Amazon CloudWatch vs. Amazon QuickSight

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

I'm likely to recommend it because it would become so native if other cloud services are based on AWS infrastructure, like our current setup. It is very seamlessly integrated with other services to feed in data for the visualization. In addition, supporting a reasonably large number of users concurrently is not an issue and should be able to scale horizontally as needed.

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

• Lightweight and serverless BI tool that can be used for niche dashboards.
• Its integration into other AWS Services is one of its most appealing features.
• The low monthly cost is another benefit.

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

• One of the primary challenges I've had with Amazon QuickSight so far is that some of the reports I want to build use data from different data sets. Instead of being able to put all of the information I want to see into one report.
• Some of our Amazon QuickSight reports only update every 24 hours. It would be great to see that data in real-time.
• I would remove the various time zones from Amazon QuickSight and only use the time zone we are in.

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

It is easy to use and set up no need to put in so much effort. Once build, the dashboard can be used with multiple clients with the same domain. It provides multiple connectivity options which makes it a versatile option for reporting.

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

They provide proper support when needed. They are always ready to provide the box solution and make things easier for users.

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

As per our requirement, the Amazon Eco System leads us to use the Amazon Quick Sight platform. It works well with Redshift datasources.

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

• Cost Effective
• Easy setup and maintenance

Incentivized