Raw AWS metrics and threshold alarms vs an AI-native, multi-cloud reliability platform. See why SRE teams replace CloudWatch + PagerDuty + their runbook tool with one Nova subscription.
CloudWatch is the AWS-native metrics, logs, and alarms service, tightly coupled to the AWS control plane. Nova AI Ops is a multi-cloud, AI-native platform that replaces CloudWatch plus PagerDuty, your runbook tool, your status page, and your postmortem flow with one product.
| Capability | Nova AI Ops | Amazon CloudWatch |
|---|---|---|
| Cloud Coverage | ✓ AWS, GCP, Azure, Docker, Kubernetes, on-prem, one pane of glass | ✗ AWS-only. Other clouds and on-prem need a parallel monitoring stack |
| Incident Management | ✓ Native lifecycle: war rooms, on-call, status page, postmortems | ✗ No incident management. Bolt on Incident Manager + PagerDuty + Statuspage |
| Alerting Intelligence | ✓ AI correlation, 94% noise reduction, related-alert grouping | ~ Static threshold & metric-math alarms. No correlation, no grouping |
| AI Agents | ✓ 100+ specialized agents that detect, diagnose, decide, and remediate | ✗ Anomaly Detection & Contributor Insights surface stats; no agentic action |
| Auto-Remediation | ✓ 78% of incidents auto-resolved in <90s with audit trail | ✗ Alarms can trigger SSM Automation, but you write and maintain every doc |
| AI Runbooks | ✓ AI-generated runbooks with what-if simulation and human approvals | ✗ Hand-authored SSM Automation documents only |
| On-Call Scheduling | ✓ Follow-the-sun rotations, zero-gap escalation, override calendar | ✗ No on-call. Buy AWS Incident Manager or PagerDuty separately |
| Service Map & Tracing | ✓ Live service map, distributed traces, flame graphs, SLA alerts | ~ ServiceLens stitches X-Ray + CloudWatch, AWS-only and feature-thin |
| Log Explorer | ✓ 1B+ events with AI anomaly detection, included in plan | ~ Logs Insights queries cost extra per GB scanned, every run |
| Synthetic & Real-User Monitoring | ✓ 15 global locations, RUM + synthetics correlated | ~ Synthetics & RUM exist as separate paid features, not correlated |
| Postmortem Builder | ✓ AI-drafted postmortems with timeline, contributors, action items | ✗ Not in CloudWatch. Bring your own Notion/Confluence template |
| Status Page | ✓ Public + private status pages with SLO badges, included | ✗ Not provided. Add Statuspage or build your own |
| Integrations | ✓ 500+ integrations across clouds, CI/CD, ticketing, chat | ~ Auto-collects every AWS service. Limited beyond AWS |
| Pricing Model | ✓ Basic tier, then $29/user/mo, everything included | ✗ Per-metric, per-log-GB, per-API-call, per-dashboard, per-query. Mid-size teams hit $5K–30K/mo |
| Setup Time | ✓ Under 5 minutes, one-command install across clouds | ✓ Zero setup for AWS metrics; non-AWS workloads require custom agents |
CloudWatch pricing is a meter-soup: per custom metric, per GB of logs ingested, per GB scanned by Logs Insights, per API call, per dashboard, per alarm. It is fine on the AWS Basic tier and brutal at scale. Nova is one line, one price, all in.
Full platform: multi-cloud monitoring, incidents, AI agents, runbooks, on-call, logs, tracing, status page, auto-remediation. Basic tier available.
Typical mid-size AWS team: $5K–15K CloudWatch (custom metrics, log ingest, Insights scans, dashboards) + PagerDuty for on-call + Statuspage + a runbook tool. Costs scale linearly with metric and log volume.
Illustrative example: a 20-engineer AWS team with 1,000 custom metrics, 2 TB of CloudWatch Logs ingest, 50 dashboards, 500 alarms, plus PagerDuty for on-call and Statuspage for customer comms. Six meters across three vendors. Nova is one line.
Scenario assumes 20 engineers, 1,000 custom metrics, 2 TB log ingest, 50 dashboards, 500 alarms, plus PagerDuty Professional and Statuspage Business. Unit prices sourced from the AWS CloudWatch, PagerDuty, and Atlassian Statuspage public pricing pages as of April 2026. Real CloudWatch bills at this scale frequently land between $5K and $25K once Logs Insights query volume, ServiceLens, RUM, X-Ray, and cross-account observability are included. Amazon CloudWatch, AWS, PagerDuty, and Statuspage are trademarks of their respective owners. Nova AI Ops is not affiliated with or endorsed by any of them.
CloudWatch is the default AWS observability service. There are real reasons it has stayed the default:
Nova was built for the AI era. Instead of bolting features onto a metrics database, everything is AI-native and multi-cloud from the ground up:
Both options are supported. Most customers keep CloudWatch as the AWS-native metrics emitter (it is free for the basics) and pipe metrics, logs, and alarms into Nova as the unified analysis, alerting, incident, and remediation layer. Teams that want to fully cut over use Nova's native AWS integration to scrape the same metrics directly and retire CloudWatch dashboards, alarms, and Logs Insights spend.
Nova has a one-click AWS integration that uses a read-only IAM role to pull CloudWatch metrics, CloudWatch Logs, X-Ray traces, and AWS Health events into the Nova data plane. Setup takes under 5 minutes; no agents are required for AWS managed services.
No. CloudWatch keeps emitting metrics for free as it always has. Nova reads what is already there, so you continue benefiting from the Basic tier on the AWS side while adding incident management, on-call, runbooks, status pages, and AI agents on the Nova side.
No. CloudWatch + PagerDuty still leaves you to write runbooks, build a status page, run war rooms in Slack, and assemble postmortems by hand. Nova bundles all of that with 100 AI agents that perform detection, diagnosis, decision, and remediation autonomously. The agentic layer is the part neither CloudWatch nor PagerDuty has.
Yes. Nova imports CloudWatch alarms as Nova alerts and can trigger your existing SSM Automation documents as part of a Nova runbook. You do not have to rewrite anything to start.
Nova offers regional data planes (US, EU, APAC) and a self-hosted option for teams with strict sovereignty requirements. If you must keep observability data inside your own AWS account, the self-hosted deployment runs Nova in your VPC and never egresses telemetry to a third-party cloud.
Try Nova, connect your AWS account in 5 minutes, keep your existing alarms and runbooks. See results on day one.