Navigating the Cloud: A Guide to the Top 10 AWS Monitoring Tools in 2024

Established in 2002, Amazon Web Services (AWS) is the market leader on cloud infrastructure services, with a 32% market share. It offers a long list of services to companies worldwide, from simple data storage to advanced machine learning features. It is safe to say that a large percentage of the internet “runs” on AWS.

As such, monitoring the health and efficiency of your AWS resources has become crucial. That’s where monitoring tools step in to provide invaluable insights into your cloud environment.

In this article, we will discuss the reasons to invest in AWS monitoring, the benefits it may bring, how to choose the correct tool for your needs, and explore 10 solutions designed to empower businesses with real-time visibility, proactive alerts, and advanced analytics.

Whether you’re a seasoned AWS user looking to enhance your monitoring strategy or a newcomer seeking guidance, we hope that this article will be an invaluable resource. Join us as we explore 10 of the best AWS monitoring tools.

Frequently Asked Questions About AWS Monitoring

What are AWS Monitoring Tools?

AWS monitoring tools are tools that can be used to monitor the performance and availability of components of the Amazon Web Services platform, a suite of cloud computing services offered by Amazon.

These can range from simple service availability monitors to more sophisticated tools that can deliver deep insight into the performance of your applications and services running or hosted on the AWS.

That is a tall order, since AWS is composed of tens of services, and most tools aren’t capable of monitoring every single one of them. However, most support the “most popular” services like Elastic Cloud Computing (EC2), Relational Database Services (RDS), Simple Storage Service (S3), etc. We recommend that you check with the developer of each tool for more information on specific features.

Amazon offers its own AWS Monitoring software, like AWS CloudWatch, AWS CloudTrail, AWS Config and AWS Inspector. However, in this article, we are focusing on third-party tools, that may offer better integration with heterogeneous IT infrastructures, like multi-cloud or hybrid monitoring, extra features like application performance monitoring (APM), and more.

Why Should You Invest in AWS Monitoring?

There are many reasons to invest in AWS Monitoring. Here are five of them, in no particular order.

1. Performance optimization: continuous monitoring can help you pinpoint issues and identify opportunities for optimization that will improve the performance of your AWS infrastructure, sometimes without the need for upgrades.

2. Security: monitoring allows you to spot early signs of uncommon behavior or usage patterns indicative of an intrusion attempt or ongoing attack. This will give you time to react and deploy countermeasures before a data breach occurs.

3. Resource allocation: find out where resources are being underutilized or overutilized, allowing you to redistribute them according to real needs to ensure the most effective usage of your systems.

4. Proactive maintenance: monitoring allows you to detect and fix potential issues before they become critical and result in outages that may affect the performance of your applications or even the profitability of your business.

5. Regulatory compliance: businesses that handle sensitive information, like financial or healthcare data, need to meet strict regulatory standards that specify how this information is stored and handled. Monitoring will allow you to prove compliance with these standards and secure approvals that may be crucial to keeping your business running.

What to Look for When Choosing AWS Monitoring Tools?

Broadly speaking, there are 5 main features you need to look out for when choosing AWS Monitoring tools. Keep in mind that this may vary according to your specific needs.

• The capability to monitor many aspects of your AWS infrastructure, and the applications running on them, at once.
• A centralized display of information from many sensors for better observability. Customizable dashboards are a bonus.
• Customizable alerts and automated notifications when alerts are triggered. Many tools offer automation triggers based on alerts, which is nice to have.
• Native and automated reporting features so that you can keep co-workers and management “in the loop”.
• A free trial period, so you can see for yourself how the tool works with your network infrastructure.

How to do AWS Monitoring?

There are many AWS Monitoring tools, from as many different vendors, which may focus solely on a single aspect of the task or offer this capability as a subset of a broader range of features. We present a few of them below, in no particular order.

The Best AWS Monitoring Tools

PRTG

Paessler PRTG is often called the Swiss army knife of the monitoring world. It is based on basic monitoring elements called “sensors”. One sensor usually monitors one measured value in your network, e.g. the traffic of a switch port, the CPU load of a server, the free space of a disk drive, and so on.

