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.
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.
Point your existing shipper at a new endpoint.
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.
Run them side by side. No card.
Dual-ship a copy of your telemetry for a week and compare what each tool actually catches. Every detector and full AI included in the trial.
* Capability comparisons, and any time or effort estimates, reflect our reading of publicly documented features and our own deployment experience as of June 2026. They may not capture every plan, feature, or recent change — verify current capabilities directly with each vendor.
Datadog, 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.