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Amazon CloudWatch vs. Microsoft System Center Operations Manager (SCOM)

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    Overview
    ProductRatingMost Used ByProduct SummaryStarting Price

    Amazon CloudWatch

    Score8.2 out of 10
    N/AAmazon CloudWatch is a native AWS monitoring tool for AWS programs. It provides data collection and resource monitoring capabilities.

    $0

    per canary run

    Microsoft System Center Operations Manager (SCOM)

    Score7.5 out of 10
    N/AMicrosoft's System Center Operations Manager (SCOM) is a monitoring and application performance management option, with the core datacenter and cloud-based systems monitoring.N/A
    Pricing
    Amazon CloudWatchMicrosoft System Center Operations Manager (SCOM)
    Editions & Modules
    Canaries
    $0.0012
    per canary run
    Logs - Analyze (Logs Insights queries)
    $0.005
    per GB of data scanned
    Over 1,000,000 Metrics
    $0.02
    per month
    Contributor Insights - Matched Log Events
    $0.02
    per month per one million log events that match the rule
    Logs - Store (Archival)
    $0.03
    per GB
    Next 750,000 Metrics
    $0.05
    per month
    Next 240,000 Metrics
    $0.10
    per month
    Alarm - Standard Resolution (60 Sec)
    $0.10
    per month per alarm metric
    First 10,000 Metrics
    $0.30
    per month
    Alarm - High Resolution (10 Sec)
    $0.30
    per month per alarm metric
    Alarm - Composite
    $0.50
    per month per alarm
    Logs - Collect (Data Ingestion)
    $0.50
    per GB
    Contributor Insights
    $0.50
    per month per rule
    Events - Custom
    $1.00
    per million events
    Events - Cross-account
    $1.00
    per million events
    CloudWatch RUM
    $1
    per 100k events
    Dashboard
    $3.00
    per month per dashboard
    CloudWatch Evidently - Events
    $5
    per 1 million events
    CloudWatch Evidently - Analysis Units
    $7.50
    per 1 million analysis units
    No answers on this topic
    Offerings
    Pricing Offerings
    Amazon CloudWatchMicrosoft System Center Operations Manager (SCOM)
    Free Trial
    YesNo
    Free/Freemium Version
    YesNo
    Premium Consulting/Integration Services
    YesNo
    Entry-level Setup FeeNo setup feeNo setup fee
    Additional DetailsWith Amazon CloudWatch, there is no up-front commitment or minimum fee; you simply pay for what you use. You will be charged at the end of the month for your usage.—
    More Pricing Information
    Community Pulse
    Amazon CloudWatchMicrosoft System Center Operations Manager (SCOM)
    Considered Both Products
    Amazon AWS
    No answer on this topic
    Microsoft
    No answer on this topic
    Key User Insights
    Would buy again
    100%
    Would buy again
    18 Answers
    92%
    Would buy again
    11 Answers
    Delivers good value for the price
    100%
    Delivers good value for the price
    18 Answers
    92%
    Delivers good value for the price
    11 Answers
    Happy with the feature set
    94%
    Happy with the feature set
    17 Answers
    83%
    Happy with the feature set
    10 Answers
    Lived up to sales and marketing promises
    100%
    Lived up to sales and marketing promises
    15 Answers
    86%
    Lived up to sales and marketing promises
    6 Answers
    Implementation went as expected
    100%
    Implementation went as expected
    17 Answers
    100%
    Implementation went as expected
    11 Answers
    Features
    Amazon CloudWatchMicrosoft System Center Operations Manager (SCOM)
    Application Performance Management
    Comparison of Application Performance Management features of Amazon CloudWatch and Microsoft System Center Operations Manager (SCOM)
    Feature
    Amazon CloudWatch
    -
    Ratings
    Microsoft System Center Operations Manager (SCOM)
    6.1
    22 Ratings
    22% below category average
    Application monitoring00 Ratings5.020 Ratings
    Database monitoring00 Ratings9.022 Ratings
    Threshold alerts00 Ratings10.022 Ratings
    Predictive capabilities00 Ratings2.020 Ratings
    Application performance management console00 Ratings3.019 Ratings
    Collaboration tools00 Ratings6.017 Ratings
    Out-of-the box templates to monitor applications00 Ratings4.020 Ratings
    Application dependency mapping and thresholding00 Ratings4.018 Ratings
    Virtualization monitoring00 Ratings7.020 Ratings
    Server availability and performance monitoring00 Ratings10.021 Ratings
    Server usage monitoring and capacity forecasting00 Ratings8.021 Ratings
    IT Asset Discovery00 Ratings5.018 Ratings
    Best Alternatives
    Amazon CloudWatchMicrosoft System Center Operations Manager (SCOM)
    Small Businesses
    No answers on this topic
    No answers on this topic
    Medium-sized Companies
    Datadog
    Score8.4 out of 10
    SolarWinds AppOptics
    Score8.2 out of 10
    Enterprises
    NetBrain Technologies
    Score9.2 out of 10
    SolarWinds Server & Application Monitor
    Score6.8 out of 10
    All AlternativesView all alternativesView all alternatives
    User Ratings
    Amazon CloudWatchMicrosoft System Center Operations Manager (SCOM)
    Likelihood to Recommend
    7.7
    (40 ratings)
    8.0
    (25 ratings)
    Usability
    7.0
    (3 ratings)
    -
    (0 ratings)
    Support Rating
    8.4
    (8 ratings)
    7.3
    (8 ratings)
    User Testimonials
    Amazon CloudWatchMicrosoft System Center Operations Manager (SCOM)
    Likelihood to Recommend
    Amazon AWS
