Accelerated Migrations of Operational and Security Data to Amazon CloudWatch
AWS Unifies Security, Compliance, and Operational Data
Amazon Web Services (AWS) is fundamentally changing the landscape by unifying operational, security and compliance data within Amazon CloudWatch for superior, cost-effective reliability, threat detection, compliance and business insights.
Using a unified data plane requires organizations to migrate from existing data stores to CloudWatch, can be challenging because:
Migrations can be time-consuming and expensive. Migrating your data pipelines and workflows in the form of field mappings, dashboards and alerts can take several weeks or months to complete.
Custom development is often required to integrate with data sources specific to your organization.
There is a scarcity of qualified technical staff who are familiar with both existing platforms and CloudWatch.
In this post, we will describe Crest Data’s CloudWatch professional services available in the AWS Marketplace that:
Reduce migration timelines and costs by over 60% through automation and an experienced multi-platform observability and security team that has performed over 100 migrations
Provide custom development services with qualified personnel to build integrations for CloudWatch through our experience building over 5000 integrations across 300 vendor products
Migrating Data and Workflows to CloudWatch
Crest Data takes a rigorous, structured approach to Amazon CloudWatch migrations, led by expert-level resources who ensure your transition is seamless, predictable, and outcome-driven.
To begin with, we start by understanding your priorities, timelines, and success criteria, review your key use cases and then set up your Amazon CloudWatch deployment.
Ensuring Risk-Free Migrations with CloudWatch Pipelines
One of the biggest challenges with CloudWatch migrations is maintaining operational continuity while ensuring enough historical data is available for threat hunting, compliance and operational analytics.
To solve this, Crest Data introduces the ingestion strategy using newly introduced CloudWatch pipelines.
We continue ingesting data into Amazon Security Lake using the historical ingestion path, and we also introduce an additional ingestion stream using native CloudWatch data sources. CloudWatch Pipelines are used to transform and normalize these incoming logs before they are ingested. This ensures that CloudWatch builds the required historical and operational context in parallel, supporting a smooth and reliable cutover when ready. The following diagram shows an example of how data sources are forked to both Amazon Security Lake and CloudWatch.
This ingestion window typically lasts 60-90 days, ensuring CloudWatch accumulates sufficient historical context before cutover.
Migrating Workflows
During this period, we migrate operational and security workflows in the form of dashboards, alerts, and correlation logic automating up to 90% with our migration engine and handling the rest manually. To understand how we do this with our Splunk to Amazon CloudWatch automation, please watch this video:
Transitioning to Production
After successfully migrating dashboards and alerts, we will ensure your CloudWatch deployment has achieved functional parity by running end-to-end validations for critical workflows with each stakeholder team.
Following the sign off on CloudWatch as the primary destination; the legacy observability, security data lake or SIEM platform can be safely decommissioned. Crest Data consultants will assist in the transition to production by providing cutover support.
The result of this process is an accelerated lower-risk migration that helps your teams get more value from your CloudWatch implementation sooner.
Building Custom Amazon CloudWatch Integrations
Building support for collecting and analyzing data from your custom data sources into CloudWatch is a non-trivial effort and often involves:
Integrating with data source APIs to poll for data at short, regular intervals.
Transforming the data to enable better analytics and correlation with CloudWatch telemetry pipelines. For example, storing security data in the Open Cybersecurity Schema Framework (OCSF) schema allows teams to standardize the data and make it easier to analyze, correlate, and respond to threats.
Building relevant analytics dashboards and CloudWatch alarms for operational and security monitoring.
The Crest Data Integrations Engineering Team brings deep expertise with over 5,000 integrations built across 300 vendor technologies. We specialize in operational and security, data sources, leveraging a mature, scalable software development lifecycle that delivers high-quality integrations at speed. Our process includes:
Strategic Planning & Use Case Definition: We partner with platform, application, security, and compliance teams to identify and prioritize business-critical use cases.
AI-Driven Development Engine: Leveraging years of integration knowledge, our fully autonomous AI agent rapidly accelerates integration development and reduces manual effort by automatically building data-collection mechanisms and ready-to-use analytics.
Automated Quality Assurance: We implement robust automated testing frameworks to ensure reliability, performance, and compatibility.
End-to-End Lifecycle Ownership: We own the full development lifecycle from architecture and system design through development, QA, automation, and delivery.
Continuous Support & Improvement: We provide ongoing technical support and a structured feedback loop for continuous enhancements and bug fixes.
Supercharge Your Operations with CloudWatch and Crest Data
In this post, we have explored how the strategic goal of using Amazon CloudWatch as a unified data plane for operational, security, and compliance data requires specialized migration expertise, robust automation tools and integration development experience. The Crest Data team has successfully executed a significant number of migrations and delivered a wide range of integrations, giving us the advanced expertise needed to make your CloudWatch deployment successful.
Experience has shown that doing migrations right can save over 60% in both time and cost. Partner with Crest Data to leverage our proven track record and secure a fast, cost-effective, and fully optimized transition to CloudWatch.
Get Started with Crest Data’s Amazon CloudWatch Services!
Explore our full suite of CloudWatch services on our CloudWatch microsite and get started now through the AWS Marketplace or directly contact us.