What's the Difference Between Amazon CloudWatch and Amazon Managed Grafana?
Compare Amazon CloudWatch and Amazon Managed Grafana side by side — features, pricing, and ideal use cases to help you choose the right product.
Compare side-by-side
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Comparisons
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Amazon CloudWatch
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Amazon Managed Grafana
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Category
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Management & Governance, Observability / monitoring |
Management & Governance, Observability |
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Description
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Observability tool to collect metrics, logs, and events across AWS, multicloud, and hybrid environments |
Fully managed Grafana service for interactive data visualizations and dashboards. |
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Best for
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Key features
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Pricing model
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Pay per metric, dashboard, alarm, log data ingested |
Pay per active editor/viewer user per month |
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Free tier
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Yes |
No |
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Expert take
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“CloudWatch is the default observability backbone for AWS. Every service emits metrics automatically; you just need to decide what to alarm on. Logs Insights lets you query log groups with a SQL-like syntax. For Prometheus-compatible metrics or Grafana dashboards, use the managed services alongside it.” |
“Managed Grafana gives you fully managed Grafana workspaces with built-in IAM authentication and data source plugins for CloudWatch, Prometheus, X-Ray, and Timestream.” |
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Product page
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When to use Amazon CloudWatch or Amazon Managed Grafana
Use Amazon CloudWatch when:
- Infrastructure monitoring
- Application monitoring
- Log analytics
- Alerting
Learn more about Amazon CloudWatch »
Use Amazon Managed Grafana when:
- Operational dashboards
- IoT monitoring
- Application observability
- Business metrics
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