Amazon CloudWatch vs. Splunk AppDynamics

Overview
ProductRatingMost Used ByProduct SummaryStarting Price
Amazon CloudWatch
Score 8.2 out of 10
N/A
Amazon CloudWatch is a native AWS monitoring tool for AWS programs. It provides data collection and resource monitoring capabilities.
$0
per canary run
Splunk AppDynamics
Score 8.2 out of 10
N/A
AppDynamics is an APM and Mobile APM program, with application mapping and predictive capabilities. These capacities enable automated remediation and code-level diagnostics in real time. It can be deployed on-premise or as a SaaS.N/A
Pricing
Amazon CloudWatchSplunk AppDynamics
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 CloudWatchSplunk AppDynamics
Free Trial
YesYes
Free/Freemium Version
YesYes
Premium Consulting/Integration Services
NoNo
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 CloudWatchSplunk AppDynamics
Features
Amazon CloudWatchSplunk AppDynamics
Application Performance Management
Comparison of Application Performance Management features of Product A and Product B
Amazon CloudWatch
-
Ratings
Splunk AppDynamics
8.5
Ratings
11% above category average
Application monitoring00 Ratings9.40 Ratings
Database monitoring00 Ratings8.00 Ratings
Threshold alerts00 Ratings8.90 Ratings
Predictive capabilities00 Ratings7.80 Ratings
Application performance management console00 Ratings8.90 Ratings
Collaboration tools00 Ratings7.60 Ratings
Server availability and performance monitoring00 Ratings8.50 Ratings
Server usage monitoring and capacity forecasting00 Ratings8.80 Ratings
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User Ratings
Amazon CloudWatchSplunk AppDynamics
Likelihood to Recommend
7.7
(0 ratings)
8.7
(0 ratings)
Likelihood to Renew
-
(0 ratings)
9.1
(0 ratings)
Usability
7.0
(0 ratings)
8.5
(0 ratings)
Support Rating
8.4
(0 ratings)
8.1
(0 ratings)
User Testimonials
Amazon CloudWatchSplunk AppDynamics
Likelihood to Recommend
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.
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Platforms for software as a service (SaaS) frequently cater to a large number of users with a variety of needs and usage patterns. Because AppDynamics offers multi-tenant monitoring capabilities to track performance across various customer environments, it is a good choice for SaaS platform monitoring. SaaS providers can maximize resource utilization, proactively detect and resolve performance issues, and provide a dependable and consistent user experience for their clients with AppDynamics.
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Pros
  • 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.
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  • AppDynamics excels in creating dynamic baselines for application performance. For instance, during periods of varying workloads, it automatically adjusts performance baselines. This adaptive baseline creation helps in accurately detecting anomalies and deviations, ensuring that abnormal behavior is quickly identified and addressed.
  • The scalability of an organization's apps can be evaluated with the assistance of AppDynamics. It gives insights into how effectively programs can handle increased workloads, helping to proactively address scalability concerns before they impair performance.
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Cons
  • 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.
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  • The initial setup process of AppDynamics could be more user-friendly. Some users find the configuration and onboarding to be a bit complex. Improving the onboarding experience could make it more accessible, especially for smaller teams or those with limited resources.
  • It can be difficult for some users to get AppDynamics up and running for the first time. For new users, the platform's usability might be improved by streamlining the onboarding process or providing more user-friendly setup wizards.
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Likelihood to Renew
No answers on this topic
its working for us, we are familiar and comfortable with the tool and its proven valuable/indispensable in helping evaluate our code.
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Usability
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
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Actually, I would like to give it a score of 10 out of 10, but taking into account certain factors such as: the cost of the annual licence, the complexity of installation and configuration, the blurring of setting Splunk AppDynamics over the cloud and especially OpenShift since we use it as a container platform. So, 8 out of 10 looks perfect for it
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Support Rating
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.
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AppDynamics has its own community site that includes forums and a knowledge base. On the forums, you can converse with other members of the community and ask technical questions as you have them. Though this forum isn’t filled with people there are active members for you to gain some valuable insights.
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Alternatives Considered
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.
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It is distinguished from these programs because the platform provides visualizations of application processes, showing the interplay between various parts and services. Understanding the architecture of complicated apps and finding their weak spots is greatly aided by this.
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Return on Investment
  • 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.
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  • We can optimize infrastructure utilization and lower cloud or server costs by locating and removing resource-intensive bottlenecks with the aid of AppDynamics.
  • Building trust with external stakeholders and encouraging accountability within our organization, AppDynamics' comprehensive reporting and monitoring capabilities offer transparency into the health of applications.
  • We can find bugs earlier and improve development workflows with the help of AppDynamics' real-time insights and code-level profiling.
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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