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Amazon CloudWatch vs. SolarWinds Server & Application Monitor

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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

    SolarWinds Server & Application Monitor

    Score7 out of 10
    N/ASolarWinds Server & Application Monitor (SAM) delivers application and server monitoring capabilities. SAM allows for self-service for easy setup, 1200+ monitoring templates, and customization options, as well as integrate with other SolarWinds products.N/A
    Pricing
    Amazon CloudWatchSolarWinds Server & Application Monitor
    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 CloudWatchSolarWinds Server & Application Monitor
    Free Trial
    YesYes
    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.SAM pricing starts at $2,995.
    More Pricing Information
    Community Pulse
    Amazon CloudWatchSolarWinds Server & Application Monitor
    Considered Both Products
    Amazon AWS
    Chose Amazon CloudWatch
    As CloudWatch is integrated into AWS already, its ready to go. External products such as Nagios require a fair bit of work to actually get the metrics into the dashboards. Products like SolarWinds and Datadog provide quite a high level of very easy integration which allows for …
    Incentivized
    SolarWinds
    No answer on this topic
    Key User Insights
    Would buy again
    100%
    Would buy again
    18 Answers
    100%
    Would buy again
    33 Answers
    Delivers good value for the price
    100%
    Delivers good value for the price
    18 Answers
    100%
    Delivers good value for the price
    31 Answers
    Happy with the feature set
    94%
    Happy with the feature set
    17 Answers
    100%
    Happy with the feature set
    33 Answers
    Lived up to sales and marketing promises
    100%
    Lived up to sales and marketing promises
    15 Answers
    100%
    Lived up to sales and marketing promises
    26 Answers
    Implementation went as expected
    100%
    Implementation went as expected
    17 Answers
    93%
    Implementation went as expected
    28 Answers
    Features
    Amazon CloudWatchSolarWinds Server & Application Monitor
    Application Performance Management
    Comparison of Application Performance Management features of Amazon CloudWatch and SolarWinds Server & Application Monitor
    Feature
    Amazon CloudWatch
    -
    Ratings
    SolarWinds Server & Application Monitor
    8.6
    276 Ratings
    12% above category average
    Application monitoring00 Ratings8.9266 Ratings
    Database monitoring00 Ratings8.4230 Ratings
    Threshold alerts00 Ratings8.9271 Ratings
    Predictive capabilities00 Ratings8.2215 Ratings
    Application performance management console00 Ratings8.2239 Ratings
    Collaboration tools00 Ratings7.7148 Ratings
    Out-of-the box templates to monitor applications00 Ratings7.8256 Ratings
    Application dependency mapping and thresholding00 Ratings8.5216 Ratings
    Virtualization monitoring00 Ratings8.8234 Ratings
    Server availability and performance monitoring00 Ratings9.8269 Ratings
    Server usage monitoring and capacity forecasting00 Ratings9.1250 Ratings
    IT Asset Discovery00 Ratings9.0199 Ratings
    Best Alternatives
    Amazon CloudWatchSolarWinds Server & Application Monitor
    Small Businesses
    No answers on this topic
    No answers on this topic
    Medium-sized Companies
    Datadog
    Score8.4 out of 10
    SolarWinds AppOptics
    Score8.1 out of 10
    Enterprises
    NetBrain Technologies
    Score9.2 out of 10
    Splunk AppDynamics
    Score8.2 out of 10
    All AlternativesView all alternativesView all alternatives
    User Ratings
    Amazon CloudWatchSolarWinds Server & Application Monitor
    Likelihood to Recommend
    7.7
    (40 ratings)
    8.8
    (278 ratings)
    Likelihood to Renew
    -
    (0 ratings)
    8.9
    (10 ratings)
    Usability
    7.0
    (3 ratings)
    8.6
    (29 ratings)
    Availability
    -
    (0 ratings)
    9.9
    (3 ratings)
    Performance
    -
    (0 ratings)
    6.0
    (3 ratings)
    Support Rating
    8.4
    (8 ratings)
    9.0
    (21 ratings)
    Online Training
    -
    (0 ratings)
    4.5
    (1 ratings)
    Implementation Rating
    -
    (0 ratings)
    4.5
    (3 ratings)
    Configurability
    -
    (0 ratings)
    1.0
    (2 ratings)
    Ease of integration
    -
    (0 ratings)
    4.5
    (2 ratings)
    Product Scalability
    -
    (0 ratings)
    9.9
    (3 ratings)
    Vendor post-sale
    -
    (0 ratings)
    4.5
    (2 ratings)
    Vendor pre-sale
    -
    (0 ratings)
    4.5
    (2 ratings)
    User Testimonials
    Amazon CloudWatchSolarWinds Server & Application Monitor
    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
    SolarWinds
    For monitoring applications that run on Windows hosts on VMware or HyperV virtualization, SolarWindows offers a nice, vertical view of both the loads and the resources. In such an environment, this makes life really good! But if you have something else -- for example, Linux hosts -- you're on your own to some extent. That is, the things it does well, it does very well -- but everything else is much less polished.
