[viraptor]

> you should be using Datadog over CloudWatch

DataDog is great, but the way it polls data means you can't rely on it being available for a long time: https://docs.datadoghq.com/integrations/faq/cloud-metric-del...

> If you receive 1-minute metrics with CloudWatch, then their availability delay is about 2 minutes—so total latency to view your metrics may be ~10-12 minutes.

If an alert delayed by 10min matters to you, DD is not viable for alerting (could be still used for dashboards).

[bradknowles]

CloudWatch Logs has a lot of its own internal latencies. If you can send the logs straight from your ec2 hosts to the log processing system and bypass CloudWatch, then you only want/need CWL for the things you can’t get from those logs.

CloudWatch Metrics is a totally separate beast, which happens to share a similar name. You can set up basic alerts in CWM, and you can trigger certain types of events from those alerts, but it is still very limited. If you want real monitoring and alerting, then CWM isn’t even the easy 80%.

[viraptor]

Agreed, my message was about using DD instead of CW for internal logs. With your own logs, you've got so much more flexibility - but not everything can be done that way. For example ELB stats don't really exist elsewhere in realtime.