Amazon CloudWatch vs CA Wily CEM

Amazon CloudWatch

If you are using other AWS products, including EC2, ECS, or Lambda, using CloudWatch is an easy decision. You will get log aggregation and instrumentation out-of-the-box. The lack of log search features may be a sticking point, though your organization does not have to use CloudWatch exclusively. If your platform does not rely on AWS products, CloudWatch should not be considered.

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Verified User

Engineer in Engineering

Research Company, 11-50 employees

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CA Wily CEM

CA Wily is well suited for monitoring the load balanced application nodes and determine their main performance bottlenecks like if problem exists in heap or in some connection issues. But I think when it comes to providing the entire report of the application, it is less appropriate as there is no way to create the entire report of the test for all the counters monitored. Also there is no way to detect some issues based on the system configuration.

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Mayank Thirani

Research Assistant

University of San FranciscoHigher Education, 1001-5000 employees

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Feature Rating Comparison

Amazon CloudWatch

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Infrastructure monitoring
Infrastructure alerting
Dashboarding

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Verified User

Director in Engineering

Sports Company, 51-200 employees

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Heap Consumption in the Application servers and its traces throughout the test scenarios.
Active number of database connections from application server to the database server.
It provides the CPU usage in the JVM and also provides if all the instances of application server are having load while running the test on the load balancing server.
Traces the active number of threads in each node of application server.

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Mayank Thirani

Research Assistant

University of San FranciscoHigher Education, 1001-5000 employees

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Cons

Building cloudwatch dashboards can be cumbersome. You have to navigate through various screens to get the metrics you want to add.
Exporting alarm / alerting data is not available for further post-processing or analysis
You have to build alerts and alarms yourself. CloudWatch does not give you any recommendations, so you have to know what you're doing.

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Verified User

Director in Engineering

Sports Company, 51-200 employees

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To kill the thread explicitly in the server as per our need.
To explicitly invoke the garbage collection so as to monitor the load as per our desire.
Sampling frequency to be reduced to get more deterministic of some counters.
Determine the first response byte from the server.

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Mayank Thirani

Research Assistant

University of San FranciscoHigher Education, 1001-5000 employees

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Alternatives Considered

We found that CloudWatch provides great value in terms of cost and maintenance time. It is cheap and requires virtually 0 upkeep. Of the other solutions we evaluated, Loggly and New Relic get quite expensive when you reach the volume of log data that we are processing even though in terms of set up and maintenance effort they are on par with CloudWatch. As dedicated log aggregation (Loggly) and application monitoring (New Relic) solutions, they do offer great features that are not exactly easy to replicate with CloudWatch, but we found that CloudWatch does more than enough to meet our needs. PaperTrail is also a relatively cheap option but has a very limited feature set. Finally, we have successfully used Graylog as part of a log aggregation stack (in tandem with fluentd and elasticsearch), and the dashboards you can create with this combination are simply spectacular. Unfortunately, even though the cost if self-hosting is relatively cheap, we found that maintaining that stack was difficult without having a dedicated engineer for it.

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Brian Dentino

Founder

finbox.ioInternet, 1-10 employees

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CA Application Performance Management (APM) is the solution global brands trust to proactively identify and resolve performance and availability issues across physical, virtual, cloud, and mobile applications. CA APM is easy, proactive, intelligent and collaborative, so every user transaction becomes a loyalty-building interaction. CA Application Performance Management is an application lifecycle management solution for businesses of all sizes while we tried to use Dynatrace but as we get more familiar with CA Wily by the time we analyzed Dynatrace, we were interested to use it and see the results how it goes.

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Mayank Thirani

Research Assistant

University of San FranciscoHigher Education, 1001-5000 employees

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Return on Investment

Very positive ROI, we are able to pre-empt production issues via alerting
CloudWatch is low cost and allows us to get enterprise level monitoring
CloudWatch allows us to get visibility into all of our workloads and see how traffic is increasing or decreasing and make product level decisions

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Verified User

Director in Engineering

Sports Company, 51-200 employees

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One APM solution can manage application systems distributed across many data centers, ones you own, and ones that you do not. The APM solution simply follows your application around. If you use VMware vMotion to move a VM that contains a Java application, the APM solution simply adjusts.
You benefit from the combination of the hosted back end and the Agile development practices of the APM vendor. If the APM vendor only has to enhance and maintain one copy of the back end, that back end can be evolved much more quickly than if the vendor has to ship software to customers and then support multiple back releases. So with an APM as a Service offering, the value of the offering simply improves over time at a faster rate than with on premise software.
We do not have to install and maintain an application system and its associated middleware and databases in order to manage your applications. There is only one back end and it is managed by the vendor.

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Mayank Thirani

Research Assistant

University of San FranciscoHigher Education, 1001-5000 employees

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Pricing Details

Amazon CloudWatch

General

7.8

CA Wily CEM

8.0

Amazon CloudWatch vs CA Wily CEM