Amazon CloudWatch vs. ManageEngine Site24x7

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 have tried other tools (PRTG etc) in the past, and switched from US monitor to [Site24x7 All-in-One Monitoring], for all the built-in features and ability to implement by using with or without the agents deployed (ip discovery LAN). This is one tool that encompasses the entire organization and allows that single pane of glass feel (NOC screen view) for an accurate virtual snapshot of your entire organization, either cloud and/or LAN.

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

• Alerts: Site24x7 can be configured to send alerts in all sorts of ways, from email, to text messages, to even direct automated phone calls.
• Internal monitoring: An agent installed on one or more machines can monitor internal connectivity to other network devices. This means if connectivity to a server goes down, we often know about it before users alert us.
• External monitoring: Site24x7 also watched our websites and sends alerts if they're unreachable. It uses multiple locations to do so, which means if there's a partial network outage in some part of the country, we know who is affected.

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

• I wish the advanced monitors were not so expensive.
• It is a cloud solution, so it is necessary to open up outbound ports in all security zones.
• If you lose outbound internet service, all your internal servers will throw alarms and life gets extremely noisy.

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

I have only had to use support once, so I can't go into much detail about their support team. The one time I did use it the response was fast but the resolution took some time.

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

Site24x7 [All-in-One Monitoring] has some similarities to ThousandEyes. Especially in the troubleshooting aspect where both offer Web performance waterfall charts to analyze the issue better. Both have cloud-based servers globally that allow to determine performance on the Internet. Site24x7 has more features available so we selected it instead.

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

• Positivity wise, we're spending a third of what we were on our website monitoring, this has allowed us to focus funding elsewhere (namely SolarWinds).
• We have enhanced our core monitoring by now also being able to provide better coverage, whereas we were handicapped with our previous supplier due to the scaling costs of multi-step transactions.
• The general feeling from our IT staff is that the platform is not great, which obviously reduces confidence in the ability for the platform to provide accurate monitoring data for our websites.

Incentivized