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

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

Well suited for IT Departments that can budget the funds and time needed for setup and maintenance of SCOM. The end product is well suited for medium to large environments that have 100's of resources that require monitoring and reporting. Enterprise level statistics are at your fingertips with a few clicks of a mouse after the product has been configured and agents have been deployed. As I said previously, we are a small business and I was fortunate enough to be able to budget this product into our environment. It did take us a while to configure and fully deploy, but as a result, we are well-informed and are able to extract detailed information as it pertains to usage/consumption of our workstation and server resources to include performance metrics and any errors that may arise.

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

• SCOM can manage Windows OS systems from desktops to servers very well.
• SCOM is platform agnostic in that we manage physical and virtual machines with no differentiation.
• SCOM can quickly deploy emergency security patches and the best part is it can provide detailed results of success and failure rate of patch deployment.

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

• It is a monster of a system and really needs a person managing the system full time
• Options are a bit clunky especially when you need to set overrides.
• Takes a lot of time and effort to setup alerts as you want them, don't rely on the out of the box options you need to invest time into the system to get what you want out of it.
• Make sure you size the underlying database server/s correctly (Microsoft provide a tool to calculate based on number of objects you plan to collect data on), it is a datawarehouse underneath after all.

Incentivized

Microsoft System Center Operations Manager is tightly integrated to Microsoft Windows servers os monitoring with great product support.

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

Ease of Use and user friendly dashboard

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

Hard to get support. The product is not being actively developed anymore, so it is hard to get new features for the product.

Incentivized

Easy to install with intuitive interactive interface during the installation process a and integration to MS SQL was smooth

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

SolarWinds stacks well on the ease of use with an easily installable version and highly modular (products can be added to the basic installation and are easily managed from a single endpoint. System Center Operations Manager was selected because the majority of the environment is based on Windows products and it was part of the licensing agreement. It offered an easy way to consolidate the monitoring tools to provide a single point of management.

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

• Since we are at the tail end of our POC, we have no immediate ROI to report.
• That said, during the POC, we immediately identified several issues within TFS that we immediately addressed and will potentially save us hours of lost time and troubleshooting.

Incentivized