Likelihood to Recommend 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.
Read full review The best I can do is a two. Our experience has been so bad, the software is not good in lots of respects, and the customer service people are either too overwhelmed with people with issues that they can't respond or they just don't care to respond. And the services come at a premium price. So you would think we could at least get a response. I know Avalara has real tax expertise deep inside that company. But the tools and processes they have cobbled together to monetize that expertise are not delivering a good experience. And their customer support is literally the worst I have ever experienced--and particularly coming from a premium provider
Read full review 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. Read full review Calculates the correct tax regardless of state, county, or local jurisdiction. CertCapture provides a site for managing all resale certificates, updating, renewing, and providing reports/backup in the event of an audit. One stop shop for all things tax makes my life easier! Read full review 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. Read full review I find it virtually impossible to access people when you have issues with anything In my experience, everything runs through account managers and they are non-responsive and unavailable most of the time. In my experience, 99% of all communication with anybody at Avalara has to be done via some ridiculous form or via email. Human contact is extremely difficult to resolve an issue that sometimes requires human to human contact. Read full review Likelihood to Renew We need their help with filing and keeping track of things. It is very likely we are in the process of renewing right now. Autumn is our case manager and she has been a great help in keeping us updated on our usage and renewal. I feel we will be using this for a very long time.
Read full review Usability The software and addons that we use are very applicable to our operations and the usability of the sotware works great with all of the software we have it integrated with. The certcapture and avatax work great together and has made things very automated for our company as majority of our sales are sales exempt. Navigating through the software is very user friendly and helps when we have to have other individuals go in as it is not difficult for them to find where they need to go within the software.
Read full review Reliability and Availability I have been using Avalara for years and do not remember ever having an outage during working hours. The service is accurate and dependable.
Read full review Performance We do have trouble tying Avalara's reporting back to our POS, but we just got a new POS system and there are bugs we are still trying to work out within the POS system. I do not believe this is an Avalara issue
Read full review 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.
Read full review Avalara is not consistent in giving us information timely. For instance, right now, we have a help desk ticket with them that's been open since October. They are still trying to figure it out and we haven't gotten any feedback on where they are at or what is going on. That seems to me a very excessive amount of time to be working on a problem. Was it forgotten? Is there something bigger going on? Do they need something from us? An update would be helpful.
Also, many times when we call with an issue or concern (wrong tax rate for instance) we generally feel like the help desk assumes it's of our doing instead of theirs and doesn't truely listen when we explain the problem because we end up repeating it over and over as well as sending examples. We expect more respect on our end.
Read full review In-Person Training I wasn't here when they first started with Avalara.
Read full review Online Training The videos go too fast; I kept having to pause them and go back. They don't allow for any practice transactions or provide training materials.
Read full review Implementation Rating The implementation team from Avalara was very knowledgable and did a good job of passing along information so that we could maintain the system and be able to make future changes ourselves. We had asked for some custom tax setup and they worked with us to get additional taxes set up that they didn't previously have. They worked with us to pull our documentation on tax rules and make sure those were included. I had hoped more scenarios would be there out of the box to cut down on the configuration time.
Read full review Alternatives Considered 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.
Read full review When I started with the company, they were using a version of CCH. This was my first experience with that program and I found it very cumbersome. It was unable to calculate multiple tax rates (this may have changed in the last 10 years) and while it filled out some of the tax returns for us, we still had to manipulate many and file them ourselves. Now we just verify that what we show in our system matches Avalara and hit approve and we are done for another month.
Read full review Scalability There is no change that has to happen as your company grows, Avalara continues to do it's job for any size company
Read full review Return on Investment 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. Read full review We are positively impacted by Avalara in having a central library to store our certificate files. We spend very little time and resources to calculate and compile tax data for filing. The electronic filing has helped insure we are on time with our filings and avoiding penalties. Read full review ScreenShots Amazon CloudWatch Screenshots