon CloudWatch's best feature stems from its ability to monitor app performance."

"The initial setup is easy."

"The tool enables live monitoring."

"It's useful to analyze past data and compare it with recent activities."

"Amazon CloudWatch offers cost-saving advantages by being an inbuilt solution that requires no separate setup or maintenance for monitoring tasks."

More Amazon CloudWatch pros

"What I like about Graylog is that it's real-time and you have access to the raw data. So, you ingest it, and you have access to every message and every data item you ingest. You can then build analytics on top of that. You can look at the raw data, and you can do some volumetric estimations, such as how big traffic you have, how many messages of data of a type you have, etc."

"Graylog Enterprise has positively impacted my organization by significantly minimizing our workload and making it easier to identify any issues in a service."

"One of the most valuable features is that you are able to do a very detailed search through the log messages in the overview."

"This had increased productivity for the dev and support teams, because we are directly notifying them."

"Real-time UDP/GELF logging and full text-based searching."

"The build is stable and requires little maintenance, even compared to some extremely expensive products."

"Graylog is very handy."

"Graylog's search functionality, alerting functionality, user management, and dashboards are useful."

More Graylog Enterprise pros

Cons

"Amazon CloudWatch needs improvement. The main thing is we have noticed missing logs."

"There is room for improvement in terms of stability."

"The solution could benefit from a price decrease."

"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."

"There could be further enhancements through CloudWatch's partnerships."

"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."

"The dashboard of Amazon CloudWatch is not very customizable right now."

"The solution's auto-scaling could be improved."

More Amazon CloudWatch cons

"The problem was with the complexity and the cost to add extensions."

"Lacks sufficient documentation."

"With technical support, you are on your own without an enterprise license."

"Graylog can improve the index rotation as it's quite a complex solution."

"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-"

"Graylog needs to improve their authentication. Also, the fact that Graylog displays logs from the top down is just ridiculous."

"The area in Graylog that needs to be improved or enhanced would be the integrations."

"Dashboards, stream alerts and parsing could be improved."

More Graylog Enterprise cons

Pricing and Cost Advice

"The price of Amazon CloudWatch is reasonable for detailed basic monitoring."

"The tool is not expensive."

"The pricing is average."

"I consider it as a medium-priced solution."

"It’s an open-source 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."

"Amazon CloudWatch has very cheap pricing, and it hardly costs my company $25-$30 a month for fifty systems, so it's pretty affordable."

"The pricing model is pay-as-you-go so you have to be mindful of usage to manage costs."

More Amazon CloudWatch pricing and cost advice

"It's an open-source solution that can be used free of charge."

"Having paid official support is wise for projects."

"You get a lot out-of-the-box with the non-enterprise version, so give it a try first."

"We're using the Community edition."

"I use the free version of Graylog."

"If you want something that works and do not have the money for Splunk or QRadar, take Graylog."

"We are using the free version of the product. However, the paid version is expensive."

"Consider Enterprise support if you have atypical needs or setup requirements."

More Graylog Enterprise pricing and cost advice

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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews

Financial Services Firm

15%

Manufacturing Company

10%

Computer Software Company

Transportation Company

Computer Software Company

14%

Comms Service Provider

11%

University

Government

Company Size

By reviewers

Large Enterprise

Midsize Enterprise

Small Business

By reviewers
Company Size	Count
Small Business	17
Midsize Enterprise	9
Large Enterprise	24

By reviewers
Company Size	Count
Small Business	10
Midsize Enterprise	5
Large Enterprise	9

Questions from the Community

What do you like most about Amazon CloudWatch?

The monitoring features are valuable.

See all answers

What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Amazon CloudWatch?

No specific setup costs were mentioned.

See all answers

What needs improvement with Amazon CloudWatch?

See all answers

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...

See all answers

What needs improvement with Graylog?

I do not have any specific examples or numbers, such as time saved or incidents to share. Currently, I have no suggestions for how Graylog Enterprise can be improved, as there are no pain points or...

See all answers

What is your primary use case for Graylog?

Graylog Enterprise is the logging and management tool we initially used, but later we stopped using it and switched to Loki, Grafana Loki for the logs. Eventually, we moved back to Graylog Enterpri...