    For out business we find that AWS Cloudwatch is good at providing real-time metrics for monitoring and analysing the performance and usage of our platform by customers. It is possible to create custom metrics from log events, such people adding items to a basket, checking out or abandoning their orders.
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    Microsoft
    More appropriate for:
    • Pure Microsoft ecosystem environments (Windows Server and SQL server) and the most common Linux and UNIX platforms.
    • Environments where cost is less of a factor than settling on a single platform for monitoring
    • Environments where the administrators are familiar with the setup and installation of SCOM.
    Less appropriate for:
    • Pure UNIX/Linux shops, especially versions not supported out of the box by SCOM.
    • Shops that cannot afford the engagement to setup/configure and maintain on a continuous basis.
    • Shops that cannot dedicate personnel to the care and feeding of SCOM, especially when supporting larger environments.
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    Pros
    Amazon AWS
    • 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
    Read full review
    Microsoft
    • Allows us to visualize our systems in a single interface and see the status of health as well as relevant performance metrics.
    • A flexible and powerful interface with active alerting covering domain controllers, SQL servers, etc...
    • Allows you to customize your views and workspaces for specific tasks and needs.
    • Reporting is powerful and flexible.
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    Cons
    Amazon AWS
    • 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
    Read full review
    Microsoft
    • One of the biggest drawbacks to SCOM is the sheer scope and complexity of the system. This can be a pro and a con. The system is very customizable, what you put into it is what you'll get out of it. That said, the learning curve is fairly steep. An organization needs to be committed to putting time and resources into SCOM to get the most out of it. I've heard stories from colleagues of several different companies that invested in SCOM and then abandoned it due to the excessive time and care required.
    • SCOM is expensive. Not only is the enterprise licensing costly, SCOM requires it's own servers, operational and warehouse databases to be maintained.
    • The OOB SCOM reports are a bit clunky and feel outdated.
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    Likelihood to Renew
    Amazon AWS
    No answers on this topic
    Microsoft
    Microsoft System Center Operations Manager is tightly integrated to Microsoft Windows servers os monitoring with great product support.
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    Usability
    Amazon AWS
    It's excellent at collecting logs. It's easy to set up. The viewing & querying part could be much better, though. The query syntax takes some time to get used to, & the examples are not helpful. Also, while being great, Log Insights requires manual picking of log streams to query across every time.
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    Microsoft
    Ease of Use and user friendly dashboard
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    Support Rating
    Amazon AWS
    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
    Read full review
    Microsoft
    Hard to get support. The product is not being actively developed anymore, so it is hard to get new features for the product.
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    Implementation Rating
    Amazon AWS
    No answers on this topic
    Microsoft
    Easy to install with intuitive interactive interface during the installation process a and integration to MS SQL was smooth
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    Alternatives Considered
    Amazon AWS
    Grafana is definitely a lot better and flexible in comparison with Amazon CloudWatch for visualisation, as it offers much more options and is versatile. VictoriaMetrics and Prometheus are time-series databases which can do almost everything cloudwatch can do in a better and cheaper way. Integrating Grafana with them will make it more capable Elasticsearch for log retention and querying will surpass cloudwatch log monitoring in both performance and speed
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    Microsoft
    We used Altiris and WSUS and in the beginning Altiris had the better admin interface than SCOM, but it is no longer the case as SCOM has refined their admin interface. Altiris still has better and more robust group assignments for management roles and those two other tools can better manage non Windows OS devices than SCOM but for a large enterprise Windows shop, if you can afford it, SCOM is the way to go.
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    Return on Investment
    Amazon AWS
    • 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
    Read full review
    Microsoft
    • It has allowed us to provide an Enterprise Event/Alert management solution to the Global company
    • It has taken a long time to get it to provide valuable alerts and information, lots of user resources and investment.
    • It assists with 24/7 monitoring and out of hours support
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    ScreenShots

    Amazon CloudWatch Screenshots

    Screenshot of How Amazon CloudWatch works - high-level overviewScreenshot of CloudWatch Application MonitoringScreenshot of CloudWatch ServiceLens and Contributor Insights - expedite resolution timeScreenshot of Improve Observability with Amazon CloudWatchScreenshot of Visual overview of Amazon CloudWatch