PRTG includes six sensors specifically designed to monitor various AWS services: the AWS Alarm v2 Sensor for monitoring the status of AWS alarms, the AWS Cost Sensor for tracking account spending and forecasting costs, the AWS EBS v2 Sensor for monitoring the status and performance of Elastic Block Store volumes, the AWS EC2 v2 Sensor for monitoring Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud performance, the AWS ELB v2 Sensor for Elastic Load Balancing performance, and the AWS RDS v2 Sensor for the Amazon Relational Database Service.

However, you are not limited to that. As we said, PRTG includes more than 250 built-in sensors for various tasks, device types, and use cases, and they can be combined as needed, which opens monitoring possibilities. You can monitor Docker containers, databases, web servers, and much more hosted on AWS. Plus, you can even deploy custom sensors, to create monitoring solutions specific to your needs.

PRTG Network Monitor is available either with perpetual licenses (starting at US$ 1.899) or subscription licenses (starting at US$ 159 monthly), a flexible and affordable pricing scheme when compared with other tools. A 30-day free trial is available. There is also a free version for personal use that lets you monitor up to 100 sensors at no charge.

ManageEngine Applications Manager

ManageEngine Applications Manager is an application performance monitoring tool that can monitor various AWS services at once, including the Amazon EC2, RDS, S3, Elastic Load Balancing (Amazon ELB), Simple Notification Service (Amazon SNS), DynamoDB, Simple Queue Service (Amazon SQS), Lambda Service (AWS Lambda), Elastic Beanstalk Service (AWS Elastic Beanstalk), Elastic Container Service (AWS ECS) and Elastic Kubernetes Service (AWS EKS).

This tool can automatically discover on-premises and cloud instances in your network infrastructure, and map the dependencies between different tiers, allowing you to correlate performance insights between diverse components. Data is collected in real-time, and can be aggregated for historical analysis or growth forecasting.

A root cause analyzer will help you pinpoint the source of faults and resolve issues faster. Alerts (delivered by text, email, or Slack message) can be leveraged for automation using web hooks that allow you to start external actions based on specific conditions. For example, it is possible to auto-scale cloud resources based on system load, avoiding outages due to resource exhaustion during peak hours.

ManageEngine Applications Manager is SaaS (Software as a Service), with pricing available by quote. There is a 30-day free trial available for Windows and Linux. It is also available on the AWS and Azure marketplaces, and there are mobile apps for iOS and Android, so you can take your monitoring on the go.

Splunk

Splunk is an AI-powered observability and security platform based on a data streaming architecture that can help you prevent major issues, recover from incidents faster, and accelerate transformation, with tools to help you stay secure, compliant, and reliable.

It simplifies monitoring in AWS, providing real-time insights across infrastructure, applications, and customer experience, and offering complete visibility in one place, eliminating data silos and providing a unified view of all AWS instances.

Dynamic alert conditions, integrated workflows, and accurate outlier detection can help you cut through the noise and fix issues before they cause a major impact. Custom metrics can be used to power root cause analysis even across multiple deployment environments, and the use of open standards like Open Telemetry avoids vendor lock-in.

Splunk is SaaS, with a pricing scheme that varies by business plan. You can choose between pricing by workload, amount of data ingested, and number of entities or activities being monitored. A 14-day free trial of the cloud platform is available.

AppDynamics

Developed by Cisco, AppDynamics offers comprehensive AWS Monitoring and Full Stack Observability to accelerate cloud migration, ensuring high-performing user experiences and providing powerful metrics for end-to-end monitoring.

It offers unified application monitoring on AWS, covering various AWS technologies such as Lambda, ELB, CloudSearch, S3, RDS, EC2, EBS, and DynamoDB. With real-time data collection, it can automatically discover resources, generate a baseline for application performance, and show interactions between infrastructure components.

Data can be automatically ingested from AWS CloudWatch and correlated with “full-stack cloud service metrics and business insights”, allowing you to have a better understanding of the performance of your services and key business metrics. AI/ML features can perform automatic root cause analysis to avoid “alert storms” in microservices and container environments.

