Software Alternatives, Accelerators & Startups

Amazon EC2 Systems Manager VS Amazon CloudWatch

Compare Amazon EC2 Systems Manager VS Amazon CloudWatch and see what are their differences

Amazon EC2 Systems Manager logo Amazon EC2 Systems Manager

Learn how to shorten the time to detect and resolve problems. View operational data from multiple AWS services and automate tasks across AWS resources.

Amazon CloudWatch logo Amazon CloudWatch

Amazon CloudWatch is a monitoring service for AWS cloud resources and the applications you run on AWS.
  • Amazon EC2 Systems Manager Landing page
    Landing page //
    2023-04-30
  • Amazon CloudWatch Landing page
    Landing page //
    2023-03-26

Amazon EC2 Systems Manager features and specs

No features have been listed yet.

Amazon CloudWatch features and specs

  • Comprehensive Monitoring
    Amazon CloudWatch offers extensive monitoring capabilities for AWS resources, applications, and services, providing real-time insights into system performance and operational health.
  • Scalability
    CloudWatch can handle monitoring data for resources at any scale, from small test environments to large-scale production deployments, easily scaling with your AWS infrastructure.
  • Seamless AWS Integration
    As a native AWS service, CloudWatch integrates seamlessly with other AWS services like EC2, RDS, S3, and Lambda, simplifying the process of setting up and managing monitoring.
  • Custom Metrics
    Users can publish their own custom metrics, allowing them to monitor specific data points relevant to their use case, in addition to the default metrics provided by AWS services.
  • Automated Actions
    With CloudWatch Alarms, users can set predefined thresholds to trigger automated actions such as sending notifications, executing Lambda functions, or altering auto-scaling groups.

Possible disadvantages of Amazon CloudWatch

  • Cost
    Depending on usage, monitoring a large number of resources or high-resolution custom metrics can become costly, potentially impacting overall cloud expenditure.
  • Complexity
    Although CloudWatch is powerful, it can be complex to set up and manage, particularly for users not familiar with AWS terminology and monitoring concepts.
  • Limited Third-Party Integration
    While CloudWatch integrates well with AWS services, integration with third-party tools is not as seamless. This might require additional configuration or third-party solutions for comprehensive monitoring.
  • Lag in Metric Visibility
    There can be a slight delay in the visibility of data points, especially for high-resolution metrics, which may delay immediate troubleshooting and resolution.
  • Basic Dashboarding
    The default dashboards provided by CloudWatch can be quite basic and may not meet the advanced visualization needs of some users, requiring additional tools for creating more sophisticated dashboards.

Category Popularity

0-100% (relative to Amazon EC2 Systems Manager and Amazon CloudWatch)
Monitoring Tools
18 18%
82% 82
IT Management
100 100%
0% 0
Log Management
0 0%
100% 100
Project Management
45 45%
55% 55

User comments

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Reviews

These are some of the external sources and on-site user reviews we've used to compare Amazon EC2 Systems Manager and Amazon CloudWatch

Amazon EC2 Systems Manager Reviews

We have no reviews of Amazon EC2 Systems Manager yet.
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Amazon CloudWatch Reviews

35+ Of The Best CI/CD Tools: Organized By Category
Amazon CloudWatch is a detection solution for AWS cloud applications and other resources. For instance, you can use it to monitor Amazon services such as EC2. It will automatically alert and inform you of any anomalies it detects. Additionally, Amazon CloudWatch gives you the ability to track and collect metrics.
PagerDuty Alternatives
Amazon CloudWatch is a monitoring service for AWS cloud resources and the applications you run on AWS.
Source: zapier.com

Social recommendations and mentions

Based on our record, Amazon CloudWatch should be more popular than Amazon EC2 Systems Manager. It has been mentiond 70 times since March 2021. We are tracking product recommendations and mentions on various public social media platforms and blogs. They can help you identify which product is more popular and what people think of it.

Amazon EC2 Systems Manager mentions (17)

  • Ensuring secure values by private keys in AWS (KMS, SSM, Secrets Manager)
    This "protection" layer of our sensitive value is based on the composition of two AWS services: Key Management Service is the one responsible for creating the private key which will be used to encrypt our value, then Secret Manager or System Manager: Parameters Store allow us to accomplish the same functionality but they differ on some caveats, since the chosen one will be used for saving the secured encrypted... - Source: dev.to / about 2 years ago
  • 6 Best Practices for AWS Monitoring
    AWS Systems Manager is a service that allows you to manage and automate tasks across your AWS resources. One powerful feature of Systems Manager is the ability to set up automated remediation tasks, which can help you quickly resolve issues without manual intervention. For example, you can set up a remediation task that automatically restarts an EC2 instance if its CPU utilization exceeds a certain threshold. Source: about 2 years ago
  • How to set up AWS Session Manager logging cross account
    Instead, it uses an SSM Agent. And this agent will register itself to the AWS Systems Manager. It will use the attached instance profile to do that. From that point on when you request a shell from the Session Manager. The agent will react on this response and establish the connection. - Source: dev.to / over 2 years ago
  • Uncomplicating cloud Security — Foundations (Part 1)
    AWS Systems Manager: you can centralize access to VMs through the service and automate security patching using the tool also. - Source: dev.to / over 2 years ago
  • AWS services for SREs
    You can find more about AWS Systems Manager here. - Source: dev.to / over 3 years ago
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Amazon CloudWatch mentions (70)

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What are some alternatives?

When comparing Amazon EC2 Systems Manager and Amazon CloudWatch, you can also consider the following products

Freshservice - Freshservice: the one-stop cloud solution for all your IT management needs.

AWS Budgets - Cloud Cost Management

Goverlan - Goverlan Reach provides IT systems support and remote management software solutions enabling innovative and simplified ways for businesses to address remote IT administration needs.

AWS Cost Explorer - Cloud Cost Management

VMware vCenter - VMware vCenter Server provides a centralized platform for managing your VMware vSphere environments.

NewRelic - New Relic is a Software Analytics company that makes sense of billions of metrics across millions of apps. We help the people who build modern software understand the stories their data is trying to tell them.