Owlpane / Solutions / vs. CloudWatch
Moving from another tool · built on OpenTelemetryOwlpane vs. CloudWatch: one telemetry view beyond AWS.
CloudWatch is built into AWS and free to start. It bills logs per GB ingested, custom metrics per metric, and X-Ray traces per million, so a bill has many parts. Owlpane takes standard OpenTelemetry and bills GB ingested.
Switching, honestly
What you keep, gain and give up
Keep
CloudWatch for AWS-native metrics and alarms. Send application traces and logs to Owlpane beside it.
Gain
Traces, logs and metrics that link to each other, one meter, and the same view on any cloud or on-premises cluster.
Give up
Native AWS integration. CloudWatch sees AWS service metrics with no agent, and IAM, Lambda and billing tie-ins that we do not replicate.
What you use
Built from features that ship today
Service map
The OpenTelemetry service graph, with uninstrumented dependencies as virtual nodes.
APM & tracing →
How it works
Three steps
Add an exporter
Add one exporter to your OpenTelemetry Collector and your current tool keeps receiving everything it does today.
Compare
Run both on the same service for a week.
Decide
Nothing proprietary to undo either way.
Side by side
What each one charges for
| CloudWatch (public rates, US) | Owlpane | |
|---|---|---|
| Logs | $0.50 per GB ingested (first 10 TB), plus storage and queries | Counted in GB ingested |
| Custom metrics | $0.30 per metric per month for the first 10,000, tiered down after | Counted in GB ingested |
| Traces (X-Ray) | About $5 per million traces stored, 100,000 free | Counted in GB ingested |
| What you forecast | Ingest, metric count, trace count, alarms, dashboards and queries | GB ingested |
CloudWatch figures come from public pricing summaries in September 2026 and vary by region and tier; confirm on aws.amazon.com/cloudwatch/pricing. CloudWatch pricing · Estimate Owlpane with the cost calculator
Questions
Do I have to leave CloudWatch?
Where Owlpane is narrower
- No agentless view of AWS service metrics; those stay in CloudWatch.
- No AWS-native IAM or billing integration.
Comparisons reflect publicly available information as of September 2026 and our own product today, and may change. Datadog, New Relic, Grafana, Dash0, Better Stack, Amazon CloudWatch, AWS, Sentry, Dynatrace, Kubeshark, Checkly, PagerDuty, SigNoz, Kubernetes, OpenTelemetry, Prometheus and other names are trademarks of their respective owners; Owlpane is not affiliated with or endorsed by them.
Send a copy of your telemetry. Change nothing else.
Standard OpenTelemetry in, so you can try Owlpane beside what you run today.
Every new workspace starts with a 14-day Team trial: 50 GB of ingest a month and 30-day retention. No card to start. Documentation · Pricing · Pricing questions