AWS Monitoring Tools - Features & Best Practices for 2025

Posted on March 9, 2025 • 19 min read • 3,848 words

AWS monitoring tools make it easy to monitor the performance, usage, and overall health of your cloud resources in real-time. These tools give you the deep understanding of your metrics such as CPU usage, memory utilization, and network activity to keep your infrastructure healthy.

• Key Takeaways
• 1. Amazon CloudWatch
• 2. Datadog
• 3. New Relic
• 4. Prometheus
• 5. Grafana
• 6. Splunk
• 7. Dynatrace
• 8. Sumo Logic
• 9. Nagios
• 10. AppDynamics
• 11. LogicMonitor
• 12. Zabbix
• 13. AWS X-Ray
• 14. Elastic Stack
• 15. SolarWinds
• 16. CloudHealth
• 17. PagerDuty
• 18. Opsgenie
• 19. Checkly
• 20. Thundra
• 21. Scout APM
• 22. SignalFx
• 23. CloudTrail
• 24. Sematext
• 25. Instana
• Conclusion
• Frequently Asked Questions
  • What are the best AWS monitoring tools for beginners?
  • How does Datadog compare to Amazon CloudWatch?
  • Can Grafana be used for AWS monitoring?
  • Is Prometheus suitable for large-scale AWS environments?
  • Why use Splunk for AWS monitoring?
  • What makes Dynatrace a strong AWS monitoring option?
  • Which AWS monitoring tool offers proactive alerting?

Key Takeaways  

• Amazon CloudWatch real-time monitoring, customizable dashboards, and proactive alerting help you use AWS resources and applications more efficiently and effectively. It’s a critically important, essential, and even foundational tool for keeping your operational health in check.
• With powerful analytics, native integration with AWS services, and application performance monitoring, Datadog is purpose-built to help you get the most efficiency and speed from your cloud environments.
• New Relic helps you gain a complete view of your AWS environment with real-time monitoring, distributed tracing, and easy-to-use dashboards to troubleshoot and optimize performance.
• Prometheus really shines on the collection and querying of metrics. Its integration with Kubernetes is so seamless that it’s become a leading choice for monitoring dynamic, containerized applications.
• Grafana allows you to build beautiful, customizable dashboards and centralizes the visualization of all your data by integrating with all of your favorite monitoring tools, including Prometheus.
• Splunk uses machine learning, security monitoring, and log analysis to provide valuable insights and predictive analytics for AWS environments.

AWS monitoring tools make it easy to monitor the performance, usage, and overall health of your cloud resources in real-time. These tools give you the deep understanding of your metrics such as CPU usage, memory utilization, and network activity to keep your infrastructure healthy.

From automated alerts to customizable dashboards, they make it easy to spot and fix potential problems before they affect users. Whether you want to monitor the health of your EC2 instances or check how cost-efficient you are, AWS monitoring tools can do it all.

Other popular solutions are Amazon CloudWatch, Datadog, and New Relic, providing their own distinct features suited for various use cases. Whether you’re taking care of an indie app or a massive enterprise architecture, these tools help you maximize your AWS infrastructure.

1. Amazon CloudWatch  

Amazon CloudWatch provides real-time monitoring for AWS resources and applications, so you can maintain high performance and availability. Custom dashboards give you personalized insights, showing you the metrics that matter most to you, whether that’s user activity, memory usage, or error rate.

Alarms to Notify When Thresholds are Breached. Alarms are a key component of any proactive alarm and event management system. Combined with one-second visibility, 15 months of data retention, and metric math, CloudWatch makes analyzing trends and troubleshooting issues a breeze.

Its near real-time event streams highlight infrastructure changes, while collected logs and debugging data help resolve issues like crashes or latencies. Container Insights metrics take anomaly detection a step further, so you can avoid downtime before it occurs.

Holistic perspectives remove unnecessary pipelines, accelerating project timelines and saving money.

2. Datadog  

Datadog provides rich end-to-end visibility across dynamic, microservices architectures with seamless integrations into AWS services. It further aggregates those metrics such as VolumeIdleTime and VolumeReadBytes to give you a complete centralized view of your AWS ecosystem.

Advanced analytics visualize data trends, such as container memory utilization or EBS health checks every five minutes, ensuring performance clarity. Automated alerts prevent issues before they become serious by alerting you to spikes in database connections or disk I/O latency.

