AWS CloudWatch vs Azure Monitor: Features, Costs, and Best Fit

AWS CloudWatch and Azure Monitor are the default observability tools for their respective clouds. They cover metrics, logs, traces, alerting, and dashboards, and work well when your workloads live entirely within one provider. The real differences surface when you look at how each tool handles investigation workflows, cost behavior at scale, alerting hygiene, and portability to other environments. This comparison evaluates CloudWatch and Azure Monitor across six aspects that matter most during actual operations: ecosystem fit, telemetry coverage, query and investigation experience, alerting, OpenTelemetry support, and cost governance. The goal is to help you decide which tool fits your cloud footprint and operating model, not to declare a universal winner. Fit and Ecosystem The strongest argument for either tool is the same. It works best inside its own cloud. The question is how deep that integration goes, and where it stops. CloudWatch CloudWatch is built into the AWS control planean