Amazon CloudWatch is a native AWS monitoring tool for AWS programs. It provides data collection and resource monitoring capabilities.
$0
per canary run
Atera
Score 8.9 out of 10
N/A
Atera is a platform that enables IT professionals to gain access, visibility, and control over all their networks and devices from anywhere. Users can manage their IT operation from patch management, IT automations, advanced reporting, alerts, helpdesk, ticketing, and it features dozens of integrations with familiar tools. Its pay-per-technician model enables IT teams and MSPs to pay a fixed price and scale operations across unlimited devices, all while reducing menial tasks so they…
$99
per month per user
Pricing
Amazon CloudWatch
Atera
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
MSP - Pro
$99
per month per user
MSP - Growth
$129
per month per user
IT Department - Professional
$149
per month per user
MSP - Power
$169
per month per user
IT Department - Expert
$169
per month per user
IT Department - Master
$199
per month per user
Offerings
Pricing Offerings
Amazon CloudWatch
Atera
Free Trial
Yes
Yes
Free/Freemium Version
Yes
No
Premium Consulting/Integration Services
Yes
Yes
Entry-level Setup Fee
No setup fee
No setup fee
Additional Details
With 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.
Unlimited devices.
Prices per user, per month, billed annually.
Cloud watch is great and essential if you decide to invest in AWS and have any need to monitor the health of all aspects of your VPC resources, or at the organizational level (multiple accounts). Another benefit of the service is constant upgrades at no additional costs; the software evolves to develop modules and interface improvements. For first-time users in AWS, this is going to take a bit to understand, so the learning curve to this metrics environment can seem overwhelming at first glance/use.
As a one-person IT department, Atera is almost like having another person to help, especially as we integrate the AIT functionalities. We have several locations spread over nearly 200 miles, and Atera has enabled me to remote in and fix something that before would have had to wait until we could justify an all-day or overnight 300 mile round trip.
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.
Support, if you need them they are there and they always have the answers you need.
The AI scripting features allow you to really hit the ground running. You can give it a prompt and it will give you a script that will be very close to what you need. All you have to do is polish it up and test it out.
I love having the ability to use multiple remote access tools, in the event a machine has an issue with one of them, or if a cloud service goes down, you have a fallback.
The shared script library is an amazing resource for troubleshooting and streamlining.
The development teams are open to adding features and have done so frequently based on user requests.
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.
As of right now, we have found nothing that can offer as many features as Atera does along with the affordability. They are doing monthly releases each month and not just making small changes (shared scripting library, chocolatey support, Install packages, Splashtop SOS support, Scheduled tickets to name a few). The uptimes are great and accessibility to the dashboard has yet to be limited. We are a happy customer and bordering on fanboy status now
This has been a great platform to handle both service requests and device maintenance. Without it, we would have to do manual ticket creation through another platform that does not link with a RMM making the help desk inefficient and frustrating both Employees and the Executives of the company. The addition of AI makes all of this even easier!
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.
Atera support provides answers to my questions lightning fast. They have never left me feeling like I'm out there on my own. I can ask questions by email, or by chat, or by opening a ticket with them and they are always on it quickly. They also have a forum where other Atera users can help you if you need it, and you can also add feature requests via the forum.
I believe that CloudWatch is a better solution to use with AWS services and resources in terms of cost and ease of integration with AWS infrastructure services. But keep in mind that Elasticsearch is better at aggregating application-level metrics. We chose CloudWatch because of its capabilities to integrate and monitor AWS services in almost real-time.
Atera was the clear winner for us. The interface and tools were very easy to learn and setup. Atera's licensing incorporates good feature sets and value levels. Some of the other products were difficult to setup and lacked good flow between tools. The value proposition was also not as good.
We were able to set up log streaming, retention, and simple downtime alerts within a few hours, having no prior experience with CloudWatch, freeing up our engineers to focus on more important business goals.
CloudWatch log groups have made it relatively easy to detect and diagnose issues in production by allowing us to aggregate logs across servers, correlate failures, isolate misbehaving servers, etc. Thanks to CloudWatch, we are generally able to identify, understand and mitigate most production fires within 10-15 minutes.
Choosing CloudWatch to manage log aggregation has saved us quite a bit of time and money over the past year. Generally, 3rd-party log aggregation solutions tend to get quite expensive unless you self-host, in which case you typically need to spend a fair amount of time setting up, maintaining, and monitoring these services.
We have been able to add new employees/devices without increasing my staff to support them.
The value of charging per technician verses per device cannot be stated enough. Without that pricing, I wouldn't be able to budget enough to pay for all of the things I get with Atera.
They have a customer portal which allows the end user to check on submitted tickets, open new tickets and recommend any new features.
