Buyer’s Guide - October 2026

The 10 best AWS monitoring tools, ranked by people who read the bill

AWS monitoring splits into three jobs - performance, security and cost - and no single tool does all three well. This ranking covers performance and observability monitoring across EC2, RDS, EKS, Lambda and CloudWatch metrics, graded on service coverage, metric resolution, alerting quality and how the bill behaves as your fleet grows.

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The 10 best AWS monitoring tools, ranked by people who read the bill product interface

Why this list exists

AWS monitoring tools: three jobs, not one category

“AWS monitoring tools” is not one category. It mixes performance monitoring (CloudWatch, Datadog, Netdata), security monitoring (GuardDuty, Security Hub, CloudTrail, Inspector) and cost monitoring (Cost Explorer and the FinOps toolset). Buyers get burned twice here: first by assuming CloudWatch is effectively free, when its per-metric, per-dashboard, per-alarm and per-GB log charges scale quietly with fleet size; second by buying one tool for all three jobs, when performance, security and cost monitoring are genuinely different products. This page ranks performance and observability tools as cards, and covers AWS security monitoring tools honestly in the FAQ - no tool listed here, Netdata included, is a security product.

How to compare AWS performance monitoring tools

Three dimensions decide the outcome more than any feature checklist:

Resolution versus fleet shape. CloudWatch’s standard metrics are 1-minute, 5-minute at basic tier. On EC2 and EKS nodes, per-second agents catch microbursts and transient failures that minute averages smooth away. If your incidents are brief and your fleet is autoscaling, collection granularity matters more than dashboard count.
Pricing shape against your growth pattern. Per-host, per-GB-ingested, per-metric and per-monitor models all scale differently. Match the model to what grows in your environment - hosts, log volume or metric cardinality - before you sign anything.
What you do with the telemetry. Native AWS automation (SNS, Lambda, Auto Scaling) is a reason to keep CloudWatch in the stack regardless of what else you buy. Unified logs and traces alongside metrics is a reason to pick a platform over a metrics-only tool.

What we quote - and what we don’t

We do not quote competitor list prices in this guide. AWS monitoring pricing changes shape more often than it changes numbers, and any dollar figure we printed would be stale by the time you read it. Instead, each card describes the pricing model and what makes the bill grow, with a link to the vendor’s own pricing page. For the broader multi-cloud picture beyond AWS-specific tooling, see our best cloud monitoring tools ranking.

The shortlist was assembled from vendor documentation, official pricing pages, AWS integration catalogs and practitioner threads on r/aws and r/devops, where the same complaints about CloudWatch billing, Datadog cost stacking and dashboard UX recur across years. Every tool here has documented coverage of core AWS services; tools that only monitor uptime from outside the cloud were excluded.

AWS service coverage carries the most weight because a monitor that cannot see RDS or Lambda natively leaves the managed half of your estate blind. Metric granularity and cost predictability follow, because those are the two axes where buyers report actual regret - hidden microbursts and hidden bills. Alerting quality, signal unification and deployment effort round out the scoring.

Tester credit

Compiled by the Netdata team - Updated October 14, 2026

Sources verified

Scoring criteria

AWS service coverage 25%
Depth across EC2, RDS, EKS, Lambda, ELB and S3; native integrations versus generic API polling.
Metric granularity and real-time visibility 20%
Default collection resolution; per-second agents versus 1-minute CloudWatch averages.
Cost predictability 20%
Pricing shape and what makes the bill grow at fleet scale.
Alerting, anomaly detection and automation 15%
Out-of-the-box alerts, ML anomaly detection, SNS/Lambda/webhook hooks.
Logs and traces alongside metrics 10%
Whether metrics, logs and traces unify or need companion products.
Deployment effort and multi-account scaling 10%
Time to first dashboard, agent versus agentless, multi-account and autoscaling handling.

Vendor 01 / 10 · #netdata

Netdata

Per-second infrastructure monitoring for EC2 and EKS with zero-configuration discovery, on-node ML anomaly detection and predictable per-node pricing.

Best for

Teams running EC2 fleets and EKS clusters who want per-second visibility without building dashboards or writing queries.
Organizations burned by CloudWatch or per-GB observability bills that want predictable per-node costs.
SRE teams that want metrics, logs and OpenTelemetry traces collected by one agent with on-node ML anomaly detection.