    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
    SolarWinds
    • Monitor Azure Cloud Severs- We use SolarWinds SAM to monitor Active Directory and DNS on Several DCs published on Azure Cloud.
    • Monitor Hyper V and VMware - SolarWinds SAM monitors applications on both Hyper V and VMware, while also monitoring the physical host machines.
    • It also helps us monitor Warranty expiration for physical servers.
    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
    SolarWinds
    • Provides basic monitoring/visibility. Visibility into detailed/fine-grained issues best suited for more specialized/expensive solutions.
    • Licensing per monitored application rapidly uses up purchased license count.
    • More out-of-the-box templates or easier setup of monitoring less-common applications would make the solution more appealing given the target audience of the product.
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    Likelihood to Renew
    Amazon AWS
    No answers on this topic
    SolarWinds
    We are heavily invested in Solarwinds products for a reason. They are generally easy to setup and run with, requiring only some interfacing with support or help articles on rare occasions. They do what we bought them to do and we can't ask for more.
    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
    SolarWinds
    SolarWinds Server & Application Monitor is quite easy to use and super versatile. It allows you to do just about anything you can through premade templates or through scripting. You can use an agent on the servers if you want to, or you can monitor through WMI or SNMP credentials. You can customize thresholds for alerting quickly, and you can configure alerts to be as complex or as simple as you want.
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    Reliability and Availability
    Amazon AWS
    No answers on this topic
    SolarWinds
    The tool works and monitors items 24x7, it only requires maintenance a little more frequently due to security fixes in the Windows operating system.
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    Performance
    Amazon AWS
    No answers on this topic
    SolarWinds
    The graphical interface and the performance of the database leave a little to be desired, they could be better explored.Some functionality and screens do not work well depending on the browser used. The integrations never had any problems or caused crashes in other systems.
    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
    SolarWinds
    I think there was only a couple times I had to open a support case for SAM and one time they got multiple engineers on the phone to get a better idea what I was trying to monitor and was able to point me in the best direction to monitor that system.
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    Online Training
    Amazon AWS
    No answers on this topic
    SolarWinds
    It was sufficient to read their documentation and watch videos.
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    Implementation Rating
    Amazon AWS
    No answers on this topic
    SolarWinds
    Make sure SNMP and WMI are configured ahead of time
    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
    SolarWinds
    It has been a while since we first purchased SolarWinds, but I looked over several other products that I can't remember now. Many other products tried to scan the network to find computers but given that our computers are located in various places across campus with other computers in our buildings that are not ours that type of network scanning was not what we needed. Other services have extra services that we had no need of and I liked the ability to add custom fields in SolarWinds so we can track the information on each computer that we need to know.
    Read full review
    Scalability
    Amazon AWS
    No answers on this topic
    SolarWinds
    It is hard to find the recommended SQL setup and convince others that is the way you should configure the server when you set it up
    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
    SolarWinds
    • Less time spent investigating causes of issues. We are alerted straight away and can find the root cause of the issue in less time.
    • We have been able to ditch all our previous individual monitoring solutions, none of which integrated with each other for a single solution which fully integrates with each of the different modules to provide a single portal for monitoring and alerting.
    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

    SolarWinds Server & Application Monitor Screenshots

    Screenshot of Multi-vendor application performance monitoringScreenshot of Multi-vendor server monitoringScreenshot of Application dependency mapping with AppStack™ dashboardScreenshot of Microsoft Exchange performance monitoring with AppInsight™ templateScreenshot of Microsoft IIS performance monitoring with AppInsight™ templateScreenshot of Server hardware health monitoring