Amazon CloudWatch vs. Spot by NetApp

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

If you want to control the cost of your cloud infrastructure and adhere to the industry's security best practices, this is the best I've found. If you want to right-size your instances, this can provide a place to start, but there are other tools like https://www.metricly.com/ that might be better suited. For us, this was enough, and we couldn't justify the additional expense of another tool. But it's primary purpose is to control costs.

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

• Monitor costs and provide alerts when they deviate from normal usage.
• Provide security best practices and alert on misconfigurations.
• Monitor utilisation and recommend more appropriate instance sizes and reserved instance purchases.
• Provide a single pane of glass view for multiple accounts in AWS.

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

• UI can be difficult to navigate. Given the amount of data, it's not surprising, but I often launch the different reports in multiple tabs so I don't get lost.
• Can be expensive. Not in our case, but you probably want to check and make sure you'll see significant cost savings that'll pay for the product as we did.

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

Overall, CloudCheckr covers all our AWS monitoring needs and great integration through SysLog into our SIEM to capture alerts for investigation. The reports are great and allow for an easy daily review. Small improvements could be made to the interface and better filtering in places would be good. Great product and the price is fair.

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

Fantastic Support team who are responsive and address question and concerns promptly with a thorough explanation and fast resolution.

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

We compared with Cloud Conformity and Staxx. They are all great products and have their pros and cons and we just felt for the price that CoudCheckr had everything we needed and seemed a bit more mature in the market. We review our position every year and can see that the other products are closing the gap as well.

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

• CloudCheckr has allowed us to increase resell margins as an MSP.
• CloudCheckr has made us aware of cost savings opportunities that exceed the price of the platform itself.
• CloudCheckr has given us additional visibility that has allowed us to manage and understand cloud computing costs.

Incentivized