Compare monitoring services (CloudWatch, Azure Monitor, Cloud Monitoring) across providers.
Last verified: April 2026
Unified monitoring and observability service for AWS resources with metrics, logs, alarms, dashboards, and automated actions.
10 custom metrics, 10 alarms, 3 dashboards (up to 50 metrics), 1M API requests, 5 GB log data ingestion, 5 GB log data storage
Full-stack monitoring service providing metrics, logs, alerts, and diagnostics across Azure and hybrid environments.
First 5 GB/month log data ingestion (per billing account), platform metrics at no charge, first 1,000 standard metric alert signals free
Integrated monitoring, logging, and diagnostics for Google Cloud infrastructure and applications via the Operations Suite.
All GCP metrics free, first 150 MiB custom/external metrics free, first 50 GB/project log ingestion free, alerting policies free (first 500)
[
{
"provider": "aws",
"serviceName": "Amazon CloudWatch",
"description": "Unified monitoring and observability service for AWS resources with metrics, logs, alarms, dashboards, and automated actions.",
"metricsRetention": "15 months (standard resolution); 3 hours (high-resolution at 1-second intervals)",
"customMetricsSupport": true,
"dashboardsIncluded": 3,
"alertingChannels": [
"SNS (Email, SMS, HTTP)",
"Lambda",
"EventBridge",
"PagerDuty via SNS",
"Webhook via SNS"
],
"logIngestionPricing": "$0.50/GB",
"metricsPricing": "$0.30/metric/month (first 10,000)",
"freeAllowance": "10 custom metrics, 10 alarms, 3 dashboards (up to 50 metrics), 1M API requests, 5 GB log data ingestion, 5 GB log data storage",
"apmIncluded": true,
"syntheticsIncluded": true
},
{
"provider": "azure",
"serviceName": "Azure Monitor",
"description": "Full-stack monitoring service providing metrics, logs, alerts, and diagnostics across Azure and hybrid environments.",
"metricsRetention": "93 days (standard platform metrics); configurable for Log Analytics workspace",
"customMetricsSupport": true,
"dashboardsIncluded": -1,
"alertingChannels": [
"Email",
"SMS",
"Voice call",
"Azure mobile app",
"Webhook",
"Logic Apps",
"ITSM connectors",
"PagerDuty"
],
"logIngestionPricing": "$2.76/GB (Log Analytics)",
"metricsPricing": "$0.18/metric time-series/month",
"freeAllowance": "First 5 GB/month log data ingestion (per billing account), platform metrics at no charge, first 1,000 standard metric alert signals free",
"apmIncluded": true,
"syntheticsIncluded": true
},
{
"provider": "gcp",
"serviceName": "Google Cloud Monitoring (Operations Suite)",
"description": "Integrated monitoring, logging, and diagnostics for Google Cloud infrastructure and applications via the Operations Suite.",
"metricsRetention": "24 months for metric data",
"customMetricsSupport": true,
"dashboardsIncluded": -1,
"alertingChannels": [
"Email",
"SMS",
"PagerDuty",
"Webhooks",
"Pub/Sub",
"Slack",
"Mobile app"
],
"logIngestionPricing": "$0.50/GB (Cloud Logging)",
"metricsPricing": "$0.2580/MiB custom metric data ingested",
"freeAllowance": "All GCP metrics free, first 150 MiB custom/external metrics free, first 50 GB/project log ingestion free, alerting policies free (first 500)",
"apmIncluded": true,
"syntheticsIncluded": true
}
]The Multi-Cloud Monitoring Compare tool provides a side-by-side comparison of monitoring services across AWS, Azure, and GCP. It maps equivalent services like CloudWatch, Azure Monitor, and Cloud Monitoring, comparing capabilities such as metrics collection, dashboarding, alerting, anomaly detection, and pricing models. This is an essential reference for teams operating in multi-cloud environments or evaluating which provider's monitoring stack best fits their operational needs.
Your DevOps team manages workloads across AWS and GCP. Engineers complain about context-switching between CloudWatch and Cloud Monitoring dashboards during incidents. You use the comparison to evaluate native features against a unified platform. You discover that CloudWatch Insights and Cloud Logging have comparable query capabilities, but neither natively monitors the other cloud. You adopt Grafana Cloud with data sources for both providers, cutting incident response time by 40%.
Monitoring costs are the hidden tax of cloud operations. CloudWatch custom metrics cost $0.30/metric/month, Azure Monitor logs cost $2.76/GB ingestion, and GCP Cloud Monitoring custom metrics cost $0.10/metric/month after 500 free. Before enabling comprehensive monitoring, calculate your expected volume on each platform.
Do not try to use one provider's monitoring for another provider's resources. Cross-cloud monitoring with native tools creates data transfer costs and latency. Use a third-party observability platform like Datadog or Grafana Cloud as your single pane of glass, and keep native monitoring for provider-specific deep dives.
Alert fatigue is the biggest operational risk in multi-cloud monitoring. Standardize your alerting thresholds and notification channels across providers. Use PagerDuty or Opsgenie as a unified incident management layer rather than configuring separate SNS topics, Azure Action Groups, and GCP notification channels.
The comparison engine maps equivalent monitoring capabilities across providers into standardized categories: metrics collection, log management, alerting, dashboarding, synthetic monitoring, and APM. Each category shows feature availability, pricing model, and notable limitations for CloudWatch, Azure Monitor, and Cloud Monitoring, enabling apples-to-apples evaluation.
Was this tool helpful?
Disclaimer: This tool runs entirely in your browser. No data is sent to our servers. Always verify outputs before using them in production. AWS, Azure, and GCP are trademarks of their respective owners.