Application Performance Monitoring (APM) isolates where the bottlenecks are occurring so you can focus on optimizing the user experience first. For instance, keeping an eye on bytes read from and written to volumes ensures you don’t run into unexpected usage.

Datadog’s deep, nuanced monitoring gives you the granular insight into AWS metrics you need, while still providing the big picture visibility.

3. New Relic  

New Relic offers the most powerful real-time monitoring for applications and infrastructure, empowering teams with complete observability across their entire environment. Its distributed tracing feature quickly identifies performance bottlenecks, so you can focus on optimizing application efficiency.

Custom, detailed dashboards let you dive deep down into user interactions and overall system health. They show the most important metrics like S3 bucket sizes, GET requests, and object counts.

Alerting tools help teams respond quickly to anomalies, reducing any potential downtime. Deep AWS integration ensures seamless telemetry data collection, supporting 90% of companies monitoring AWS services.

With resources such as New Relic Docs and New Relic University, even novices can take full advantage of its power. Its SaaS-based delivery makes it incredibly easy to access and use.

4. Prometheus  

Prometheus does a great job of collecting and storing metrics in a time-series database and retrieving that data quickly for monitoring purposes. Its powerful query language means you can easily analyze performance trends over time, making it an incredibly flexible tool for visualizing any metric you want.

Easily integrating with Kubernetes native tooling, Prometheus dynamically discovers and monitors containerized applications, including AWS services such as EKS, ECS, and Fargate. Real-time alerting rules can help notify teams of critical issues, increasing operational responsiveness.

Though not purpose-built for logs or traces, its simplicity and usability in Kubernetes-based environments are key. All Free Tier customers can access up to 40 million metric samples per month for free.

5. Grafana  

Grafana’s real strength lies in its ability to create beautiful dashboards that can pull monitoring data from a wide variety of sources. Amazon Managed Grafana takes care of the provisioning, scaling, and maintenance for you, making it easy to build and share insights with Grafana.

By integrating with Prometheus and Amazon CloudWatch, you’re able to centralize your metrics, logs, and traces. This integration allows organizations to have a single view across both on-premises and cloud applications.

Alerts can be customized for specific thresholds to ensure faster responses, with alerts delivered through Amazon SNS or Slack. Because it’s so easy to share dashboards, it increases transparency organization-wide, which is important for DBAs and DevOps teams alike.

The intuitive user interface makes it easy to set up and manage dashboards, simplifying application health monitoring.

6. Splunk  

Then, Splunk goes further by providing the ability to analyze all machine data from AWS environments in one place— providing actionable insights to maximize efficiency and performance. Its robust search functionality allows you to troubleshoot and solve problems quickly and easily.

Security monitoring features enhance the protection of cloud resources, ensuring that any weaknesses can be quickly identified and patched. Powered by machine learning, Splunk automatically detects anomalies and delivers predictive analytics to help you manage proactively before issues impact your business.

To help with this, Splunk is all in on OpenTelemetry and we monitor things such as disk usage and request tracing. Its infrastructure monitoring figures out percent changes and disk utilization as well as sending you alerts through Slack, PagerDuty or email.

Built on an open, extensible platform, Splunk makes it easy to share data across environments.

7. Dynatrace  

Dynatrace’s AI-driven monitoring automatically identifies applications performance issues before they affect users, eliminating the need for teams to spend hours manually troubleshooting. Your complete full-stack monitoring follows the journey from frontend user interactions all the way through backend processes.

It offers unique perspective into AWS public cloud, Outposts, and on-premises data centers business. When integrated with CI/CD pipelines, it helps provide ongoing and continuous tracking as the development cycles continue.

Predictive analytics helps detect traffic anomalies and automatically scale your AWS services accordingly. Auto-baselining learns thresholds automatically with no complex setup required.

In-depth reports identify app performance, user metrics, cost savings with Grail, and even carbon footprint forecasting. App Security adds value by continuously finding vulnerabilities across all AWS services in a timely manner.

8. Sumo Logic  

Today, Sumo Logic is unique with its cloud-native log management, enabling users to easily and cost-effectively analyze and visualize logs created by AWS services. It can collect data from backend sources including infrastructure, hosts, and load balancers.

It then combines this data with CrowdStrike’s threat intelligence to deliver robust security insights. With real-time analytics, you can easily monitor your application’s performance and security, and custom dashboards put key trends and metrics right at your fingertips.