Pricing

Per-node: Netdata Cloud Business from $4.5/node/month on annual plans, with the per-node price decreasing as node count grows.
Agents are open source under GPLv3+ and free to run anywhere, on AWS or off it.
Community plan is free for personal, non-commercial use with up to 5 active connected nodes; businesses use the open-source Agent or Cloud Business with a 14-day trial.
Not billed: metrics volume, Logs Monitoring (querying logs in place), users, data retention, containers. Logs Management is in Free Preview.

Pros

1-second metric collection on every node where the agent runs, catching microbursts and transient failures that CloudWatch 1-minute averages hide.
Installs on an EC2 instance or EKS node in about a minute with auto-discovery of services, containers, databases and applications - no dashboards to build.
Amazon CloudWatch collector discovers AWS resources and turns CloudWatch metrics into per-resource charts for a curated set of AWS services.
Unsupervised ML anomaly detection trains on the node itself, so raw telemetry stays on the host and detection adapts as infrastructure changes.
Logs Monitoring queries systemd-journal in place on every node; Logs Management collects any source through the OpenTelemetry Collector.
Ingests OpenTelemetry traces over OTLP (gRPC and HTTP), stored and indexed on your own agents, explored in the Netdata Cloud Traces tab with heatmap, RED analysis and waterfall views.

Where teams pair it

Managed and serverless services (RDS, Lambda, S3, DynamoDB) are monitored through the CloudWatch API collector, so their resolution is limited to what CloudWatch publishes (typically 1-minute) and coverage is a curated service set. The 1-second granularity applies to nodes running the agent.
Not a security product: no GuardDuty-class threat detection, Security Hub posture management or CloudTrail audit logging, so AWS security monitoring needs AWS-native tools alongside it.
No AWS cost management or FinOps features - billing analysis and rightsizing stay with Cost Explorer or a dedicated FinOps tool.

Verdict

Netdata leads this list because it fixes the two things AWS teams actually struggle with: visibility and bill shock. Per-second collection on every EC2 instance and EKS node surfaces the transient failures that minute-resolution monitoring misses, and per-node pricing stays flat while telemetry volume grows. The CloudWatch collector covers managed services at CloudWatch’s own resolution, which is the honest limit - it is a compute-layer strength, not a managed-service microscope. Pair it with CloudWatch for native AWS automation and with GuardDuty and Security Hub for the security side, and you have full coverage without a volume-based bill.

Get started with Netdata -> See AWS monitoring with Netdata ->

Vendor 02 / 10 · #cloudwatch

Amazon CloudWatch

AWS’s native monitoring service: metrics, logs, alarms and dashboards for every AWS service, with deep integration and usage-based billing.

Best for

Teams that want zero extra vendors and native integration with every AWS service, SNS and Lambda automation.
Organizations with compliance requirements that keep telemetry inside their AWS account.
Simple workloads where 1-minute resolution and basic alarms are sufficient.

Pricing

Usage-based: billed per metric stored, per dashboard, per alarm, per API request and per GB of logs ingested and stored.
Costs grow with detailed monitoring, custom metrics, high-resolution metrics, log volume and Container Insights overhead.
Free tier covers basic 5-minute metrics with limited alarms and dashboards; anything detailed is paid.
No seat licensing - the bill is driven entirely by telemetry volume and feature usage.

Pros

Native integration with every AWS service - no credential plumbing, IAM role gymnastics or agents for service-level metrics.
Alarms trigger native automation (SNS, Lambda, Auto Scaling) directly inside AWS.
CloudWatch Logs, Logs Insights, Application Signals and ServiceLens cover logs and APM-adjacent views in one AWS-native place.
Cross-service dashboards and built-in anomaly detection.

Cons

Standard metrics are 1-minute at best (5-minute basic), hiding microbursts and transient failures; high-resolution custom metrics cost more.
Usage-based billing is notoriously hard to predict; log ingestion and Container Insights charges surprise growing fleets.
Dashboards and Logs Insights have a steep configuration learning curve - r/aws threads repeatedly ask for friendlier alternatives.
Monitoring non-AWS or on-prem components alongside AWS requires extra work.

