Epok vs AWS CloudWatch
CloudWatch Logs is where your AWS logs go by default — convenient and native to AWS. Getting real alerting out of it takes engineering time on subscription filters and Lambdas, and the meter runs on queries, dashboards, and alarms. If that's you, read on.
Representative production boundary · shadow mode · no cutover · pre-agreed scorecard
Keep AWS CloudWatch. Make Epok prove what it adds.
Choose a representative boundary
Mirror a service group, ownership domain, environment, or critical user journey through OTel or an open shipper.
Keep every alert
AWS CloudWatch remains the control while Epok watches the same production window.
Score the incident cohort
Classify correct, incorrect, abstained, and missed outcomes; measure alert fanout, time to verified cause, and responder effort.
Success is not “data arrived” or one anecdote. Expansion requires performance across the agreed incident cohort and operational gates.
| Dimension | CloudWatch | Epok |
|---|---|---|
| What it is | AWS's native monitoring service — metrics, logs, alarms and dashboards for AWS resources, with X-Ray, Synthetics and RUM alongside it. | A multi-signal detection engine. Logs, metrics, traces, infrastructure, RUM and session replay correlated on one incident canvas. |
| Billing basis | Pay-as-you-go with no commitment, metered per dimension: GB of logs ingested, GB stored, GB scanned by Logs Insights, custom metrics per metric-month, plus alarms and dashboards. | Each plan includes one unified volume allowance. Paid-plan overage is $0.20/GB; there is no per-host, per-user, per-custom-metric, per-query or cardinality line. |
| Who runs it | AWS runs it. Nothing to deploy — and it is scoped to your AWS accounts and regions. | Hosted SaaS. Nothing for you to deploy, scale or upgrade. |
| Data collection | Native for AWS services; the CloudWatch agent or OpenTelemetry for anything outside AWS. | No proprietary Epok server agent: send with OTLP or an open shipper such as Vector, Fluent Bit, Fluentd or the OpenTelemetry Collector. Browser RUM and replay require web instrumentation. |
| How detection is set up | Alarms you configure, including per-metric anomaly-detection bands. | Immediate rule packs begin matching supported signals as data arrives. Statistical detectors activate after they have the required history and signal coverage; threshold rules remain available when you want them. |
CloudWatch facts checked against Amazon CloudWatch pricing on 2026-08-03. Vendors change packaging and pricing — tell us if anything here has gone out of date and we'll fix it.
Where CloudWatch wins
CloudWatch is the default destination for everything AWS emits — Lambda execution logs, VPC Flow Logs, Route 53 query logs, CloudTrail audit events, RDS slow query logs. If your security and compliance posture requires logs stay inside your own AWS account, CloudWatch is the obvious choice. There is no third-party trust boundary to cross.
Its native IAM authorization, cross-service hooks (subscription filters into Kinesis, Lambda, Firehose), and integration with the rest of the AWS toolchain — X-Ray, CloudTrail, Config, Security Hub — are genuinely valuable when AWS is your whole world.
- —Your CloudWatch bill keeps climbing and you're still building alerting by hand.
- —You want anomaly detection, new error detection, and root cause analysis without buying DevOps Guru on top.
- —Per-query and per-dashboard charges discourage your team from exploring their own logs.
- —You run multiple AWS accounts and want one place to investigate instead of cross-account subscription gymnastics.
- —You want a flat monthly bill that doesn't scale with how hard you debug.
- —Compliance or contractual requirements mandate logs stay within your AWS account.
- —You need deep integration with AWS-native event routing (Lambda, Kinesis, EventBridge) for log processing.
- —Your team has the bandwidth to build dashboards, write alarm logic, and tune Insights queries by hand.
- —Your log volume is low enough that the per-GB ingest plus per-query model stays predictable.
Add Epok as a second destination first.
CloudWatch Logs to Epok is one of the cleaner migrations because you don't have to touch your applications. Subscription filters are CloudWatch's built-in mechanism for streaming logs elsewhere — point one at an Epok ingestion endpoint and your existing log groups start flowing in minutes.
You can keep CloudWatch as the system of record (compliance, raw retention) and use Epok purely as the intelligence layer on top. Both run in parallel during evaluation. No agents to install. No application code to change.
Alternatively, send logs directly via the Elasticsearch bulk API, Loki push, OTLP, FluentBit, or raw JSON over HTTP — useful if you're already using one of these formats elsewhere in your stack.
Keep AWS CloudWatch. Make Epok prove the incident outcome.
Run a controlled shadow evaluation across a representative boundary. Compare both systems on the same incident cohort, then expand only after Epok clears the agreed quality, security, and operational gates.
* Capability comparisons, and any time or effort estimates, reflect our reading of publicly documented features and our own deployment experience as of August 3, 2026. They may not capture every plan, feature, or recent change — verify current capabilities directly with each vendor.
Datadog, New Relic, Splunk, Elastic, Grafana, Loki, Amazon CloudWatch, and other product and company names are trademarks of their respective owners. Epok is not affiliated with, endorsed by, or sponsored by them.