Anomalies in logs are automatically detected with machine learning technology, immediately identifying potential issues so you can act quickly. With its AWS integrations, Lambda function support, and centralized data hub Sumo Logic is all about reliability and security.

Awarded with AWS Service Ready designations, Sumo Logic cuts security threat response times by up to 90%.

9. Nagios  

Nagios provides powerful monitoring for all of the servers, applications, and networks that your critical systems depend on – keeping your most important infrastructure constantly monitored. Alerts can be set up to bring a team’s immediate attention to any disruptions or slowness of performance, reducing potential downtime.

The plugin ecosystem supercharges capabilities for specific AWS services like EC2 and S3. It additionally facilitates critical tasks, such as bandwidth analysis and vulnerability scanning. Comparative and historical performance data becomes fairly simple to analyze through detailed reports, helping to identify and inform trends.

Originally NetSaint, Nagios Core is extensible through third-party integrations and serves as the foundation for enterprise-level Nagios XI, relied on by enterprises such as Sony and Comcast. Its monitoring score is indeed lower than AWS CloudWatch, but its monitoring plugin flexibility is still a big benefit in its favor.

10. AppDynamics  

Finally, AppDynamics provides real-time application performance monitoring to ensure maximum availability. By monitoring business transactions, it allows you to drill down user experiences, revealing how each interaction contributes to the growing performance.

Root cause analysis tools help you identify and remediate the source of problems quickly, greatly reducing time and resource costs. Its cloud monitoring features are best-in-class, particularly in hybrid environments.

With AppDynamics, monitoring performance across on-prem and cloud environments is just as simple. For example, with AppOptics, you get out-of-the-box, real-time visibility into serverless architectures, hosts, and containers so that you never miss a thing.

11. LogicMonitor  

Additionally, LogicMonitor features unique automated, intent-based monitoring for cloud, infrastructure, and applications. Because it monitors every performance metric, not a single detail is left out. Customizable dashboards make it easy to visualize key data, offering clear insights into metrics and alerts tailored to specific needs.

Predictive analytics is another key feature, allowing you to predict possible performance problems before they become a major issue. Beyond that, the tool automatically integrates with nearly all AWS services, providing visibility and monitoring capabilities throughout the entire stack.

Integration with CloudWatch improves visibility into workloads. This unique capability combined with automatic discovery and monitoring makes it a powerful tool to manage sprawling AWS environments.

12. Zabbix  

In addition to its versatility, Zabbix provides flexible, open-source monitoring for any IT infrastructure, including AWS. It offers seamless integration, which makes it a reliable option for monitoring system health across hybrid cloud environments.

When paired with triggers and notifications, it allows you to resolve issues before your users even notice. For example, you can configure alerts for high CPU usage or network outages, reducing interruptions before they happen.

Pre-built templates make AWS monitoring configuration easy, letting you save time and reduce manual setup. In-depth reporting makes it easy to gauge performance trends, such as the use of storage or bandwidth, so you can better allocate resources long-term.

13. AWS X-Ray  

With AWS X-Ray, tracing requests through applications is easy and helps you quickly identify performance bottlenecks. Once developed, these detailed service maps vividly illustrate how services depend on and interact with one another.

This combined platform offers the most holistic view of your application’s architecture. Its power to drill down latency and error rates gives you actionable insights to improve performance.

AWS X-Ray works out of the box with AWS Lambda, offering deep visibility into your serverless applications. With this powerful integration, debugging and finding issues in real-time has never been easier.

For instance, you can follow a user request from beginning to end, pinpointing where lag occurs in certain functions.

14. Elastic Stack  

In addition, Elastic Stack provides powerful solutions to make AWS monitoring a breeze. Elasticsearch is what allows you to perform complex searches and analysis of your log data, so you can quickly find patterns, anomalies, and potential problems.

Using Kibana, it’s possible to create powerful visualizations and dashboards that transform your data into clear, actionable insights. Beats and Logstash make gathering data way easier by moving the data to us, from all the different servers, applications, and other things, in the format we need it.

With machine learning features for basic operations monitoring, you can easily spot anomalies like never before using this log data. They flag suspicious behavior before it develops into an issue.

15. SolarWinds  

SolarWinds makes it easy to monitor performance across AWS environments and hybrid cloud configurations. It helps you track metrics such as CPU usage, memory, and storage, allowing you to quickly identify bottlenecks.