Verdict

CloudWatch is the baseline every AWS team already has, and for native automation it is irreplaceable - nothing else fires an Auto Scaling policy or SNS workflow as directly. Its limits are equally well documented: coarse default resolution, a configuration-heavy console, and a bill assembled from a dozen usage dimensions that nobody models correctly in advance. The common pattern on r/aws is keeping CloudWatch for service metrics and automation while adding a third-party tool for dashboards, granularity and cross-stack visibility. Budget for it as a metered utility, not a flat service.

Read full Netdata vs CloudWatch -> CloudWatch pricing ->

Vendor 03 / 10 · #datadog

Datadog

The broadest commercial observability platform for AWS, with 75+ AWS service integrations spanning metrics, logs, traces and security.

Best for

Mid-size to large teams that want one platform for AWS plus multi-cloud, Kubernetes and application monitoring.
Organizations that value the widest integration catalog and mature dashboards, monitors and SLO tooling.
Teams with budget authority who accept premium pricing for breadth.

Pricing

Per-host, per-month licensing for infrastructure monitoring, with separate bills for APM, logs (per GB ingested), RUM, synthetics and security products.
Bill grows with host count, container count, log volume, custom metrics and each module switched on.
Limited free tier capped by host count and retention.
Multi-year and volume discounts available at scale.

Pros

75+ AWS service integrations within a 900+ total integration catalog - the deepest third-party AWS coverage available.
Unified platform: infrastructure metrics, APM, logs, RUM, synthetics and cloud security in one UI.
Mature AWS-specific views for EC2, RDS, Lambda, ECS/EKS, ELB, billing and CloudWatch metric streaming.
Strong out-of-the-box dashboards and monitors for AWS services with minimal setup.

Cons

Pricing is the most common complaint: per-host plus per-GB log ingestion plus per-module add-ons stack quickly, and r/devops users call the pricing perplexing.
Costs escalate sharply once logs, APM and security modules are enabled on autoscaling fleets.
Agent-based model adds an agent to every host, which some teams resist on managed or restricted instances.
Feature depth varies by module - capabilities competitors bundle are billed separately here.

Verdict

Datadog earns its rank on coverage: no third-party tool sees more of AWS, and the unified platform genuinely reduces the number of vendors a large team manages. The friction is financial, not technical. Every module you enable is another line item, and autoscaling fleets make the per-host component move monthly. Teams with budget authority and a broad estate get real value; cost-sensitive teams should model the full stack of modules before committing, because the sticker price and the invoice are rarely the same number.

Read full Netdata vs Datadog -> Datadog pricing ->

Vendor 04 / 10 · #grafana-cloud

Grafana Cloud

Managed Grafana, Prometheus, Loki and Tempo with AWS integrations and a genuinely usable free tier - the natural home for Prometheus-centric teams.

Best for

Teams already using Prometheus or Grafana dashboards that want a managed backend for AWS metrics.
Cost-conscious teams that want a real free tier and usage-based scaling.
Organizations standardizing on open observability standards (Prometheus, OpenTelemetry, Loki).

Pricing

Usage-based: free tier with a monthly ingest allowance and limited retention; paid plans bill per GB of logs, per active metric series, per profile GB and per user.
Adaptive Metrics and Adaptive Logs reduce bills by dropping or aggregating unused series and log volume.
Bill grows with active series cardinality and log ingest more than with host count.
The self-hosted Grafana, Prometheus, Loki and Mimir stack is the open-source alternative to the managed cloud.

Pros

AWS integration via the CloudWatch data source and Amazon Managed Service for Prometheus compatibility; EC2, RDS, EKS and Lambda metrics all plottable.
Best-in-class dashboarding with the huge Grafana dashboard and plugin ecosystem.
Unified managed stack: Prometheus (Mimir), Loki logs, Tempo traces and profiling.
Free tier with access to the full Grafana Cloud feature set.

Cons

You assemble the monitoring yourself: dashboards, recording rules and AWS data sources need setup, unlike the turnkey AWS integrations in Datadog or Netdata.
AWS metric cardinality can drive active-series costs up without Adaptive Metrics tuning.
Alerting and anomaly detection are capable but require configuration; no on-node ML.
Support quality on lower tiers is community-level.

