CloudWatch vs Datadog
AWS-native monitoring versus third-party unified observability platform.
Overview
What is being compared
CloudWatch is the native AWS service for metrics, logs, dashboards and alarms. Datadog is a third-party SaaS platform that unifies metrics, logs, traces and APM across any cloud or on-premises infrastructure.
- Provider — Native AWS service — Third-party SaaS
- Coverage — AWS services — Any cloud or on-premises
- Signals — Metrics, logs, dashboards, alarms — Metrics, logs, traces and APM in one place
- AWS integration — Tight — Through integrations
- Cost — Low — Higher, for a richer feature set
- Strength — AWS infrastructure visibility — Cross-cloud and application-layer visibility
How the signals are organized
CloudWatch keeps metrics, logs and traces in separate services (Metrics, Logs, X-Ray); Datadog puts them on one timeline, from a metric spike to the traces behind it to the logs from those traces. In the grid, yellow marks a separate service with its own view and green marks one shared view.
Which one to pick
Pick Datadog when monitoring spans several clouds, on-premises or application performance, or when you need deep APM and distributed tracing. Otherwise CloudWatch covers it.
> [!NOTE] Many teams run both: CloudWatch for AWS infrastructure metrics and alarms, Datadog for application health.
> [!TIP] Where each platform collects its signals, one latency spike investigated on both, and the questions that decide it, step by step in Visual Explanation below.
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