i agree with your statement on logs and i see where you're coming from with cloudwatch. i think if you're coming from graphite and grafana then it makes total s

i agree with your statement on logs and i see where you're coming from with cloudwatch. i think if you're coming from graphite and grafana then it makes total sense why you would dislike cloudwatch. cloudwatch requires a bit more planning than the intuitive metrics you can typically throw at and query from graphite. it also definitely does feel weird to have to ship multiple dimensions of seemingly the same metric to do the queries that you really want. however, once you design the rollups of metrics, you get everything you need, plus you don't have to worry about operating a mission-critical monitoring stack. and you can still build your dashboards in grafana and alert as you like. i've never really found tracing to be useful - i've used pprof and an internally developed version which uploads profiles from production instances and shows you a heatmap for stuff that require deeper digging than metrics