Verdict

Grafana Cloud is the best answer for teams that already think in PromQL and dashboards. The free tier is real enough to run a small environment on, and the managed Mimir, Loki and Tempo stack removes the hardest parts of self-hosting. For AWS specifically it is less turnkey than the platforms ranked above it: you wire up data sources and build the views yourself, and CloudWatch-polled metrics inherit CloudWatch’s resolution. If your team enjoys that assembly work, nothing here beats it on flexibility per dollar.

Read full Netdata vs Grafana -> Grafana Cloud pricing ->

Vendor 05 / 10 · #newrelic

New Relic

Full-stack observability priced by data ingested rather than per host, with solid AWS integrations and a monthly data allowance that gets teams started.

Best for

Teams that prefer ingest-based pricing over per-host pricing, especially with spiky or autoscaling fleets.
Organizations wanting APM and infrastructure monitoring under one usage bill.
Smaller teams starting on the free tier and scaling into paid usage.

Pricing

Usage-based: billed per GB ingested plus per full-platform user seat, with compute units for advanced capabilities.
Free tier includes a monthly data allowance and one full-platform user; additional users billed per seat.
Data retention tiers priced differently; the bill grows with ingest volume and user count, not host count.
Synthetic checks beyond the included amount are billed per check.

Pros

AWS integrations for EC2, RDS, Lambda, EKS and ELB, plus CloudWatch metric streaming through the AWS integration.
Strong APM: distributed tracing, service maps and error analysis alongside infrastructure metrics.
Per-GB model means autoscaling fleets are not penalized per host.
The free tier’s monthly data allowance is frequently cited on r/devops as the reason teams pick it.

Cons

Per-GB ingest pricing punishes high-volume log and metric senders; costs become opaque at scale.
User-seat pricing adds up for large teams needing full-platform access.
AWS integration setup (IAM roles, polling intervals) is more involved than native CloudWatch.
UI breadth can be overwhelming, and some AWS-specific views are shallower than Datadog’s.

Verdict

New Relic’s ingest-based model is the interesting part of its AWS story: fleets that double during a launch and shrink after do not pay per host for the peak. The trade is that your bill tracks telemetry volume instead, which is easier to forecast for metrics and harder for logs. APM depth is genuinely good, and the free tier is a legitimate evaluation path rather than a demo. Model your log volume carefully - that is where ingest pricing stops being friendly.

Read full Netdata vs New Relic -> New Relic pricing ->

Vendor 06 / 10 · #dynatrace

Dynatrace

Enterprise observability with the Davis AI causation engine and automatic full-stack instrumentation, including deep AWS and Kubernetes coverage.

Best for

Large enterprises needing AI-driven root-cause analysis across complex hybrid and AWS estates.
Organizations with strict SLAs that want automatic discovery and dependency mapping without manual dashboards.
Teams consolidating APM, infrastructure, logs and digital experience under one enterprise contract.

Pricing

Modular per-capacity licensing: per host for full-stack monitoring, per pod for Kubernetes, per GB for logs, plus separately priced RUM and security modules.
Bill grows with hosts, pods and each module enabled; enterprise contracts are typically negotiated.
No meaningful free tier - trials only.
Consumption-based options exist for cloud workloads.

Pros

Davis AI performs topology-aware causal root-cause analysis, not just threshold alerting.
OneAgent auto-instruments hosts, applications and AWS services with dependency mapping out of the box.
Deep Kubernetes and EKS monitoring with per-pod pricing and full-stack context.
AWS integrations cover EC2, RDS, Lambda and more via CloudWatch and native extensions.

Cons

Premium enterprise pricing; per-host and per-pod charges make large autoscaling fleets expensive.
Heavier footprint and more operational complexity than lightweight agents.
Overkill for small teams; contract-led purchasing slows adoption.
Many managed AWS services are still covered through CloudWatch polling.

Verdict

Dynatrace is the enterprise answer when root-cause analysis across a large, hybrid estate is the buying criterion - Davis AI’s causal engine is a real differentiator over threshold alerting, and OneAgent’s automatic discovery removes the dashboard-building phase entirely. The cost structure matches the ambition: per-host, per-pod, per-module, negotiated by contract. Organizations under a few hundred nodes will find the price and the platform heavier than their problem.

