What's the Difference Between Amazon CloudWatch and Amazon Managed Prometheus?
Compare Amazon CloudWatch and Amazon Managed Prometheus 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 Prometheus
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Category
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Management & Governance, Observability / monitoring |
Management & Governance, Monitoring |
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Description
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Observability tool to collect metrics, logs, and events across AWS, multicloud, and hybrid environments |
Serverless, Prometheus-compatible monitoring service for container metrics at scale. |
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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 metric samples ingested + stored + queried |
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Free tier
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Yes |
Yes |
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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 Prometheus ingests and stores Prometheus metrics at scale without managing servers. It is compatible with PromQL and integrates natively with EKS and Managed Grafana.” |
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Product page
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When to use Amazon CloudWatch or Amazon Managed Prometheus
Use Amazon CloudWatch when:
- Infrastructure monitoring
- Application monitoring
- Log analytics
- Alerting
Learn more about Amazon CloudWatch »
Use Amazon Managed Prometheus when:
- Container monitoring
- Kubernetes metrics
- Application monitoring
- Infrastructure metrics
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