Best AWS Monitoring Tools in 2026

AWS dominates the cloud market to deploy scalable infrastructure. Yet, with this scale comes complexity. To maintain uptime and efficiency, companies require total visibility into every layer of their stack.

For many, Amazon CloudWatch is the default choice for basic insights. But as applications grow, relying solely on native tools can lead to higher costs. To overcome these limitations, you can adopt dedicated AWS monitoring tools. These external solutions are cheaper and provides advanced features to proactively monitor and optimize AWS infrastructure.

AWS Monitoring Tools At Glance

Best AWS Monitoring Tools Review

Below, I review each monitoring tool in detail to give you an idea how it can help you to monitor your AWS infrastructure and hosted applications.

Amazon CloudWatch

Zero-setup monitoring and basic metric collection.

As the built-in observability service for AWS, Amazon CloudWatch is the logical starting point for most organizations. It provides a unified view of operational health by collecting data across your AWS resources.

Because it is native to the platform, there are no agents to install for basic metrics, it starts collecting data the moment you launch an EC2 instance or RDS database.

While CloudWatch handles performance, it works alongside these native tools for security and compliance:

• AWS CloudTrail to tracks user activity and API usage for auditing.
• AWS Security Hub is a centralized dashboard for security alerts.
• Amazon Inspector automates vulnerability assessments.

• Collects metrics and logs from almost every AWS services automatically.
• Sets alarms that can trigger automated responses when thresholds are breached.
• Insights features allow you to query and analyze log data to identify root causes of operational issues.
• Monitors applications running on AWS and on-premises using the CloudWatch Agent.

CloudWatch Limitations

While excellent for getting started, CloudWatch has known drawbacks as you scale:

• Custom metrics and detailed log retention can become surprisingly expensive compared to third-party tools.
• It lacks the single pane of glass experience for multi-cloud environments.
• It lacks the advanced APM and predictive analytics found in tools like Datadog or Dynatrace.

Datadog

Best for DevOps teams needing deep visibility across multi-cloud environments.

Datadog is the upgrade for business critical applications. It simplifies AWS monitoring by unifying data from servers, databases, tools, and services into a centralized platform.

With 800+ built-in integrations, it connects your AWS infrastructure with the rest of your stack like Kubernetes, Jenkins, LangChain. Its drag-and-drop dashboards allow you to visualize performance across the entire stack without the fragmentation often found in native tools.

Key Features

• The Watchdog feature uses machine learning to automatically detect performance abnormalities.
• Tracks requests from the frontend to the backend database to pinpoint error.
• Provides side-by-side performance tracking, which is critical when migrating legacy apps to the AWS cloud.
• Combines observability with security, offering out-of-the-box threat detection rules for your cloud environment.

Datadog Limitations

• Datadog is powerful, but it can get expensive. Pricing is granular like per host, per log GB, per synthetic test, and costs can shoot up quickly if you don’t aggressively manage data ingestion.
• For simple applications or small infrastructure, the depth of features Datadog offers may be unnecessary.

New Relic

Best for SMB needing application performance monitoring.

New Relic takes a data-centric approach to monitoring. While Datadog focuses heavily on infrastructure, New Relic excels at Application Performance Monitoring (APM).

I particularly like its usage-based pricing model. New Relic charges based on data ingestion. This makes it an attractive option for a growing AWS environment where the number of servers scales up and down frequently.

We use New Relic to monitor AWS and GCP servers. I like how it autodetects the running applications like docker, WordPress, PHP, Node.js and give application-level metrics.

Chandan Kumar, Founder of Geekflare.

• Uses AWS CloudFormation templates to integrate with your AWS account in minutes.
• Automatically visualizes the relationships and dependencies between your applications and servers.
• Provides immediate visibility into EC2 and other AWS resources performance.
• Automatically correlates infrastructure health with application performance.