Read full Netdata vs Dynatrace -> Dynatrace pricing ->

Vendor 07 / 10 · #prometheus

Prometheus + Grafana (self-hosted)

The open-source monitoring standard: Prometheus scrapes and stores metrics, Grafana visualizes them, and CloudWatch exporters bridge AWS services.

Best for

Engineering teams with Kubernetes expertise that want full control and no vendor lock-in.
Organizations standardizing on OpenMetrics and Prometheus exposition across clouds.
Cost-sensitive teams willing to trade operational effort for license-free software.

Pricing

Open source and self-hosted - you run and operate it, and the costs are infrastructure, storage and engineering time.
Spend grows with cluster size, retention and the operational burden of running Prometheus, Thanos or Mimir and Grafana at scale.
No license fees; commercial support available through third parties and managed offerings.
Cardinality explosions are the classic hidden cost - storage grows with label combinations.

Pros

De facto standard for Kubernetes and EKS monitoring, with a huge exporter ecosystem including CloudWatch exporters for AWS services.
Powerful PromQL query language and alerting via Alertmanager.
Grafana provides mature visualization on top.
Fully portable across AWS, other clouds and on-prem.

Cons

You build and operate everything: HA, long-term storage, dashboards and AWS exporters are all DIY.
AWS managed-service metrics (RDS, Lambda, ELB) require CloudWatch exporter plumbing and inherit CloudWatch’s 1-minute resolution.
No built-in logs or traces - you add Loki, Tempo or Jaeger yourself.
No anomaly detection or ML without add-ons.

Verdict

Prometheus plus Grafana remains the default for EKS workloads, and for good reason: nothing else matches the ecosystem or the portability. The honest cost accounting is operational. High availability, long-term storage, exporter maintenance for AWS managed services and dashboard upkeep are all engineering hours, and they scale with your fleet. Teams that already run Kubernetes well absorb this easily; teams buying monitoring to reduce operational load should look at the managed options ranked above.

Read full Netdata vs Prometheus -> Prometheus site ->

Vendor 08 / 10 · #site24x7

Site24x7

Affordable SaaS monitoring with per-monitor licensing and hourly billing for autoscaled AWS resources, popular with smaller teams.

Best for

Small to mid-size teams that want AWS monitoring without enterprise pricing.
Autoscaling environments where hourly per-resource billing is cheaper than per-host seats.
Organizations wanting monitoring plus status pages and basic APM from one vendor.

Pricing

Per-monitor licensing across tiers; AWS resources can be billed hourly, so you pay only while a resource is active.
Hourly model suits autoscaling EC2 fleets - suspended or terminated instances stop billing.
Bill grows with monitor count and add-ons (logs, APM, synthetics).
Free tier available for basic monitoring.

Pros

AWS integrations for EC2, RDS, Lambda and ELB with IAM-role-based discovery.
Hourly billing for AWS resources is genuinely cost-effective for autoscaling fleets.
Broad portfolio: servers, applications, websites, cloud and network in one console.
Recommended repeatedly in r/devops threads as a budget-friendly CloudWatch alternative.

Cons

Metric resolution and dashboard polish trail Datadog and Netdata.
Per-monitor accounting gets fiddly in large, dynamic environments.
Anomaly detection and AI features are lighter than enterprise platforms.
Support quality varies by plan tier.

Verdict

Site24x7 is the budget pick that does not feel like a compromise for its target audience. Hourly billing on AWS resources is a genuinely clever fit for autoscaling fleets - terminated instances stop costing you monitoring money immediately. What you give up is granularity and depth: polling resolution is coarser, dashboards are functional rather than polished, and the AI features are thin. For a small team watching cost per monitored resource, that is usually the right trade.

Read full Netdata vs Site24x7 -> Site24x7 pricing ->

Vendor 09 / 10 · #sumologic

Sumo Logic

Cloud-native log analytics and observability born on AWS, combining logs, metrics and traces with security analytics in one platform.

Best for

Log-heavy AWS environments that need powerful search over CloudTrail, VPC Flow Logs and application logs.
Teams that want observability and security analytics in one platform.
Organizations standardizing on AWS-native log sources.

