HACKER Q&A
📣 thiht

Is there an alternative CloudWatch UI?


I recently started using AWS for my new job, and am currently stuck with CloudWatch for logs. I used to dislike Graylog because of the clunky interface, but I just cannot extract anything from CloudWatch! My logs are there, I can view them but it's impossible to query them:

- on the Log Streams page, the pagination doesn't work, I can only view page 1

- if I do "Search all streams" with a basic filter (something like `foo = "bar"`) it doesn't return anything (I know there are some matches I can see them)

- Logs Insights is limited to the last 3 hours of logs

Is there an alternative CloudWatch interface somewhere that would allow me to finally query my logs? I don't care if it's a CLI, a heavy client or a webpage, I just want to query my logs...

  👤 jgworks Accepted Answer ✓
> Logs Insights is limited to the last 3 hours of logs

You may want to check again, there is a date selector in the upper right of the page that allows you to choose between 5m, 30m, 1h, 3h, and 12h. There is also a Custom option which allows up to 4 weeks, or a calendar widget where you can choose any start and end date.

👤 adobrawy
We use Grafana as UI for CloudWatch. We use dashboard for Kubernetes cluster to discovery relevant pod, set relevant variables etc. We use Prometheus metrics (eg. memory usage) to pin-point interesting timeframe. Then we have linked dashboards to see logs for a specific timeframe of a specific pod. It allows us to limit amounts logs of logs scanned.

In addition, we have links to Grafana in our back-off, where we monitor our batch jobs, so immediately the developer has a timeframe selected and a suitable pod in Grafana to quickly see job metrics and job (pod) logs.

👤 koromak
There are plenty of paid SaaS products that ingest logs for easier viewing. I don't know about free ones.

Lumigo and Datadog are the ones we've tried. Both shine when using Lambda architecture, tying logs to invocation traces are very helpful. Currently we use Lumigo.

👤 chunk_waffle
It's not a GUI, but saw[0] was my go to for grepping, streaming, and searching CloudWatch logs.

[0] https://github.com/TylerBrock/saw