AWS CloudWatch is a powerful observability tool integrated into AWS, offering access to logs, metrics, and alarms for monitoring AWS workloads, but it is often misconfigured or misused, leading to unexpected costs, limited visibility, and operational challenges. Common issues include complex pricing models that can result in expensive custom metrics, unpredictable log ingestion and storage fees, limited query and analysis capabilities with a proprietary syntax, and dashboard limitations with fixed layouts and delayed metric updates. Additionally, CloudWatch's standard metric granularity is not suitable for real-time monitoring, and cross-region or multi-account setups require manual configurations. Alarm configurations are challenging due to static thresholds, and retention policies need careful management to avoid compliance issues and high costs. To mitigate these challenges, it is advised to audit custom metrics, optimize log retention, use structured logging, and explore alternative visualization tools like Grafana. For teams facing visibility gaps or high costs with CloudWatch, a more integrated observability solution, such as Logz.io, which combines logs, metrics, and traces, could be beneficial.