See all answers

Comparisons

Grafana Loki vs Amazon CloudWatch

Compared 13% of the time

Amazon OpenSearch Service vs Amazon CloudWatch

Compared 7% of the time

Dynatrace vs Amazon CloudWatch

Compared 5% of the time

Zabbix vs Amazon CloudWatch

Compared 5% of the time

Datadog vs Amazon CloudWatch

Compared 4% of the time

More Amazon CloudWatch Competitors

Grafana Loki vs Graylog Enterprise

Compared 22% of the time

Wazuh vs Graylog Enterprise

Compared 17% of the time

syslog-ng vs Graylog Enterprise

Compared 8% of the time

Security Onion vs Graylog Enterprise

Compared 6% of the time

Splunk Enterprise Security vs Graylog Enterprise

Compared 3% of the time

More Graylog Enterprise Competitors

Product Reports

Buyer's Guide

Amazon CloudWatch

February 2026

Download Amazon CloudWatch product report

Buyer's Guide

Graylog Enterprise

January 2026

Download Graylog Enterprise product report

Also Known As

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Graylog2

Overview

Amazon CloudWatch integrates seamlessly with AWS, providing real-time monitoring and alerting features. Its interface supports task automation, enhancing troubleshooting and analytics capabilities, while offering strong security and scalability at a cost-effective rate.

Amazon CloudWatch is an impactful platform for monitoring AWS resources and managing application performance. It simplifies infrastructure performance monitoring by providing comprehensive analytics capabilities, including application insights and event scheduling. Users appreciate CloudWatch for its detailed metrics, dashboards, and support in issuing alerts to detect anomalies. It efficiently tracks performance, optimizes resource utilization, and ensures service availability. CloudWatch is recognized for its robust alerting features and integration with other AWS services, further supporting its resource monitoring capabilities. However, there is room for improvement in dashboard customization, log streaming speed, and integration with non-AWS services. Enhancements in API integration, machine learning features, and support for third-party tools are also desired.

What features does Amazon CloudWatch offer?

Seamless Integration: Works effortlessly with AWS for cohesive service management.
Advanced Metrics: Provides detailed monitoring of CPU, memory, and more.
Real-time Monitoring: Offers up-to-the-minute alerts on infrastructure status.
Dashboards: User-friendly and informative for quick insights.
Automation: Supports task automation for efficient troubleshooting.

What benefits does Amazon CloudWatch provide?

Cost-effectiveness: Efficient resource monitoring without high costs.
Scalability: Easily adapts to growing infrastructure needs.
Security: Strong protocols for safe monitoring activities.
Improved Performance: Enhances application insights and operational efficiency.
Operational Insights: Provides comprehensive logging and performance analysis.

Industries implementing Amazon CloudWatch often focus on optimizing IT infrastructure. Companies in sectors like finance and e-commerce rely on its monitoring and alerting capabilities to ensure service uptime and performance. The platform's automation and analytics features empower teams to proactively manage performance and detect potential issues promptly.

Amazon Web Services (AWS)

Graylog Enterprise, recognized for log collection, real-time search, and enriched data handling, offers an open-source framework that integrates seamlessly with Elasticsearch. Its user-centric interface streamlines data correlation and log aggregation, supporting both backend services and comprehensive monitoring needs.

Graylog Enterprise stands out for its stability and powerful log management capabilities, facilitating efficient log aggregation, real-time updates, and data analytics. Users benefit from its plugin-based alerting, user-friendly interface, and support for microservices, including Docker integration. The ability to search in detail, flexible API integration, and data enrichment features are highly valued. Challenges include collector application issues, desired visualization enhancements, and authentication integration improvements. Users seek advancements in UI customization, backup functions, and easier rule creation.

What are Graylog Enterprise's most important features?

Log Collection: Efficiently aggregates and handles diverse logs.
Real-Time Search: Provides immediate log data access.
Custom Alerts: Plugin-based alerting for tailored notifications.
Dashboard Enhancements: Improved visualization for data insights.
Data Enrichment: Adds value through detailed log analysis.

What benefits and ROI can users expect?

Audit Trail Support: Essential for compliance in financial sectors.
Security Event Correlation: Enables incident analysis and response.
Faster Issue Identification: Speeds up troubleshooting with detailed visualization.
API Flexibility: Seamless integration across systems and environments.
Comprehensive Monitoring: Centralized log management enhances oversight.

In industrial use, Graylog Enterprise is crucial for audit trailing in financial sectors, facilitating security event identification and error monitoring. Backend teams leverage real-time analytics for swift issue resolution, while developers appreciate the comprehensive log visualization enabled by Docker integration for microservice management.

Graylog

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

Buyer's Guide

Amazon CloudWatch vs. Graylog Enterprise

December 2025

Free Report: Amazon CloudWatch vs. Graylog Enterprise

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