Amazon CloudWatch vs. Data Center Real-User Monitoring (DCRUM), discontinued

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

Dynatrace Network Application Monitoring (NAM), formerly DCRUM, has improved greatly compared to when it was DCRUM; however, it still needs a lot of improvement in end-to-end flow capture with regards to network monitoring. Its alerting and integration capabilities are very good and easy to use. But it still needs a lot of tweaking in usability.

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

• Dynatrace Network Application Monitoring (NAM), formerly DCRUM, is very useful to find the network packet flow across applications
• It shows the application behavior in terms of end-user performance
• It integrates very well with other Dynatrace components

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

• Its configuration requires a lot of technical and business knowledge to drive monitoring expectations to dashboards.
• DCRUM needs a robust monitoring architecture to store, analyze and visualize all collected data.
• DCRUM can't monitor the latest Microsoft Exchange versions.

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

Best of breed.

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 only thing missing for a 10, would be if they texted or called you back.

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

Nagios can't trace real user transactions from a front-end tier through a backend-tier,;with Nagios you only can monitor server availability and hardware issues. Riverbed is commonly used to determine networking issues without considering real user transactions impact on an application stack.

• 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

• It has reduced the number of war rooms as well as the number of people involved to address issues.
• It helps in utilization trending for network capacity.
• It has prevented poor solutions from hitting production.
• When the various business units launch own initiatives such as third party tools or new platforms, it's become extremly easy to detect.
• The reports help in the field of continuous improvement as any changes are immediately discovered and can be compared to history. Deviations from what you have decided as a tolerance corridor can be used to trigger alarms, both positive and negative.