Amazon CloudWatch Logs vs Grafana Cloud Application Observability
Amazon CloudWatch Logs
aws.amazon.comGrafana Cloud Application Observability
grafana.comSide by side
| Figure | Amazon CloudWatch Logs | Grafana Cloud Application Observability |
|---|---|---|
| Price from | $0.03/mo | $0.03/mo |
| Free plan | Yes | Yes |
| Free trial | — | — |
| Open source | — | — |
| Web | Yes | Yes |
| Windows | — | Yes |
| macOS | — | Yes |
| Linux | — | Yes |
| iOS | — | Yes |
| Android | — | Yes |
| API | Yes | Yes |
| Plans published | 5 | 5 |
| Spec score · Log Analysis Software | 9.2 (#1) | 9.2 (#3) |
| Spec score · Log Management Software | 9.2 (#5) | 9.2 (#6) |
| Spec score · Metrics Monitoring Tools | 9.2 (#2) | 9.2 (#3) |
| Spec score · Real User Monitoring | 9.1 (#2) | 9.1 (#3) |
| Spec score · Log Monitoring Tools | 9.1 (#5) | 9.2 (#3) |
| Founded | 2006 | 2014 |
| Free plan | No | Yes |
| Integrations | CloudWatch Logs integrates with Amazon OpenSearch Service for querying and analyzing logs without moving or duplicating the data. | Grafana Cloud connection tiles support Java, .NET, Beyla, Grafana Alloy, OTLP, and the upstream OpenTelemetry Collector. |
| Purpose | Amazon CloudWatch collects and stores logs from AWS resources, applications, services, on-premises resources, and other clouds. | Grafana Cloud Application Observability provides out-of-the-box application monitoring and uses OpenTelemetry and Prometheus data to support root-cause analysis. |
Plans
Amazon CloudWatch Logs
- Logs data ingestion$0.50 a month
- Logs archive storage$0.03 a month
- Pay-as-you-goPrice not published
- Free tierFree
- Paid usagePrice not published
Grafana Cloud Application Observability
- FreeFree
- Pro$0.03 a month
- FreeFree
- Pro$0.03 a month
- EnterprisePriced on request
In their own words
Amazon CloudWatch Logs
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.
Grafana Cloud Application Observability
Grafana Cloud Application Observability monitors applications and brings OpenTelemetry and Prometheus data together to help software engineers investigate anomalies and their causes. Its knowledge graph discovers services and relationships from telemetry, while the service catalog displays latency, error ratio, and request rate for each service. The RCA workbench and Entity Graph help investigate correlated problems across a stack. Metrics, logs, traces, and profiles share a unified view, with drill-down from a service into its signals. Grafana identifies Alloy as a collector with native pipelines for OpenTelemetry and Prometheus. The free plan includes up to 2,232 host hours per month and community support. Pro is listed at $0.03 a month, with a $19 monthly platform fee and $0.025 per host hour; host hours and application telemetry are billed at standard Grafana Cloud rates. Serverless usage is billed on telemetry ingested instead of host hours. The cloud service runs on Linux, macOS, Windows, and the web.