Amazon CloudWatch vs. Virtana Platform

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

Zenoss is one of the most economical low cost monitoring/AIOPS tools available in the market. This goes excellent when complete infra is monitoring by itself however if its receiving the events from other monitoring tool then the Event management uses cases will be limited.

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

• The flexibility to monitor almost anything.
• The graphical interface available for servers and database planning helps to make it easier.
• Easy to integrate other solutions under zenoss.

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

• Support for streaming data is on the roadmap must currently be addressed via a third-party app.
• For some customers, a hybrid on-prem/cloud model may be a better fit than a pure cloud model. The onsite collectors offer some, but not all, of this functionality.
• Tighter integration with third-party (AppDynamics, etc) and/or built-in app performance tools.

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

Anytime we've had issues they have been very responsive and professional.

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 selected Zenoss because we had been using it for years before these other solutions were considered nearly robust enough to potentially be a viable alternative to Zenoss. Our familiarity with the interface and the tool set made it an easy choice for us to continue to upgrade and use the product.

• 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

• We were able to save double-digit percentages on our monthly bill due to cutting back on hardware that was not needed.
• We save time by not having to run across various dashboards and instead have a central place to monitor our infrastructure.

Incentivized