How to make CloudWatch better?

CloudWatch is good, fast and reliable tool and it serves a good purpose but maybe not with a good User Interface and User Experience.

Below is a list of a couple of things that can be improved in CloudWatch:

1. Notifications: CloudWatch doesn’t provide a lot of options when it comes to notifications. These notifications are generally triggered when an alarm is raised by CloudWatch. Users can get notified externally using the AWS’s Simple Notification Service (SNS). The options for the type of notifications mostly include emails and SMS, which are not the best channels to get notified for something as urgent as a fault in your website’s server.
2. Multi-account login: Since most people collaborate on web development projects, it is often the case that multiple people are responsible for multiple websites. To monitor multiple website’s server and overall backend-infrastructure, one has to login to all the related AWS accounts one-by-one.
3. Ease-of-use: CloudWatch presents its data in a complicated manner making it difficult for people to get a one-view screen to get a quick grasp of what’s going on.
4. Collaboration: CloudWatch does give the option for users to share notifications with other people but this makes it a pain for others since they would be receiving notifications even when they don’t want to and on channels which they don’t use very often. Moreover, it is upon the admin to go and manually remove each additional user one by one.

How to rectify the above problems

Like most DevOps engineers, using a wrapper on CloudWatch like SpectrumApp.io is the best way to rectify all the above problems without changing any of the current IT infrastructure at all.

Spectrum provides additional notification options like phone/web push notifications which users can configure easily on their end.

There is no need for users to request their admins to unsubscribe them from the notifications list. Spectrum allows people to do it on their own.

Spectrum also allows people to monitor more than one websites just on a single screen. This way, users will get an overview of all their web-apps with a single view. No, complicated graphs, no hardcore-tech. Using a simple green-red light colour-coding, Spectrum makes it easy and fast to read the monitoring dashboard.

And whenever one has to make the dashboard available to others, it can all be done in just a single email via Spectrum.

Tried Spectrum? Let us know what you think in the comments below.