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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

Comparisons
Amazon CloudWatch
Amazon Managed Prometheus
Category

Management & Governance, Observability / monitoring

Management & Governance, Monitoring

Description

Observability tool to collect metrics, logs, and events across AWS, multicloud, and hybrid environments

Serverless, Prometheus-compatible monitoring service for container metrics at scale.

Best for
  • Infrastructure monitoring
  • Application monitoring
  • Log analytics
  • Alerting
  • Container monitoring
  • Kubernetes metrics
  • Application monitoring
  • Infrastructure metrics
Key features
  • Metrics
  • Logs
  • Alarms
  • Dashboards
  • ServiceLens
  • Prometheus compatible
  • PromQL queries
  • Auto scaling
  • Multi-AZ
  • Alert manager
Pricing model

Pay per metric, dashboard, alarm, log data ingested

Pay per metric samples ingested + stored + queried

Free tier

Yes

Yes

Expert take

“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.”
— Didier Durand, re:Post Top Contributor [profile]

“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.”
— Gary McLean, re:Post Top Contributor [profile]

Product page

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

Learn more about Amazon Managed Prometheus »

AWS product comparisons

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