Its network performance tools ensure seamless connectivity and reliable operation, perfect for keeping your operations running around the clock. You can create alerts for any key metric, whether it’s latency or sudden surges in traffic. In this manner, you are one step ahead of future problems.

In-depth reports tell you what resources are being used and long-term trends are available for effective capacity planning and optimization. For instance, you can pinpoint over-provisioned instances to save money without sacrificing performance.

16. CloudHealth  

CloudHealth enables users to better manage and optimize their cloud costs by providing insights into cloud usage patterns and resource allocation. For instance, pinpointing underutilized instances or deprecated use of storage can eliminate wasteful spending.

It allows for detailed governance policies to govern the use of cloud resources to ensure that teams are compliant and not overspending. Their reporting tools begin to show trends in spending, shine a light on opportunities to save money, and help produce actionable insights.

Integration with other cloud providers, such as AWS and Azure, provides a single pane of glass dashboard for improved visibility across environments. This ensures that working with complicated environments is faster and easier.

17. PagerDuty  

PagerDuty simplifies incident management by automating incident workflows to ensure your teams are focused on responding rapidly to alerts and incidents. It enables teams to build context-rich workflows to automatically route tasks, set assignment priorities and escalate incidents.

PagerDuty’s on-call scheduling feature guarantees that there is always someone—ideally the most qualified person—available to handle your most critical problems. This eliminates costly delays in resolution.

Its integration with monitoring tools like CloudWatch centralizes notifications, making it easier to track and respond to alerts from one platform. Creating detailed incident reports can improve postmortem analysis of patterns, growing a strategy of response and a plan to minimize future downtime.

This proactive approach ensures greater operational efficiency and reliability.

18. Opsgenie  

Opsgenie makes it easy to manage alerts and incidents with notifications you can customize to fit your team’s workflow. Configure alerts to automatically escalate if they’re not responded to in certain time intervals. This makes sure that not a single critical issue passes undetected.

Its on-call scheduling feature makes sure you always have coverage by rotating responsibilities seamlessly, preventing any dangerous delays during emergencies. Integration with tools like CloudWatch or Datadog centralizes alerts, making it easier to track and manage everything from one platform.

Opsgenie’s incident analysis tools help you learn what went right—and what didn’t, so your team can refine processes and respond more quickly next time.

19. Checkly  

All in all, Checkly is a robust solution for API and web application monitoring, ensuring that uptime and performance are always on track.

It enables you to configure synthetic monitoring to simulate actual user behavior, identifying issues before users do. For example, you can test complex login flows or test long checkout processes to make sure they all work seamlessly.

Its monitoring and alerting features notify teams immediately when performance is degraded, so issues are resolved before they affect users or customers.

Additionally, Checkly produces in-depth reports, allowing you to deeply analyze your API response times and monitor your performance trends over time with accuracy.

These insights are the key to making the optimization of your services remarkably easy.

20. Thundra  

Thundra makes monitoring & troubleshooting serverless applications easier, so they perform and work as expected. It leverages powerful distributed tracing to identify performance bottlenecks in your serverless architectures. This allows you to quickly find and fix your slow functions or lagging workflows.

With dimension logging features out of the box, observability is taken to new heights. It captures contextually-rich logs for serverless functions that make debugging simple. Performance metrics such as execution time, memory usage, error rates, etc., offer clear examples of where to focus your efforts to improve your application’s deployment.

For instance, you can identify a function that is over the memory limit you set. You can then increase the resources, avoiding crashing or wasted CPU cycles.

21. Scout APM  

Scout APM is designed to make it dead simple to monitor application performance and help you quickly identify slow transactions and app bottlenecks. Digging into the detailed traces shows you precisely where the delays are occurring. For example, you can quickly tell when a database query is taking longer than it should.

With real-time insights, developers can change code to ensure things run smoothly, keeping your users happy and directly impacting user experience. Alerts, when added to performance monitoring, make sure issues are identified as soon as they occur, minimizing or even preventing downtime.

Comprehensive reports that monitor progress in real-time give you a nice bird’s eye view of progress, highlighting aggregate wins such as better load times and boosted efficiency. These features combined make it a powerful APM for performance optimization.

22. SignalFx  

SignalFx delivers smart real-time analytics to monitor and understand dynamic cloud infrastructure and applications. It analyzes performance data in real-time, allowing you to identify trouble spots as they occur.

