Amazon CloudWatch vs. AWS Security Hub

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

AWS Security Hub is mainly for protecting your software, video games, web application, etc... from external digital threats. This is a must for all software out there that can afford it. This also require a decent amount of resources to mitigate problems so that the monitoring page isn't overloaded. So overall, a large amount of budget and manpower is required to maintain this product.

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

• Brings together the security related AWS tools in one dashboard
• Allows to pick and chose which AWS security tools to use
• Clean UI

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

• Not easy to read past data, especially once it moves into Glacier deep storage
• performance is somewhat sluggish ... other systems are much faster to analyze data
• Doesn't always provide a remediation solution or suggested fix like other 3rd party tools like Qualys.
• It's hard to get the initial configuration and enrollment completed as there's a lot of manual intervention for every configured rule that needs to be enabled
• alerts are often times delayed

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

AWS always good with usability and same here for AWS Security Hub. A lot of good documentation is available to read and configure your own. We also started with looking at the videos and documentation to configure automation for our compliance checks. And to configure there are very less steps to be followed which is a very good thing for faster configuration.

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

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

AWS stacks up very similarly to Splunk but being that it's an AWS tool it is better able to natively monitor our AWS footprint, unlike splunk which requires an appliance and / or forwarding agent for it to work properly. The same can be said about some other tools like Dynatrace. Dynatrace has a much more pleasant user interface that the senior management seems to like more, but AWS Security Hub has better options, a more straightforward rules engine and is less expensive than both Splunk and Dynatrace

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 automated compliance test helped us a lot to get PCIDSS certified so it was a very good return for our investments.
• Some third party tools we were using were not available for AWS Security Hub automated testing.
• Easy to configure for faster security automations but if we need detailed reports we should add more tools.

Incentivized