New Relic Limitations

• Pricing is based on GBs ingested, costs can skyrocket if you are logging everything without filtering.
• To get the most out of the platform, you need to learn NRQL.

Dynatrace

Best for enterprise AI automation

Dynatrace is an AWS Service Ready Partner. That credibility says a lot. I would recommend Dynatrace to only large businesses and global enterprises.

I particularly like its Davis AI. Instead of just alerting you that CPU usage is high, Dynatrace analyzes dependencies to tell you why it is high and exactly which line of code or database query caused the bottleneck. It fits perfectly into high-scale AWS environments.

• Delivers automatic baselining and root-cause analysis.
• Automatically discovers and maps your entire stack in real-time.
• Combines observability with runtime application security to detect vulnerabilities.
• OneAgent allows for auto-instrumentation.

Dynatrace Limitations

• Because it offers such deep data, the interface can be overwhelming for smaller teams.
• Dynatrace is an enterprise-grade solution. For startups or simple infra where basic metrics suffice, the cost and complexity may be overkill.

SolarWinds

Best for hybrid infrastructure with SolarWinds ecosystem

SolarWinds Server & Application Monitor (SAM) is self-hosted solution for SMEs. It make sense to use SolarWinds when you have on-premises servers to monitor and some footprint on cloud.

I like its focus on asset management. The auto discovery feature is excellent, it automatically scans your AWS account to find and map EC2 instances.

Key Features

• View the health of your physical servers, VMs, and AWS EC2 instances on a single dashboard.
• Comes with 1,200+ monitoring templates for common applications (like Active Directory, Exchange, IIS, and SQL Server) running on AWS.
• Identifies zombie instances and unattached EBS volumes to help you reduce wasted cloud spend.

SolarWinds Limitations

• The UI can feel traditional compared to the modern ones like Datadog or New Relic.
• While excellent for infrastructure (EC2/EBS), its integration with newer serverless AWS services like Lambda or Fargate is not as deep as cloud-native competitors.

Paessler PRTG

Best for network and Windows environment

Paessler PRTG is a favorite among IT administrators for its sensor-based approach monitoring. Its true strength lies in unifying your AWS cloud with your on-premise network and Windows servers.

PRTG uses pre-configured sensors to track AWS metrics like EBS volume status or EC2 CPU usage. This makes it easy to set up custom dashboards that show the health of your local network alongside your cloud.

• Allows you to build drag-and-drop dashboards that visualize your network topology and cloud connections in real-time.
• Excellent for tracking data transfer costs, helping you see if your AWS egress traffic is spiking.
• Generates PDF reports on uptime and performance.

Paessler PRTG Limitations

• The core PRTG server software must run on a Windows machine.
• Higher upfront committment, pricing starts above $1500/year which is not suitable for micro startups.

Site24x7

Best for SMBs and MSPs

ManageEngine Site24x7 offers one of the cheapest monitoring subscription plan. It integrates with CloudSpend to guide you on cloud spending and optimization recommendation.

It covers website uptime, server monitoring, and application performance (APM) in a single ALL-IN-ONE subscription. And, a dedicated pricing for MSPs starting at $54/mo to manage 9 customers and 5 servers.

Its Guidance Report analyzes your AWS usage and provides actionable recommendations to reduce costs and improve security. For teams that want one tool to do it all without the enterprise price tag of Datadog or Dynatrace, this is a very good choice.

• Allows you to automate repetitive tasks like restarting an EC2 instance or clearing logs automatically when a specific alert is triggered.
• Uses machine learning to learn your system’s normal behavior and only alerts you when metrics deviate significantly.
• Tracks your AWS spending trends and provides forecasts.

Site24x7 Cons

• UI can feel a bit cluttered compared to the modern observability platform like New Relic.
• Pricing is based on per host which can be expensive if you have fleet of micro VMs.

Netdata

Best for open-source infra monitoring

Netdata is open-source monitoring solution and also offer managed subscription starting at $4.50/mo.

