Amazon CloudWatch vs Splunk

Overview

Amazon CloudWatch

Stacks12.0K

Followers8.2K

Votes214

Splunk

Stacks772

Followers1.0K

Votes20

Amazon CloudWatch vs Splunk: What are the differences?

Amazon CloudWatch and Splunk are both popular platforms used for monitoring and analyzing log data. While they share some common functionalities, there are several key differences between them that set them apart.

Deployment: Amazon CloudWatch is a fully managed service provided by Amazon Web Services (AWS) and is tightly integrated with other AWS services. It offers seamless deployment and easy scaling within the AWS ecosystem. On the other hand, Splunk can be deployed on-premises or in the cloud, giving users more flexibility in choosing their deployment model.
Cost: Amazon CloudWatch offers a flexible pricing model based on the number of metrics, alarms, and custom events generated. It provides a free tier for limited usage and offers cost savings for users already utilizing other AWS services. Splunk, however, has a more complex pricing structure and can become expensive, especially for large-scale deployments.
Functionality: Amazon CloudWatch primarily focuses on monitoring and managing resources within the AWS environment. It provides comprehensive metrics, logs, and events for AWS services and allows users to set alerts and trigger actions based on predefined thresholds. Splunk, on the other hand, is a general-purpose data analytics platform that supports data ingestion from various sources, including AWS, and provides advanced analytics and visualization capabilities.
Scalability: Amazon CloudWatch can easily handle the monitoring and logging needs of large-scale AWS deployments. It automatically scales to accommodate increased demand and supports high-volume log ingestion. Splunk, although scalable, requires additional configuration and resources to handle large data volumes efficiently.
Integration: Amazon CloudWatch seamlessly integrates with other AWS services, including EC2, S3, and Lambda, allowing users to monitor and analyze a wide range of AWS resources. It also provides APIs for custom integrations and supports integration with third-party monitoring tools. Splunk, on the other hand, offers a wide range of integrations with various data sources and applications, making it suitable for organizations with diverse IT environments.
User Interface: Amazon CloudWatch provides a web-based console with a straightforward interface, making it easy for users to navigate and access monitoring data. It offers prebuilt dashboards and visualizations for AWS services. Splunk, on the other hand, offers a more advanced and customizable user interface, allowing users to create tailored dashboards, reports, and visualizations based on their specific requirements.

In summary, Amazon CloudWatch is tightly integrated with AWS and provides a focused monitoring solution primarily for AWS resources, while Splunk is a versatile analytics platform capable of handling data from various sources. The choice between the two depends on the specific needs of an organization, including deployment preferences, scalability requirements, and budget considerations.

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Detailed Comparison

Amazon CloudWatch	Splunk
It helps you gain system-wide visibility into resource utilization, application performance, and operational health. It retrieve your monitoring data, view graphs to help take automated action based on the state of your cloud environment.	It provides the leading platform for Operational Intelligence. Customers use it to search, monitor, analyze and visualize machine data.
Basic Monitoring for Amazon EC2 instances: ten pre-selected metrics at five-minute frequency, free of charge.;Detailed Monitoring for Amazon EC2 instances: seven pre-selected metrics at one-minute frequency, for an additional charge.;Amazon EBS volumes: eight pre-selected metrics at five-minute frequency, free of charge.;Elastic Load Balancers: thirteen pre-selected metrics at one-minute frequency, free of charge.;Amazon RDS DB instances: thirteen pre-selected metrics at one-minute frequency, free of charge.;Amazon SQS queues: eight pre-selected metrics at five-minute frequency, free of charge.;Amazon SNS topics: four pre-selected metrics at five-minute frequency, free of charge.;Amazon ElastiCache nodes: twenty-nine pre-selected metrics at one-minute frequency, free of charge.;Amazon DynamoDB tables: seven pre-selected metrics at five-minute frequency, free of charge.;AWS Storage Gateways: eleven pre-selected gateway metrics and five pre-selected storage volume metrics at five-minute frequency, free of charge.;Amazon Elastic MapReduce job flows: twenty-three pre-selected metrics at five-minute frequency, free of charge.;Auto Scaling groups: seven pre-selected metrics at one-minute frequency, optional and charged at standard pricing.;Estimated charges on your AWS bill: you can also choose to enable metrics to monitor your AWS charges. The number of metrics depends on the AWS products and services that you use, and these metrics are free of charge. Learn more about this option.	Predict and prevent problems with one unified monitoring experience; Streamline your entire security stack with Splunk as the nerve center; Detect, investigate and diagnose problems easily with end-to-end observability
Statistics
Stacks 12.0K	Stacks 772
Followers 8.2K	Followers 1.0K
Votes 214	Votes 20
Pros & Cons
Pros 76 Monitor aws resources 46 Zero setup 30 Detailed Monitoring 23 Backed by Amazon 19 Auto Scaling groups Cons 2 Poor Search Capabilities	Pros 3 Alert system based on custom query results 3 API for searching logs, running reports 2 Splunk language supports string, date manip, math, etc 2 Query engine supports joining, aggregation, stats, etc 2 Custom log parsing as well as automatic parsing Cons 1 Splunk query language rich so lots to learn

What are some alternatives to Amazon CloudWatch, Splunk?