According to Cisco, the metrics collected by AppDynamics allow you to compare application performance before and after migration, helping you justify associated costs. As this tool is an “end-to-end” monitoring solution, capable of monitoring your on-premises, hybrid, or cloud-native infrastructure, there may even be cost reductions associated with the consolidation into a single tool.

AppDynamics is SaaS available in four subscription plans (Infrastructure Monitoring, Premium, Enterprise, and Enterprise for SAP), with prices starting at US$ 6 per month per CPU core for basic Infrastructure Monitoring. There is a free 15-day free trial available.

Site24x7 AWS Monitoring

Site24x7 offers a comprehensive cloud monitoring tool that incorporates artificial intelligence insights and IT automation to monitor cloud applications and services. It supports monitoring popular cloud platforms such as Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure, and Google Cloud Platform, providing centralized visibility and real-time data analysis.

This tool can help you correctly deploy and configure your resources according to the best practices, thanks to a Guidance Report with more than 150 checks to “find opportunities to reduce costs, increase fault tolerance, and close security gaps”. It can even recommend better instance categories based on usage, to help you save on costs.

A drag-and-drop interface and many visualization widgets allow the easy creation of custom dashboards to consolidate various metrics into a single pane of glass. It is possible to schedule automations based on alerts, and AI-powered insights can help you detect anomalies or prevent issues. Last, but not least, an Inventory Dashboard gives you a precise overview of your cloud service usage.

Site24x7 is SaaS, with prices varying by the kind of monitoring you want to do: website, infrastructure, application performance, etc. “All in One” monitoring is available in three plans (Pro, Classic and Enterprise), starting at US$ 35 per month. Keep in mind that several features (like Advanced Monitoring and Log Management) are available as add-ons, which can quickly drive up the price. There is a 30-day free trial available.

Nagios XI

Nagios XI is a complete IT Infrastructure Monitoring Tool that can monitor your network infrastructure (be it on-premises, hybrid, or in the cloud), applications, services, operating systems, network protocols, and more.

Out-of-the-box, it includes wizards that make it easy to monitor various metrics for the Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) and the Amazon Simple Storage Service (S3), allowing for increased availability and faster detection of issues and outages.

However, the real power of Nagios lies in a robust ecosystem with “thousands of community-developed add-ons that extend monitoring and native alerting functionality”, alongside multiple APIs that facilitate integration with in-house or third-party applications. This includes many plugins for monitoring various aspects of AWS.

The powerful and customizable web interface, combined with multi-user access, allows you to create user-specific views to enhance observability and collaboration, ensuring users only see the infrastructure components they’re authorized for, without risking exposure to sensitive information.

Nagios XI is available in four editions, Free, Standard, Enterprise, and Sitewide. Prices vary with the edition and the number of nodes to be monitored, starting at US$ 2.495 for monitoring 100 nodes on the Standard edition.

The free edition allows for the monitoring of 7 nodes or 100 services, “whichever comes first”. There is also Nagios Core, a fully free and open-source version, with fewer features and no technical support.

Zabbix

Zabbix is a free and Open Source monitoring package that can do a lot, including server, cloud, application, services, and network monitoring into one tool. It can automatically discover AWS components such as EC2 instances, EBS volumes, RDS instances and S3 buckets.

Discovered entities can be filtered by their attributes, allowing you to include or exclude particular ones from Zabbix. Custom dashboards and slideshows can be created to show the state of your cloud infrastructure, and flexible graphs can be used to analyze performance trends. Like Nagios XI, Zabbix has a plugin system that can expand its abilities far beyond what is included “in the box”.

Zabbix can do root-cause analysis, anomaly detection, and trend prediction, for quick resolution of existing issues or avoiding looming ones. The alerting system is very flexible, supporting not only SMS and email, but also modern communication platforms like Slack, Microsoft Teams, and Telegram, among others. Messages can even be customized according to the type and role of the recipient.

Zabbix is free to use, but you pay for the technical support. There are five support tiers (Silver, Gold, Platinum, Enterprise, and Global I), each one with different levels of availability, response times, and amount of incidents and support contacts. Prices are only available by quote.

