Amazon CloudWatch vs. ManageEngine ADAudit Plus

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

ManageEngine is mostly a "check the box" solution for SIEM systems. We needed something that satisfied our customer and was cost-effective. I would highly rate the system on "worth what paid for". Support is eager to please and prompt. My only issue is that it's mostly based outside the US with helpful, but non-native speakers so it's hard to understand them. I wish they would spring for better help "phone lines" so I'm not dealing with difficult to understand and unclear speakers.

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

• Logons - reports are very clean and concise and accurate
• Account Lockouts - very challenging to do without ManageEngine ADAudit Plus. The tool allows us to easily locate the device or, at the very least, point us in the right direction!
• AD change management - IT admins should consider this a necessity, and ManageEngine ADAudit Plus facilitates this seamlessly

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

• In earlier releases there were quite a few bugs and performance issues. These have since been resolved.
• When integrated with the Log360 Suite, it can be confusing on whether EventLog Analyzer or ADAudit Plus are "managing"/"Ingesting" the data from a given endpoint.

Incentivized

It works great for everything we need and use. Any issues in the software are pretty easy to resolve with tech support. And they are very responsive to resolving issues. Even ones where a fix/patch are required. At present, the software does everything we need it to for compliance, audit, and account review.

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

ADAudit with its cloud and on prem install option allows any organization to get in on AD report management. Whether you need to report internally only for for external audit controls its a great tool with flexibility to handle most any user or group report capability. Since this also includes m365 integration it enables IT pros to administer usage, license, cost control and permission access to most anything in Microsoft's portfolio. Its a great tool all around for AD integrated access needs.

Incentivized

uptime good

Incentivized

Integration/overlap between products could be improved

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

The attention to cases or situations with the tool has been exceptional. being able to count on the manufacturer either by mail, call or chat. generate cases directly from the application allows you to have personalized support in order to solve problems that has been able to appear.

Incentivized

knowledgable and prompt response

Incentivized

The remote setup team helped when i needed it and setup weas very straight forward and easy. The advanced setup for an external db and customizations for our latest version AD environment went pretty easy once they found documentation on customization.

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

In terms of features, ADAudit Plus offers a comprehensive set of features for monitoring and auditing Active Directory, including real-time alerts, detailed reports, and user behavior analytics. The platform also offers support for multiple platforms, including Windows, UNIX, and Linux, as well as integration with other ManageEngine tools.

Incentivized

updates are effective and system is reliable

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

The visibility of changes made in AD are very helpfull. We had an admin that made a change in a GPO that causes some strange behaviour in our environment. Normally that would take days to find, especially because the admin was a few days out of office and couldnt tell us the change he made. But after looking into our alerts we found very fast the specific change that was made to a GPO that pointed us in the right direction to solve the problem within 30 minutes.

• No more ghost accounts and password never expires in our AD, the security level is therefore much higher then it was before. And we need less manhour to maintain that.
• Before ADAuditplus we had several hundred accounts with password never expires and at least 15 changes on that item every week. Since we have ADaudtiplus we have no accounts with password never expires and we only see modifications on that item sometimes when a new IT employee starts within our group. IT crew learns fast what to do and especially what NOT to do in our environment to keep things secure.
• Before ADAuditPlus I wrote PowerShell scripts to create reports for management, since ADAuditplus the reports are build automatically every month and send to management.

Incentivized