AWS Monitoring Tools: A Complete Guide to Observability on the Cloud

In the modern cloud environment, maintaining the performance, security, and reliability of the infrastructure is essential. As applications scale and architectures get complex, it gets hard to monitor the performance and ensure that everything runs efficiently. 

Amazon Web Services (AWS) offers a whole lot of native monitoring tools that will help you with all important tasks, such as visibility, tracking metrics, and more in real time. However, since there are way too many AWS monitoring tools available, this guide shall walk you through the best native and third-party options that you need to add to your stack. 

But first, let us see why we actually need to monitor the cloud environment in AWS. 

Why Monitoring Matters in AWS Environments

Cloud environments are highly dynamic due to their need of scaling, but that flexibility can create complexities. Without properly keeping a check, organizations risk performance issues, security breaches, or even incorrect resource allocation. 

Here are a few key reasons why monitoring is critical in AWS:

1. Ensure Application Availability

Monitoring helps keep an eye on downtime, latency, and failed deployments beforehand. Tools like Amazon CloudWatch provide real-time insights into health services like EC2, RDS, ECS, and others so that you can create a mitigation plan early on. 

2. Optimize Resource Usage and Cost

AWS operates on a pay-as-you-go model. This means that consistent monitoring will help you avoid overutilization or waste of resources. 

3. Enhance Security and Compliance

With services like AWS Cloudtrail and AWS Config, you can monitor user activity, track API calls, and detect configurations drift with unauthorised changes. This visibility supports compliance efforts, such as SOC 2, GDPR and helps you respond to threats faster. 

4. Troubleshoot and Debug Efficiently

Monitoring activities across the cloud environment provides the data needed to identify the root cause of failures, whether they are due to bad deployments, network bottlenecks, or infrastructure issues. 

5. Enable Automation and Auto-Healing

By monitoring regularly, you can identify the anomalies that usually occur and set automated trigger responses to ensure self-healing and resilience in production stages. 

Key AWS Monitoring Tools Overview

There are multiple AWS monitoring tools that you can use to keep an eye on the cloud environment at different stages. 

1. Amazon CloudWatch

Amazon CloudWatch is one of the widely used AWS monitoring tools for all native cloud resources and applications. It keeps a track of all the metrics, logs, and events, helping the user keep an eye on performance, set up alarms, and create custom dashboards. CloudWatch is an excellent option for centralized visibility across EC2, Lambda, RDS, and others. 

Pricing: Basic monitoring is free. For custom scheduled monitoring, the package is for $0.30 per metric/ month. For logs, $0.50 per GB is required, plus $0.03 per GB archived.

2. AWS X-Ray

AWS X-Ray is another one of the AWS monitoring tools that help developers analyze and debug production applications that are built by using microservices or serverless architecture. It visualizes latency bottlenecks and tracks user requests across services like API Gateway and ECS. 

Pricing:

• First 100,000 traces recorded per month are free.
• $5.00 per 1 million traces recorded thereafter.
• $0.50 per 1 million traces retrieved for analysis.

3. AWS CloudTrail

AWS CloudTrail records all the API calls and tracks user activity from your AWS account for auditing and compliance purposes. It helps you keep an eye on the changes, identify any unusual access, and maintain governance across the environment. Logs are either stored in S3 or analyzed in the AWS CloudWatch. 

Pricing: For management events, the first copy is free. Data events cost $0.10 per 100,000 events and the insights events cost $2 per 100,000 analyzed events.

4. AWS Config

AWS Config identifies and tracks the configuration of your native AWS resources over time. It allows you to access compliance against the internal policies, detect issues in configurations, and maintain regular audits. Config is an incredible tool for organizations where security is the top most priority. 

Pricing: Configuration items cost $0.003 per item recorded and the rules evaluations cost $0.001 per evaluation. 

5. Amazon DevOps Guru

Amazon DevOps Guru works on the principle of machine learning to detect anomalies and operational issues. It analyzed CloudWatch, X-Ray, and other measurable data to give real-time insights and remediation suggestions. 

Pricing: Free tier gives up to 7,200 AWS resource analysis hours/ month for 3 months. If you need more hours, you need to pay $0.004 per resource/ hour. 

6. Amazon Inspector

Amazon Inspector is one of those automated security assessment tools that scans the AWS workload like EC2, Lambda, and other containers for misconfigurations. It continuously monitors your environment for compliance. 

