Amazon CloudWatch vs. DX Application Performance Management

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

Any other APM product is vastly superior. This product's interface, lack of automated instrumentation, and just ridiculous false parity with other APM products is the laughing stock of the industry. In our use case, we have no other APM tools so we attempt to use and in 1 case out of 10 did we actually find a reported metric that was actually related to the root cause. We spent four hours parsing metric output graphs and hierarchy trees to find it. If CA is your preferred vendor and you like washing your clothes by hand instead of using an automated appliance then this tool is for you

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

• CA APM supports .Net and Java applications which are the strong areas of CA APM. It does very well in banking solutions where we are able to meet our business requirements.

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

• There is a steep learning curve with the tool which can make it at times daunting to use.
• APM can at times be fickle with what it can and cannot track as far as performance metrics go.
• Other than Team Center, the rest of the pieces of the tool aren't as intuitive and require more time to instrument.

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

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 have never received any support from CA on this product

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

CA Application Performance Management (APM) is the solution global brands trust to proactively identify and resolve performance and availability issues across physical, virtual, cloud, and mobile applications. CA APM is easy, proactive, intelligent and collaborative, so every user transaction becomes a loyalty-building interaction. CA Application Performance Management is an application lifecycle management solution for businesses of all sizes while we tried to use Dynatrace but as we get more familiar with CA Wily by the time we analyzed Dynatrace, we were interested to use it and see the results how it goes.

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

• APM has allowed us to customize a dashboard view for each specific application. This allows for unique monitoring of top functions and unique alerts. It is awesome for this use.
• APM allows us better data and faster alerting compared to previous products. We moved away from another product because it was not reporting on problems accurately.
• Once set up, APM requires little management and overhead time. The setup can be somewhat time consuming, but once setup we see no issues

Incentivized