
CloudWatch Dashboards – Create and Use Customized Metrics Views - hepha1979
https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/cloudwatch-dashboards-create-use-customized-metrics-views/
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foreigner
$3 per dashboard per month (first 3 free) seems exorbitant. They're already
charging for storing and viewing metrics, I would have expected dashboards to
be free.

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yeukhon
I actually hope they will utilize elasticsearch and dyanmoDB one day. They
already have integration b/w DDB and Titan, DDB and Kinesis, Kinesis and
Elasticsearch, so it's just a matter of time and enough requests to see
Elasticsearch & Kibana integrate with cloudwatch. I am not sure when they will
have a "logstash" although that's already doable with cloudwatch log.

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yeukhon
But CW retention is still two-week maximum right? Would be really beneficial
if AWS just make a service available or upgrade the two-week retention to
customer-choosing. I know the metric storage can grow exponentially (like what
happened with the recent Dynamo outage) but it will also alleviate customers
to roll their own metric storage system if CW now can create custom dashboard.

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foreigner
Yes I want this too! You can pay them for CW log retention but not for metrics
retention. Seems like an obvious step.

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nodesocket
We just setup DataDog, and absolutely love them for all of our charting and
monitoring needs. They are quite deeply integrated with AWS.

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foreigner
We've been using DataDog for a while and I hate it. I'm really excited about
doing this directly at AWS.

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2-m3m3n70
Can you elaborate on what's good / bad about it? We have been looking for a
metrics solution and trying to find a good option.

What I'm confused about DataDog is they charge your per host - how exactly
does that work if you are just reporting metrics (I guess you have to pay per
host you are reporting metrics from).

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nopzor
Watching how players in the space are evolving how and what they bill for is
interesting.

I think that charging by host is a lot easier for general buyers to understand
and things generally average out.

I was recently also interested by the new signalfx pricing model - its really
priced by metric volume but they sell it by host. When you peel back the
covers they're just including a certain amount of metric volume with each host
and your actual bill will vary.

Obviously underlying costs are tied to the amount of metrics, not the amount
of hosts.

We are using Datadog for a bunch of stuff right now, and we generally like it.
The per-host pricing model does get a bit hard to swallow especially when you
have a bunch of really small hosts. Your monitoring bill can start to approach
your hosting bill :)

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nopzor
Grafana (in v2.5) now has a bunch of overlap with this.

It's arguably a better solution [disclaimer: I'm biased; co-founder of
raintank, the company behind Grafana].

Best of all its open source and used for metrics viz by a lot of people.

v2.5 ships with a new cloudwatch data source, so it's super easy to add
cloudwatch metrics to your existing dashboards.

We'd love to get feedback on it.