Dynamic alerting are your eyes and ears, keeping you in the loop by creating thresholds that dynamically change according to performance metrics.

SignalFx’s interactive dashboards help you visualize even the most complex monitoring data, bringing out trends and key insights at a glance.

SignalFx plugs into all of your data sources to give you a unified view of your systems from one place. For instance, correlating AWS metrics with custom application data means that you never miss an important signal.

23. CloudTrail  

CloudTrail provides a record of the actions taken by a user, role, or an AWS service, providing security, compliance, and governance benefits. By enabling logging to an S3 bucket, it generates immutable audit trails of all API actions taken.

Then you can analyze these logs to detect abnormal behavior. Be on the lookout for potential threats, including unauthorized access attempts or unexpected configuration changes.

CloudTrail works effortlessly with other monitoring solutions to provide greater security awareness and a strong overall monitoring environment. By pairing it with Amazon CloudWatch you can receive immediate alerts for any unusual behaviors in your API calls.

This increases your security posture by leaps and bounds.

24. Sematext  

Second, Sematext provides a single platform to monitor your cloud infrastructure and applications effortlessly together. With its log management capabilities, you can easily correlate logs to identify and troubleshoot issues in no time.

By configuring alerts that are triggered from your important key performance indicators, you can be sure to keep your systems healthy and operational 24/7.

Sematext allows you to generate comprehensive reports on resource usage that can help inform your decision-making. These powerful insights allow you to better plan for and improve your performance trends.

For instance, monitoring CPU consumption or memory use becomes incredibly simple and the information is easy to read.

25. Instana  

Instana is the only solution that delivers automatic, continuous monitoring of microservices, giving you smooth application performance—no manual configuration required. It employs real-time tracing to identify where bottlenecks occur, allowing businesses to take immediate action to resolve issues.

By monitoring user experience metrics, it provides real-time insights to help you maximize application responsiveness and reliability. The tool integrates smoothly with popular cloud services such as AWS, Google Cloud, and Azure.

With this integration, Instana provides a single monitoring experience across all platforms. For instance, it’s deep integration with AWS Lambda guarantees visibility across all serverless workloads, which simplifies management of increasingly complex environments.

With these smart capabilities, Instana makes performance management easier than ever before, providing the most actionable data to maximize efficiency.

Conclusion  

The best AWS monitoring tools reduce the burden of operating complex AWS environments while improving security and reducing costs. There’s a lot to explore with each tool, with features ranging from real-time alerts to in-depth analytics. Selecting the best one for your use case will be based on the needs of your team or organization. Products like Datadog and AWS CloudWatch are excellent for high-level, wide-ranging monitoring, but tools like Prometheus or Grafana will take you further in terms of customization. Many tools as well connect easily with each other, providing you the ability to create a monitoring stack that works like a well-oiled machine.

Saving time and avoiding downtime starts with investing in the right tools. It allows your teams to be proactive and increases the overall performance of your systems. Browse your options, play around with their tools, and discover the things that work best for you. Being proactive with monitoring you can trust leads to better operations and a deeper sense of security.

Frequently Asked Questions  

What are the best AWS monitoring tools for beginners?  

Amazon CloudWatch and AWS X-Ray are great tools for beginners. They work well with AWS, provide real-time monitoring, and have an easy-to-use interface.

How does Datadog compare to Amazon CloudWatch?  

Datadog offers deeper analytics capabilities and multi-cloud monitoring support, but CloudWatch is better if you want a native AWS solution for basic AWS monitoring.

Can Grafana be used for AWS monitoring?  

Yes, Grafana has an integration for AWS, including CloudWatch. Grafana Cloud provides powerful, customizable dashboards and visualizations to help you see and understand your data.

Is Prometheus suitable for large-scale AWS environments?  

Is Prometheus great for large-scale environments. It shines in time-series data and Kubernetes-based AWS environments.

Why use Splunk for AWS monitoring?  

Splunk excels at log management and complex analytics. It has native support for AWS integrations such as CloudTrail and CloudWatch.

What makes Dynatrace a strong AWS monitoring option?  

Dynatrace’s AI-powered automatic root cause analysis and its hyper-scalability makes it the most powerful AWS application monitoring tool on the planet.

Which AWS monitoring tool offers proactive alerting?  

PagerDuty and Opsgenie are both fabulous tools for proactive alerting and incident response that get you on the path to resolving issues quickly.