monitoring and alerting , AWS cloudwatch vs GCP stackdriver

Overview

For alerting based on monitored CPU, RAM etc., Amazon CloudWatch and Stackdriver are part of your native cloud monitoring services.

Some of the features offered by Amazon CloudWatch are:

• Basic Monitoring for Amazon EC2 instances: ten pre-selected metrics at five-minute frequency, free of charge.
• Detailed Monitoring for Amazon EC2 instances: seven pre-selected metrics at one-minute frequency, for an additional charge.
• Amazon EBS volumes: eight pre-selected metrics at five-minute frequency, free of charge.

GCP Stackdriver provides the following key features:

• Monitoring – at App and Infrastructure Level 
• Logging  – At Infra and App Level
• Diagnostics – at app and Infrastructure level

Metrics that Stackdriver provides

Metrics for Google Cloud Platform services:

• GCP metrics, for Google Cloud Platform services such as Compute Engine and BigQuery.

• Kubernetes metrics, for Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE).

• Istio metrics, for Istio on GKE.

• Anthos metrics, for GKE On-Prem.

Metrics for Stackdriver agents, Amazon Web Services, open-source, and third-party applications:

• Agent metrics, for VM instances running the Stackdriver agents.

• AWS metrics, for Amazon Web Services such as Amazon Redshift and Amazon CloudFront.

• External metrics, for open-source and third-party applications.

Summary

The key point is that Stackdriver can be used for both AWS and GCP app layer monitoring (with the appropriate agents installed). It encompasses JVM , LAMP, .NET and several other runtimes.

In addition, the logs from stackdriver can be sent straight to bigquery for analytics.