Pricing: EC2 scans an instance for $0.30 per instance/ month. Container image scans are $0.09 per scan and Lambda functions scans are $0.0006 per function/month. 

Third-Party Monitoring Tools for AWS

There are a few third-party AWS monitoring tools that you can use as well. 

1. Datadog

Datadog is one of those comprehensive monitoring tools that integrates multiple different technologies. It provides full real-time observability through different metrics, logs, traces, and dashboards in one single interface. Datadog is an ideal solution for hybrid and multi-cloud environments. 

Pricing: 

• Infrastructure Monitoring: Starts at $18 per host/month (billed annually).
• Log Management: $0.10 per ingested GB + $1.70 per million log events for retention.
• APM: $31 per host/month.
  

2. New Relic

New Relic offers a cloud-native platform that brings together all the metrics, logs, traces, and events. It supports automated instrumentation and provides advanced detection for anomalies. New Relic works with pre-built integrations in the AWS. 

Pricing:

Free tier includes 100 GB of data ingested per month. Standard plan is priced at $49 per user/month.

3. Prometheus & Grafana

Prometheus is an open source AWS monitoring tool that comes paired with Grafana for intense visualisation. 

It is widely used for time-series metrics collection and integrates highly with Kubernetes and AWS services through exporters. 

Pricing:

Prometheus is free and open source. Grafana has a free tier that offers 10k series, 3 users, and 14-day retention. The pro plan starts at $29/ month per user. 

Related Article: Top 9 Kubernetes Monitoring Tools To Increase Visibility in 2025 

Comparing Native AWS Tools vs Third-Party Options

Feature/Criteria	Native AWS Tools	Third-Party Tools (e.g., Datadog, New Relic)
Integration	Seamless with AWS services	Broad multi-cloud and hybrid support
Ease of Use	Can require multiple services to combine (e.g., CloudWatch + X-Ray + Config)	Unified platforms with dashboards, alerts, and traces
Customization	Limited visual customization	Rich, interactive dashboards and flexible visualization
Pricing Model	Pay-as-you-go per service and usage	Tiered or subscription-based pricing
Advanced Analytics/AI	Basic (DevOps Guru, Inspector)	Sophisticated AI, anomaly detection, and root-cause analysis
Open Source Support	Limited	Strong (e.g., Prometheus, Grafana support)
Learning Curve	Moderate to steep for complex setups	Often more intuitive with guided setup and automation

Setting Up Monitoring with CloudWatch: Step-by-Step

Setting up monitoring with AWS CloudWatch is super easy. Here are the basic steps: 

1. Log in to the AWS console. 
2. Create a log group by defining the name that is relevant to the logs from EC2, Lambda, and others. 
3. For EC2 or on-premises services, install the CloudWatch Agent and set up the right configurations. 
4. Use the AWS CLI or SDK for custom app metrics. 
5. Go to Alarms > Create Alarm, choose the metric (e.g., CPU Utilization), and set thresholds for notifications.
6. Under the dashboard, create a dashboard and use widgets to visualize metrics and logs in real-time. 
7. Use CloudWatch Logs for insights and enable anomaly detection for proactive alerts. 

Common Challenges and How to Avoid Them

Challenge	Description	How to Avoid
High Costs from Excess Logs or Metrics	Unexpected charges from excessive ingestion or custom metrics	Set retention policies, limit log verbosity, use filters
Alert Fatigue	Too many irrelevant or noisy alerts	Use anomaly detection and well-calibrated thresholds
Lack of Centralized Visibility	Data scattered across tools (CloudWatch, X-Ray, Config)	Consolidate into unified dashboards or integrate with third-party tools
Poor Data Retention Planning	Logs or metrics expire before analysis	Plan and configure longer retention where necessary
Complex Setup for Multi-Account Environments	Monitoring across multiple AWS accounts can be difficult	Use AWS Organizations + CloudWatch cross-account dashboards

Conclusion – Which Ones Are The Right AWS Monitoring Tools For Your Stack? 

Monitoring is the foundation to a high performing and non-glitchy cloud environment. AWS offers the right robust monitoring tools that can help with on-premises, hybrid, and remote cloud servers. 

Finding the right tools for your team can set the foundation for your future cloud operations.

Frequently Asked Questions