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Amazon CloudWatch vs Nagios Log Server 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)
Nagios Log Server
Ranking in Log Management
43rd
Average Rating
8.0
Reviews Sentiment
6.9
Number of Reviews
4
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 Nagios Log Server is 0.8%, down from 0.8% 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…
Syarul Idzuddin Adzmi - PeerSpot reviewer
A scalable and affordable tool for monitoring data centers
Five engineers are needed for the maintenance of the product. I would definitely recommend the solution to those planning to use it. To increase the rating for the product, Nagios should offer remote support and offer more customization in reporting while making it easy for the customers to use it. Overall, I rate the solution an eight out of ten.

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 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 use Amazon CloudWatch for logging."
"The tool's UI is good. One can scroll through the logs very easily."
"Amazon CloudWatch is a cheap and easy-to-use solution."
"The detection is the most valuable feature."
"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."
"Scheduling is a valuable feature."
"The monitoring features are valuable."
"The product is scalable."
"A great feature of the solution involves its internal portal."
"One of the most valuable features is the dashboard because the UI was effective and easy to use. The alert systems are good as well. We had no failovers and had high availability. We can search the queries fast as well in Nagios Log Server."
"The initial setup of Nagios Log Server was easy and straightforward."
 

Cons

"There's a learning curve with Amazon CloudWatch since we have to learn to write the queries to extract the keys and logs."
"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."
"When customers want to see the CPU or memory utilization there is a cost. This should be free to see the utilization."
"The product should provide more features."
"CloudWatch's scalability could be improved."
"The solution should provide human-readable metrics."
"The solution's pricing is a bit higher."
"The solution's auto-scaling could be improved."
"As we are talking about a product which is open to the public, the pricing makes it challenging for us to profit off of its marketing."
"The configurations during initial setup could be improved. If they could be agentless, as in the case of the Ansible product, it would be better. I would like to be able to analyze the network bandwidth."
"The support could be better."
"The customization and dashboards have shortcomings and need to be improved to make the tool look more presentable."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"I consider it as a medium-priced solution."
"It is a free-of-charge service."
"The pricing can be considered reasonable, especially when already operating on a cloud platform."
"The price is okay for me."
"The solution is expensive."
"It’s an open-source 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."
"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."
"On a scale of one to ten, where one is expensive, and ten is cheap, I rate the pricing an eight or nine."
"For a single instance, the price is around $4,000."
"We found the pricing to be quite affordable."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Financial Services Firm
16%
Computer Software Company
12%
Manufacturing Company
9%
University
5%
Computer Software Company
12%
Manufacturing Company
9%
University
8%
Government
7%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
No data available
 

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...
Ask a question
Earn 20 points
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

AirAsia, Airbnb, Aircel, APUS, Avazu, Casa & Video, Futbol Club Barcelona (FCBarcelona), National Taiwan University, redBus
IBM, impulse, wipro, comteco
Find out what your peers are saying about Amazon CloudWatch vs. Nagios Log Server and other solutions. Updated: July 2025.
865,295 professionals have used our research since 2012.