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AWS CloudWatch
AWS CloudWatch is the default for AWS monitoring. Where the fragmented experience and itemized pricing bite, and how Tsuga compares as an alternative.
Definition
Amazon CloudWatch is AWS's built in monitoring service: metrics, logs, alarms, and dashboards, with tracing through X-Ray, integrated by default with nearly every AWS service.
What it means in observability
CloudWatch is where AWS observability starts, because it is already there: every service emits metrics to it automatically, and for AWS centric teams it is the path of least resistance. It is monitoring as a utility rather than an observability platform.
How it works in practice
AWS services publish metrics and logs natively, agents extend collection to instances and containers, and alarms, dashboards, and Logs Insights queries build on top. Pricing is itemized per metric, per alarm, per GB ingested, and per query scanned, across many small meters.
Where it gets hard
The experience fragments as systems grow: correlation across metrics, logs, and traces is largely manual, cross account and cross region views take assembly, and anything outside AWS is a second class citizen. The many small meters add up in surprising ways, with custom metrics, log ingestion, and query scans as the classic line items, and high resolution data costs enough that many teams stay coarse.
Where Tsuga fits
Tsuga runs inside your AWS account but works as a full observability platform across clouds and signals: OpenTelemetry native, correlated by design, and flat per GB. CloudWatch data and native AWS integrations flow in alongside your application telemetry.
Related terms
- BYOCBYOC, Bring Your Own Cloud, is a deployment model where a vendor's software runs inside the customer's own cloud account, operated by the vendor but living on infrastructure the customer owns.
- Egress costsEgress costs are the fees cloud providers charge for data leaving their network, priced per gigabyte and varying by destination.
- Infrastructure monitoringInfrastructure monitoring is the practice of tracking the health, performance, and capacity of the layer applications run on: hosts, virtual machines, containers, Kubernetes clusters, and managed cloud services.
- MetricA metric is a named numeric measurement tracked over time, request counts, memory usage, response latency, carrying a type, a unit, and attributes that slice it into series.