Pricing

Per-GB ingestion tiers (Essentials, Enterprise, Enterprise Plus) with flexible and scan-based options.
Bill driven primarily by log ingest volume and retention; metrics and traces bundled by tier.
No per-host licensing - costs scale with data volume.
Free trial and a limited free account shape available.

Pros

Built on AWS from the start, with strong collectors and apps for CloudTrail, CloudWatch, ELB and Lambda.
Powerful log query language and analytics, including ML-driven templates and outlier detection.
Combines observability with security-adjacent analytics use cases.
AWS-region data residency options.

Cons

Per-GB log pricing makes high-volume environments expensive; cost control needs active curation of what you ingest.
Metrics and tracing capabilities are less mature than the log analytics.
The query language has a learning curve.
Real-time per-second infrastructure monitoring is not its focus.

Verdict

Sumo Logic is the strongest tool on this list when the problem is logs: CloudTrail auditing, VPC Flow Log analysis and application log search are its home ground, and the analytics are genuinely deep. As an infrastructure metrics monitor it is a complement, not a replacement - real-time, high-resolution host visibility is not what it is built for. The per-GB model rewards disciplined ingestion and punishes log-everything defaults, so decide what you ship before you ship it.

Read full Netdata vs Sumo Logic -> Sumo Logic pricing ->

Vendor 10 / 10 · #splunk

Splunk Observability Cloud

Enterprise observability with a streaming metrics architecture and deep AWS integrations, priced per host with separately licensed modules.

Best for

Large enterprises already invested in Splunk that want metrics, traces and logs alongside Splunk platform data.
Organizations needing streaming, high-cardinality metrics analytics from the SignalFx heritage.
Teams with dedicated observability budgets and platform engineering staff.

Pricing

Per-host, per-month subscription for infrastructure monitoring (billed annually), with APM, logs and RUM licensed as separate modules.
Hosts counted as unique hosts reporting per hour, averaged over the month - autoscaling affects the bill.
Bill grows with host count and each module added; enterprise contracts are negotiated.
No significant free tier - trials only.

Pros

Streaming metrics architecture (SignalFx lineage) supports high-cardinality, near-real-time analytics.
AWS integrations cover EC2, RDS, Lambda, EKS and CloudWatch metrics, with detailed cost-visibility documentation.
Strong APM with service maps and distributed tracing.
Tight integration with the broader Splunk ecosystem, including Log Observer.

Cons

Premium pricing with per-host plus per-module licensing; total cost climbs quickly at enterprise scale.
Complex packaging - infrastructure, APM and logs are separately licensed, complicating procurement.
Heavier than needed for small and mid-size AWS deployments.
Agent deployment and configuration carry enterprise-tool overhead.

Verdict

Splunk Observability Cloud makes the most sense inside an existing Splunk estate, where the metrics, traces and logs join data the organization already pays to keep. The streaming architecture handles high-cardinality analytics better than most, and AWS coverage is broad. The packaging is the obstacle: three separately licensed products plus per-host pricing means procurement is a project, and smaller AWS deployments will not recoup the overhead. A large-organization tool, honestly positioned.

Read full Netdata vs Splunk -> Splunk Observability pricing ->

Frequently asked questions

What is the best AWS monitoring tool in 2027?

There is no single best tool for every team: Amazon CloudWatch is the native baseline every AWS account already has, Netdata leads this ranking for real-time per-second infrastructure monitoring with predictable per-node pricing, Datadog has the broadest third-party AWS integration catalog, and Grafana Cloud is the natural home for Prometheus-centric teams. The right answer depends on your fleet size, whether you need logs, traces and security in one place, and whether your bill is driven by hosts or by data volume - the ranking criteria on this page score exactly those dimensions.

Is Amazon CloudWatch enough, or do I need a third-party tool?

For native service coverage and automation, CloudWatch is enough; for metric resolution, console usability and predictable billing, most growing teams add a third-party tool. CloudWatch natively covers every AWS service with alarms and automation hooks, which is genuinely valuable. Its limits are resolution and usability: standard metrics are 1-minute (5-minute basic), which hides microbursts, and the dashboards plus Logs Insights have a steep learning curve. Usage-based charges - per metric, per dashboard, per alarm, per GB of logs - also grow unpredictably with fleet size. The common pattern in r/aws threads is keeping CloudWatch for native automation while adding a third-party tool for visibility and UX.

