20 engineers on Hacker News describe using Amazon CloudWatch first-hand: 3 endorse it, 4 regret it, 1 are mixed.
“We had a latency spike that all the usual polling tools missed — top, CloudWatch, Datadog, everything looked normal.”
regret · production · parth21shah · 2025-11-20 · source ↗ · wrong label?“cloud waatch only had logs about 20% of the time, so I had to redeploy five times just to get some logs”
regret · personal · dkersten · 2024-11-14 · source ↗ · wrong label?“A simple `console-log` statement with JSON.stringify will log it to Cloudwatch logs. Up to 5Gb in the free tier. Easy dashboards.”
endorse · production · catchmeifyoucan · 2020-12-10 · source ↗ · wrong label?“The UI for Cloudwatch Logs completely crumbles if you use it for Lambda functions, especially if you have a lot of executions.”
regret · production · djhworld · 2018-10-31 · source ↗ · wrong label?“looking at CloudWatch logs works fine most of the time.”
endorse · production · aeikenberry · 2017-06-21 · source ↗ · wrong label?“I never liked Cloudwatch Logs and recently switched it for an ELK stack”
regret · production · arikfr · 2016-11-11 · source ↗ · wrong label?“We use Cloudwatch Logs, it has its warts (and its a bit expensive), but it's better than a lot of the infrastructure you see out there”
mixed · production · cachemiss · 2015-12-26 · source ↗ · wrong label?“Our CloudWatch metrics are actually made up of 16 independent metrics reporters... the CloudWatch metrics tell you exactly when the failure and recovery happen.”
endorse · production · colmmacc · 2013-07-12 · source ↗ · wrong label?“I don't think I'd ever let datadog slurp everything from AWS cloudwatch again.”
neutral · production · inhumantsar · 2025-01-25 · source ↗ · wrong label?“After trying to set up Fargate and it only sending my logs to cloudwatch 25% of the time”
neutral · personal · dkersten · 2021-11-08 · source ↗ · wrong label?“These are the services we used.”
neutral · production · scarface74 · 2020-12-20 · source ↗ · wrong label?“monitoring CloudWatch metrics for API stability, end-to-end tests, etc”
neutral · production · cddotdotslash · 2019-11-03 · source ↗ · wrong label?“We log lots of stuff to CloudWatch. CloudWatch allows you to scan for regexps”
neutral · production · kstrauser · 2019-09-23 · source ↗ · wrong label?“It seems hard to get away from using AWS tools to observe your code in prod (eg. CloudWatch for logs)”
neutral · personal · The_Amp_Walrus · 2019-07-28 · source ↗ · wrong label?“Cloudwatch prints logs, kinesis takes the log to s3 where it's transformed in batches with lambda”
neutral · production · InGodsName · 2018-12-26 · source ↗ · wrong label?“particularly custom CW metrics and A/B deployments with Lambda traffic shifting”
neutral · production · 1.5 yr · not_kurt_godel · 2018-06-23 · source ↗ · wrong label?“I use a cloudwatch event to detect this”
neutral · production · jpetersonmn · 2017-11-25 · source ↗ · wrong label?“The elb queue never backed up seriously according to cloud watch.”
neutral · production · encoderer · 2016-08-11 · source ↗ · wrong label?“Of course, you have to assume the Cloudwatch API is working... :)”
neutral · production · Rapzid · 2015-07-31 · source ↗ · wrong label?“The instances get added or removed based on the latency reported by CloudWatch/ELB.”
neutral · production · bad_user · 2013-06-04 · source ↗ · wrong label?