SolarWinds Hybrid Cloud Observability

SolarWinds Hybrid Cloud Observability is a full-stack cloud observability platform designed to optimize performance, ensure availability, and reduce remediation time in on-premises and multi-cloud environments, offering comprehensive, integrated coverage across the network, cloud, infrastructure, application, and databases.

It can automatically discover all components of your infrastructure, including Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) instances and Amazon Elastic Block Store (EBS) volumes. Metrics collected from your AWS infrastructure are displayed alongside those for other components of your environment, giving you an integrated view of all your IT assets.

It is possible to incorporate data from other managed nodes into charts and graphs for visual overviews alongside cloud metrics, and drag and drop relevant data on adjustable timelines to better understand cloud performance issues. You can even terminate, stop, or reboot any AWS instance monitored as a node. Alerts can be automatically sent for throttling or polling issues, exceeded limits, or health status, with customizable thresholds to suit the needs of your environment.

SolarWinds Hybrid Cloud Observability is SaaS available in two service plans, Essential (offering integrated hybrid cloud observability) and Advanced (with full-stack observability), starting at US$ 5,60 per monitored node, per month, on the Essential plan. There is also a fully-functional, 30-day free trial available.

Datadog

Datadog offers comprehensive AWS monitoring services, providing deep visibility into complex environments, aiding in security, migration tracking, multi-cloud visibility, auto-scaling, cost management, and onboarding to AWS.

Multiple tools are available to help you track a migration to AWS. The Host Map can monitor real-time data such as CPU utilization and network throughput for all hosts, and the Database Monitoring feature can provide visibility into the health and performance of databases running in AWS or on-premises across all hosts.

A forecasting feature, based on Machine Learning, can be used to address issues before they become critical. For example, the memory usage of a new EC2 instance can be forecast and adjusted as needed before resources are exhausted.

The Service Map shows the flow of data along your infrastructure, from on-premises to AWS (or other cloud providers) and vice versa. Datadog can also auto-scale resources as needed, and has a Cost Management module to help you keep spending in check.

Datadog is SaaS available in 3 plans: Free, Pro and Enterprise, with prices starting at US$ 15 per month, per host, on the Pro plan. The Free plan is limited to 5 hosts and only retains metrics for 1 day. Keep in mind that features like Cloud Cost monitoring are charged separately.

Dynatrace

Dynatrace offers comprehensive AWS monitoring with automatic and intelligent observability, with support for tens of AWS services, like EC2, ECS, S3, Lambda, Fargate, EKS and much more. The platform supports hybrid environments, offering hands-free monitoring and real-time observability.

Installation is simplified with the Dynatrace OneAgent, requiring zero manual configuration. AI features can analyze problems rapidly, pinpointing underlying root causes in milliseconds, and alert noise is reduced by consolidating related performance issues into actionable notifications.

It can empower your DevOps teams, with “advanced observability throughout CI/CD software pipelines”​​, quality gates to avoid bad code from reaching production, automated deployment and automated operations, including self-mitigation and self-remediation. There are also analysis tools that can show the business impact of a device or user session, with a single view “from users and edge devices, to apps and cloud platforms”.

Dynatrace is SaaS, charged by the hour. Pricing for Infrastructure Monitoring starts at US$ 0,04 per hour, per host, but other features, like application security, log ingestion and user monitoring, are charged separately. There is a 15-day free trial available.

Conclusion

As we said, there are AWS monitoring tools of all kinds and sizes, for every monitoring need. But among all these, our favorite is Paessler PRTG. Why? Because of its versatility and clear and flexible licensing scheme, which avoids surprises typical to the variable pricing based on volume or usage employed by many other tools.

It “ticks all the boxes” in our list of desired characteristics, and streamlines your workflow by enabling you to monitor all of your infrastructure with a single tool. The built-in sensors cover many of the main use cases, without the need to purchase extras, so it can monitor your AWS infrastructure, but also your network, services, servers, IoT devices, cloud infrastructure, and much more.

And it is extensible: you can deploy third-party sensors, or even develop your own, to cover specific needs. That means you can do away with having to rely on a variety of individualized solutions, which can carry potential risks such as conflict with your current workflow and even network security issues.