While most tools like CloudWatch provide metrics with a 1-minute or 5-minute delay, Netdata provides per-second granularity.

I love its Zero-Configuration approach. You install the lightweight agent on your AWS EC2 instance and it immediately detects hundreds of metrics.

• Collects data every second.
• Lightweight agent, consuming roughly 1% of a single CPU core.
• Automatically detects running services like Nginx, Docker, MySQL, or MongoDB and starts collecting the metrics immediately.
• It is a highly rated project on the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF) landscape.

Netdata Limitations

• It is a performance monitoring tool. It does not have the deep cloud cost management or multi-cloud billing analysis found in tools like Datadog or CloudZero.

Prometheus + Grafana

Best open source for DIY and Kubernetes

While Prometheus and Grafana are separate tools, they go along and my favorite.

Prometheus acts as the engine, collecting metrics and storing them, while Grafana acts as the dashboard, visualizing that data.

I highly recommend this stack for AWS users because it is the de facto standard for monitoring Kubernetes (Amazon EKS). Unlike many tools that wait for agents to push data, Prometheus automatically pulls metrics from your services.

Note: AWS offers managed versions of these tools Amazon Managed Service for Prometheus and Amazon Managed Grafana.

Key Features

• Prometheus automatically discovers targets.
• PromQL is a powerful query language to slice metric data with extreme precision.
• Grafana can pull data from Prometheus, CloudWatch, and CloudTrail simultaneously to view AWS server health, and app performance on a single screen.
• Grafana handle the alerting.
• Because it is open source, you avoid vendor lock-in. You own your data and your configuration.

Limitations

• If you self-host, you are responsible for scaling and updates.
• Prometheus is designed for short-term data retention. For long-term history, you often need to add extensions like Thanos.
• Mastering PromQL takes time compared to readymade interface like New Relic.

Pricing

The pricing depends on how you deploy it:

• Self-Hosted: You only pay for the AWS EC2 instances and EBS storage required to run it.
• Amazon Managed Service: You pay based on metrics ingested ~$0.90 per 10 million samples.
• Amazon Managed Grafana: Charges roughly $9.00 per Editor licenses

Splunk

Best for log analytics and security (SIEM)

Splunk is for logs and recommended for enterprise needing SIEM solution. It is the industry heavyweight for digesting massive amounts of logs from your AWS and turning it into searchable answers.

Splunk acts as a SIEM (Security Information and Event Management) system, ingesting CloudTrail logs, VPC Flow Logs, and application logs to detect security threats and compliance violations.

Splunk Limitations

• Splunk is expensive.
• It has a steep learning curve.

Other AWS Monitoring Tools

#11

Middleware

Full-stack monitoring for application, container, AWS, GCP, Azure and serverless.

#12

Motadata

Unified observability and IT service management platform.

#13

Sematext

End-to-end visibility for modern applications. It combines logs, infra, synthetic monitoring and distributed tracing.

#14

Elastic

An open source alternative to Splunk. ELK stack combines Elasticsearch, Kibana and Logstash.

#15

Checkmk

Monitor entire IT infrastructure, including on-premises and multi-cloud.

#16

Zabbix

Zabbix is a popular open-source monitoring tool, similar to Nagios.

#17

LogicMonitor

Native cloud integration for Azure, AWS and Google Cloud Platform. Act fast with Edwin AI.

Conclusion

AWS monitoring tools are essential for maintaining high availability and optimizing performance. While AWS-native tools like CloudWatch provide a good foundation for basic metrics, the third-party solutions listed above offers full-stack observability.

Your choice should depend on your specific infrastructure and budget:

• For simple cloud-native setups: Stick with AWS CloudWatch.
• For microservices architecture: Upgrade to Datadog or New Relic.
• For hybrid environments: Choose SolarWinds or PRTG.
• For Kubernetes & Open Source: Go with Prometheus + Grafana.

Happy monitoring ☺️