Papertrail

Papertrail helps detect, resolve, and avoid infrastructure problems using log messages. Papertrail's practicality comes from our own experience as sysadmins, developers, and entrepreneurs.

Logmatic

Get a clear overview of what is happening across your distributed environments, and spot the needle in the haystack in no time. Build dynamic analyses and identify improvements for your software, your user experience and your business.

Loggly

It is a SaaS solution to manage your log data. There is nothing to install and updates are automatically applied to your Loggly subdomain.

Apache Spark

Spark is a fast and general processing engine compatible with Hadoop data. It can run in Hadoop clusters through YARN or Spark's standalone mode, and it can process data in HDFS, HBase, Cassandra, Hive, and any Hadoop InputFormat. It is designed to perform both batch processing (similar to MapReduce) and new workloads like streaming, interactive queries, and machine learning.

Logentries

Logentries makes machine-generated log data easily accessible to IT operations, development, and business analysis teams of all sizes. With the broadest platform support and an open API, Logentries brings the value of log-level data to any system, to any team member, and to a community of more than 25,000 worldwide users.

Logstash

Logstash is a tool for managing events and logs. You can use it to collect logs, parse them, and store them for later use (like, for searching). If you store them in Elasticsearch, you can view and analyze them with Kibana.

Graylog

Centralize and aggregate all your log files for 100% visibility. Use our powerful query language to search through terabytes of log data to discover and analyze important information.

Stackdriver

Google Stackdriver provides powerful monitoring, logging, and diagnostics. It equips you with insight into the health, performance, and availability of cloud-powered applications, enabling you to find and fix issues faster.

Presto

Distributed SQL Query Engine for Big Data

Amazon Athena

Amazon Athena is an interactive query service that makes it easy to analyze data in Amazon S3 using standard SQL. Athena is serverless, so there is no infrastructure to manage, and you pay only for the queries that you run.

Related Comparisons

Amazon CloudWatch vs Splunk: What are the differences?

Deployment: Amazon CloudWatch is a fully managed service provided by Amazon Web Services (AWS) and is tightly integrated with other AWS services. It offers seamless deployment and easy scaling within the AWS ecosystem. On the other hand, Splunk can be deployed on-premises or in the cloud, giving users more flexibility in choosing their deployment model.
Cost: Amazon CloudWatch offers a flexible pricing model based on the number of metrics, alarms, and custom events generated. It provides a free tier for limited usage and offers cost savings for users already utilizing other AWS services. Splunk, however, has a more complex pricing structure and can become expensive, especially for large-scale deployments.
Functionality: Amazon CloudWatch primarily focuses on monitoring and managing resources within the AWS environment. It provides comprehensive metrics, logs, and events for AWS services and allows users to set alerts and trigger actions based on predefined thresholds. Splunk, on the other hand, is a general-purpose data analytics platform that supports data ingestion from various sources, including AWS, and provides advanced analytics and visualization capabilities.
Scalability: Amazon CloudWatch can easily handle the monitoring and logging needs of large-scale AWS deployments. It automatically scales to accommodate increased demand and supports high-volume log ingestion. Splunk, although scalable, requires additional configuration and resources to handle large data volumes efficiently.
Integration: Amazon CloudWatch seamlessly integrates with other AWS services, including EC2, S3, and Lambda, allowing users to monitor and analyze a wide range of AWS resources. It also provides APIs for custom integrations and supports integration with third-party monitoring tools. Splunk, on the other hand, offers a wide range of integrations with various data sources and applications, making it suitable for organizations with diverse IT environments.
User Interface: Amazon CloudWatch provides a web-based console with a straightforward interface, making it easy for users to navigate and access monitoring data. It offers prebuilt dashboards and visualizations for AWS services. Splunk, on the other hand, offers a more advanced and customizable user interface, allowing users to create tailored dashboards, reports, and visualizations based on their specific requirements.

Amazon CloudWatch vs Splunk

Overview