EU Sovereignty Score
Non-EU vendorNetwork & MonitoringHeadquarters: US

Amazon CloudWatch: sovereignty score and 8 European alternatives

Amazon CloudWatch is a managed monitoring and observability service from Amazon Web Services. It collects metrics, logs and traces from AWS resources and, through an OpenTelemetry-compatible agent, from workloads running outside AWS. Users can set alarms and anomaly detection, build dashboards, query telemetry with PromQL or SQL, and use AI-assisted investigation features. It is delivered as a cloud service and managed through the AWS console, APIs and command-line tools.

Amazon.com, Inc. is headquartered in Seattle, so the provider is subject to US jurisdiction, including the CLOUD Act. CloudWatch has endpoints in several European AWS regions, among them Frankfurt, Ireland, Paris, Stockholm and Zurich, and the customer decides which region telemetry is sent to. AWS offers a data processing addendum with EU standard contractual clauses for transfers. European organisations that want monitoring entirely outside US control can compare EU-headquartered or self-hosted options.

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Sovereignty score
27 / 1000 = high exposure
100 = sovereign
  • Jurisdiction SOV-210
    Headquartered in the US: CLOUD Act and FISA 702
  • Data residency SOV-350
    Hosting inside and outside Europe (US, EU)
  • Cryptographic key sovereignty SOV-320
    Key management with a non-European vendor
  • Freedom from lock-in SOV-640
    Closed source: switching requires data migration
  • Source & runtime sovereignty SOV-4 · SOV-615
    Closed source, runtime with the vendor

SOV codes: the matching objective in the European Commission's Cloud Sovereignty Framework. Official source

How the score is calculated

Facts and evidence

Last checked October 10, 2026
HeadquartersUS (US)Verified by hand
EU adequacy decisionOnly for companies individually certified under the EU-US Data Privacy FrameworkVerified by hand
Sovereignty modelVendor-hosted (non-EU)Verified by hand
Data hostingUS, EUVerified by hand
Open-sourceNoVerified by hand
GDPR-compliantYesVendor-stated
CategoryNetwork & Monitoring
TypeProduct
Websiteaws.amazon.com ↗

How we verify · Something wrong? Suggest a correction

Top EU-based & GDPR-compliant alternatives to Amazon CloudWatch

The European alternatives to Amazon CloudWatch come from our knowledge base of over 6,200 vendors. We only list vendors headquartered in the EU or the EEA; fully European-owned vendors rank before vendors with a foreign owner. For each alternative you see the country, the open-source status and a short description.

Score per alternative: 0 = high exposure, 100 = sovereign

41 European Network & Monitoring vendors are in the catalogue. View the whole category · Submit an alternative · View category on the map

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Why digital sovereignty matters with Amazon CloudWatch

Amazon CloudWatch is headquartered in the United States. US vendors fall under the CLOUD Act and FISA 702: US authorities can compel access to data, even when that data sits in a European data centre. That is the core of the jurisdictional exposure in our model.

Amazon CloudWatch hosts data in US, EU. Exactly what stays within the EU — and what does not — is defined by the vendor's data processing agreement and sub-processor list, not by a setting you control yourself; check those documents for the precise scope, including backups, logs and support access.

Amazon CloudWatch is closed source and hosted by the vendor. The encryption keys and the runtime sit with the vendor and switching requires data migration. Ask about bring-your-own-key, export options and open standards.

What this means for your organisation depends on your whole stack and context. The free assessment weighs Amazon CloudWatch together with your other vendors and gives a total score, a heatmap and the main risk drivers.

Frequently asked questions

What is the best European alternative to Amazon CloudWatch?

It depends on your use case. Strong EU alternatives to Amazon CloudWatch include Centreon, Checkmk and collectd. On this page you can compare 8 EU alternatives by jurisdiction, data residency and open-source status.

Are there open-source alternatives to Amazon CloudWatch?

Yes. Open-source EU alternatives to Amazon CloudWatch include Centreon, Checkmk, collectd and Healthchecks.io. These keep your data fully under your own control and let you self-host if you want to.

Is Amazon CloudWatch GDPR-compliant and where is the data hosted?

Amazon CloudWatch is headquartered in US and hosts data in US, EU. The vendor states it is GDPR-compliant, but the data falls under non-EU jurisdiction. For full EU data residency the EU alternatives on this page usually offer more certainty.

Details and sources

Verified by handHeadquarters, owner, hosting locations and licence have been checked by us against public sources. Free of charge and for every vendor, not a paid label. Nothing in this knowledge base is taken over automatically. Last checked on October 10, 2026.

Sources

Public sources used in the latest check of this record.

Compliance evidence

The links below point to the vendor's own public documents. We only record what we found: a missing link means "not found publicly", not "not compliant".

No public compliance evidence has been recorded for this vendor yet. Do you know its DPA or subprocessor list? Something wrong? Suggest a correction

Digital sovereignty in Network & Monitoring

Network & Monitoring: Network monitoring, infrastructure monitoring, log management and observability. In this category the choice of vendor determines who has legal access to your data, where that data lives and how easily you can switch later.

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8 European alternatives to Amazon CloudWatch — GDPR-compliant & EU-hosted · EU Sovereignty Score