Why is CloudWatch so expensive, and how can I reduce the bill?

CloudWatch bills per metric stored, per dashboard, per alarm, per API call and per GB of logs ingested and stored, and Container Insights adds metadata per log line. Costs scale with detailed monitoring, custom metrics and log volume rather than host count, so growing fleets see surprise bills. Practical mitigations: filter log ingestion aggressively, limit custom metrics, and use tiered retention. Some teams move infrastructure monitoring to a per-node-priced tool like Netdata while keeping CloudWatch for native automation.

What are the best open-source AWS monitoring tools?

Prometheus plus Grafana is the standard among open-source monitoring tools in AWS environments, with CloudWatch exporters bridging managed services. Zabbix offers official AWS templates that poll the CloudWatch API. Netdata’s agent is open source under GPLv3+ and self-hosted. Remember that open source is a distribution model, not a price: you operate it yourself, and the real costs are infrastructure, storage and engineering time. Managed options like Grafana Cloud remove some of that burden.

What AWS security monitoring tools should I use?

Use the AWS-native security stack: Amazon GuardDuty for ML threat detection built on CloudTrail, VPC Flow Logs and DNS logs, AWS Security Hub for posture aggregation, CloudTrail for API audit logging, and Amazon Inspector for vulnerability scanning. Security monitoring is a separate category from performance monitoring - none of the performance tools on this list, including Netdata, replace these, and most observability platforms integrate with their findings rather than generate them. For a security-specific shortlist, see the SentinelOne AWS security monitoring overview.

Can Netdata monitor AWS services like RDS and Lambda?

Yes, through the Amazon CloudWatch collector, which discovers AWS resources and turns CloudWatch metrics into per-resource charts for a curated set of services. Resolution for those services follows CloudWatch’s own publication, typically 1-minute. Netdata’s 1-second collection applies to EC2 and EKS nodes where the agent runs - and there it also monitors the OS, containers, databases and applications on the instance itself, which CloudWatch cannot see at that granularity.

How do I monitor EC2 instances in real time?

Install a host-level agent: Netdata collects at 1 second by default with zero configuration, and Datadog, New Relic and Dynatrace also collect at the host with finer default resolution than CloudWatch. CloudWatch detailed monitoring gives 1-minute metrics, and high-resolution custom metrics go down to 1 second at extra cost. The real-time value comes from per-second collection combined with anomaly detection, not just faster polling of the same averages.

How much does AWS monitoring cost?

It depends on the pricing shape, not a single figure. CloudWatch is usage-based (per metric, alarm, dashboard and GB of logs). Datadog and Splunk are per-host with per-GB add-ons. New Relic and Sumo Logic bill per GB ingested. Site24x7 bills per monitor with hourly billing for AWS resources. Netdata is per-node, from $4.5/node/month on annual plans - see our pricing page. Prometheus, Zabbix and the Netdata agent are open source and self-hosted, so you carry the operating cost. Pick the model that matches what grows in your fleet - telemetry volume, host count or monitor count - and check each vendor’s official pricing page linked from its card.

What is the difference between CloudWatch and Datadog?

CloudWatch is AWS-native: zero-setup service integration, alarms that trigger SNS, Lambda and Auto Scaling directly, and a bill assembled from telemetry usage. Datadog is a multi-cloud platform with 75+ AWS integrations, deeper APM, logs and RUM in one UI, billed per host plus per GB of logs plus per module. The common pattern is CloudWatch for AWS-native alarms and automation, with Datadog or another platform handling cross-stack observability and day-to-day visibility.

The 10 best AWS monitoring tools, ranked by people who read the bill

AWS monitoring tools: three jobs, not one category

How to compare AWS performance monitoring tools

What we quote - and what we don’t

How we evaluated AWS monitoring tools

Netdata

Amazon CloudWatch

Datadog

Grafana Cloud

New Relic

Dynatrace

Prometheus + Grafana (self-hosted)

Site24x7

Sumo Logic

Splunk Observability Cloud

Frequently asked questions

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