Amazon CloudWatch vs. Cognizant Cloud360

If you use any AWS services, CloudWatch is the natural choice to monitor & troubleshoot your workload. Thankfully, for most AWS services, CloudWatch is either built-in or very easy to set up. However, being proficient in browsing & tracking the log events would take some training & practice. Having some experienced people on the team would help immensely, especially in spreading the skill to the rest of the team.

Incentivized

Cognizant Cloud 360 is very well suited for cloud integration of modern, common software among users of a wide spectrum of proficiency levels. The user interface is well designed and intuitive, and all common software tools have existing implementation tools and intuitive platforms for cloud migration. Cognizant Cloud 360 is not as useful when most users are highly technically competent and use specialized, less common software tools that are to be migrated to the cloud platform. Cognizant is technically sound, but maybe not as much as some established competitors (Microsoft, IBM, Oracle, etc) and also may not have familiarity with lesser-known software applications.

Incentivized

• It provides lot many out of the box dashboard to observe the health and usage of your cloud deployments. Few examples are CPU usage, Disk read/write, Network in/out etc.
• It is possible to stream CloudWatch log data to Amazon Elasticsearch to process them almost real time.
• If you have setup your code pipeline and wants to see the status, CloudWatch really helps. It can trigger lambda function when certain cloudWatch event happens and lambda can store the data to S3 or Athena which Quicksight can represent.

Incentivized

• Very good customer service team. Very responsive to inquiries, and willing to collaboratively develop solutions to software Platform integration challenges.
• Very intuitive user interface. Layout for various tools and settings is well-conceived and implemented, and the software is ultimately very easy to navigate for even novice users.
• Customizable resource library. The platform makes it easy to select tools that are needed without forcing you to subscribe to additional tools that are not needed.

Incentivized

• Memory metrics on EC2 are not available on CloudWatch. Depending on workloads if we need visibility on memory metrics we use Solarwinds Orion with the agent installed. For scalable workloads, this involves customization of images being used.
• Visualization out of the box. But this can easily be addressed with other solutions such as Grafana.
• By design, this is only used for AWS workloads so depending on your environment cannot be used as an all in one solution for your monitoring.

Incentivized

• Could improve in agility in the delivery life cycle. When customer demands change and abrupt changes in resources and configuration are required, the change order process is not as quick as desired.
• Advanced technical competence and knowledge of a wide variety of specialized software applications is a bit lacking. Relative to some competitor software from Oracle, Microsoft, IBM, or HP, Cognizant isn’t as technically inclined and ready to handle issues with less common software tools.
• Not as forthcoming with status updates as some competitors. In cases of interruptions or upcoming updates, Cognizant doesn’t disclose timely and detailed information unless it is specifically requested by the user.

Incentivized

Although the tool itself is easy to integrate and is readily available for use, it has its limitations. The key limitations of cloudwatch are with respect to cost incurred on log retention and log querying. While for key use cases this is sufficient, for more advanced use cases, Amazon CloudWatch doesn't work out. Also, obviously it is tightly coupled with AWS, which makes you look away if you need a single tool for all monitoring

Incentivized

Support is effective, and we were able to get any problems that we couldn't get solved through community discussion forums solved for us by the AWS support team. For example, we were assisted in one instance where we were not sure about the best metrics to use in order to optimize an auto-scaling group on EC2. The support team was able to look at our metrics and give a useful recommendation on which metrics to use.

Incentivized

Support is very timely and thorough in their responses to inquiries, and also is very willing to help in finding collaborative solutions to any technical challenges. Overall, the only negative is they may not be as equipped or ready to proactively handle some more customized requests as a more established competitor would be. This is more of a reflection of the software than the support team.

Incentivized

We use Cloudwatch for simpler monitoring, but these metrics and logs often feed into bigger ecosystems across our organization. The metrics and logs in Cloudwatch allow our developers quick and easy access to the data they need whilst easily integrating the same data into more prominent platforms for wider analysis, including Service desk support, SecOps, and ITOps monitoring within the organization.

Incentivized

Cognizant Cloud 360 has more of a modern look to it and most of the same functionality. I prefer the layout of Cognizant as I find it more intuitive for a variety of users, but Microsoft’s is also pretty well laid out. Microsoft is more established and has more experience in integrating a wide variety of applications, and so is more ready and equipped to handle less common application cloud integration.

Incentivized

• Positive for alarms and alert notifications once configured/customized.
• Has upfront learning curve, and cost can increase as does the alarm activity and monitoring details you may require.
• Cost-effective for any size organization keeping with AWS and utilizing its native tools is a savings in long-term ROI.

Incentivized

• Cognizant Cloud 360 has saved on overall hardware costs, as many resources have been migrated to the cloud platform and local storage and hardware systems are no longer needed.
• There was an initial period of negative return as the migration was occurring, as some applications were interrupted, which in turn interrupted the flow of projects and inhibited the timely allocation of resources.
• Another positive return can be measured in time savings, as users can more easily access applications from the central cloud source versus various locally customized network locations.

Incentivized