Amazon CloudWatch Logs vs Better Stack

Amazon CloudWatch Logs collects and stores logs from AWS resources, applications, services, on-premises systems, and other clouds. It offers log pipelines, structured parsing, archive export, and live tailing through web and API access. Logs Insights lets users query records with filters, aggregations, and regular expressions, then visualize time-series data or export results to CloudWatch Dashboards. Logs are available in Standard for real-time monitoring and advanced analytics, or Infrequent Access for ad-hoc queries and forensic analysis. Live Tail provides a central interactive view of streaming logs, while anomaly detection uses machine learning to identify patterns and changes. Users can search and analyze logs across accounts from a monitoring account at no additional cost. The free tier includes 5 GB for ingestion, archive storage, and query scans, plus 1,800 Live Tail minutes per month. Usage-based charges are billed at month end, with no upfront commitment or minimum fee; rates vary by Region.

Better Stack combines incident management, on-call, uptime monitoring, status pages, telemetry, error tracking, and real user monitoring. Its Slack-native AI SRE agent investigates incidents using logs, metrics, traces, errors, and web events. Logs and traces can be transformed with VRL and queried through drag-and-drop controls, PromQL, or SQL. Uptime checks cover HTTP(S) keywords, TCP/UDP ports, SSL, and DNS, and can run as often as every 30 seconds. Integrations include Slack, Microsoft Teams, Datadog, New Relic, Grafana, Prometheus, PagerDuty, Jira, Zapier, and Google Calendar; iOS and Android apps can receive notifications. The free plan includes 10 monitors and heartbeats, one status page, 100,000 exceptions per month, 5,000 session replays, 3 GB of logs and traces retained for three days, and 30 GB of metrics. Responder costs $29 a month per license when billed annually. Better Stack says it is SOC 2 Type 2 and GDPR compliant, but not HIPAA compliant. It also describes encryption at rest and in transit, automated backups, and redundant storage where appropriate.