In what should be good news for Amazon AWS users, Amazon has made its CloudWatch monitoring service free for basic monitoring of EC2 instances. Thanks to this move, AWS users can now save $11 per EC2 instance. In addition, basic monitoring by Amazon CloudWatch will be enabled by default for all EC2 instances.

Apart from EC2 instances, CloudWatch is also free for Amazon EBS(Elastic Block Storage) volumes, Elastic Load Balancers, and Amazon RDS instances. However, there are a couple of catches: the metrics are collected only at 5-minute intervals and you will receive only 10 alarms per month.

Although Amazon’s latest move will help them differentiate their AWS offering from other public cloud providers, you will still need a advanced cloud monitoring tool for the following reasons:

– CloudWatch only gives you basic monitoring capabilities. When your business-critical applications are on the cloud, you need much more than that. You need in-depth performance metrics and visualizations to quickly troubleshoot and resolve problems with your cloud applications.

– CloudWatch’s Auto Scaling helps you in  capacity planning. But still you need detailed reports to make educated decisions about allocating more resources.

– Most businesses only have a portion of their IT on the cloud. The rest are still hosted inside their corporate data center. You need a single monitoring tool to take care of both.

That is why you should be using ManageEngine Applications Manager’s cloud monitoring feature  for tracking your business-critical apps hosted in the Amazon cloud. Not only do you get deep performance metrics and capacity planning insight, you can manage your entire hybrid IT infrastructure (physical, virtual and cloud) – all from a single console. And yes, there is no limit to the number of alarms you can receive