Amazon CloudWatch vs Cisco ASA

Likelihood to Recommend

Ideal for monitoring AWS services and workloads. We have several of our websites entirely hosted on AWS and we're able to get a Grafana dashboard of all the relevant metrics from CloudFront, S3, EC2, RDS, and Elastic Beanstalk. This can be set up within the hour or templated on your code for infrastructure (we do this with terraform & cloud formation). By design, it isn't suited for non-AWS workloads.

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Verified User

Professional in Finance and Accounting

Financial Services Company, 501-1000 employees

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CISCO ASA is suitable for every organization from MID range to HIGH RANGE. However, for small customers, they can buy Cisco product but support cost will be the challenge. However nowadays one tool is never enough, but Cisco gives us a unified way of managing infra with there different solutions. I agree they are more stable products comparing any products which are available in the Market.

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Jitu Mani Das

Information Security Manager

SPXFLOWMachinery, 10,001+ employees

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Feature Rating Comparison

Amazon CloudWatch

Cisco ASA

Identification Technologies

Visualization Tools

Content Inspection

Policy-based Controls

Active Directory and LDAP

Firewall Management Console

Reporting and Logging

VPN

High Availability

Stateful Inspection

Proxy Server

Pros

Managing log retention periods is very simple with CloudWatch, and can be configured on a per-group basis.
Monitoring host performance is very easy when coupled with the CloudWatch Agent on an EC2 instance. A simple installation and configuration replaces an entire 3rd-party host monitoring stack.
CloudWatch is flexible enough for not just host monitoring, but application monitoring as well. It's easy to pipe local logs up to CloudWatch and extract structured data in order to monitor and set alerts on custom app metrics.

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Brian Dentino

Founder

finbox.ioInternet, 1-10 employees

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Consistent commands. A lot of the general commands used on other Cisco switches and routers also work here, making it easy script common tasks and changes across multiple devices without having to switch command structure.
Processing power. The ASA is incredibly fast and doesn't introduce much if any latency.

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Brian Taylor

Systems Engineer

Synectics for Management Decisions, IncInformation Technology and Services, 51-200 employees

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Cons

CloudWatch doesn't monitor things outside of the cloud, it's not what it is intended for.
Billing is confusing as it bills on Dashboard, metrics called, custom metrics, etc. Hard to forecast the charge.
Paradigm is confusing sometimes and difficult to learn.

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Verified User

C-Level Executive in Information Technology

Retail Company, 1001-5000 employees

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The gui interface is good, but often lacks the ability to perform full tasks without command line.
Integration with other products can be complicated and you may need to find the custom commands from the 3rd party or support to make it work.
A lot of their advanced features are present, but aren't fully integrated yet.

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Verified User

Engineer in Information Technology

Higher Education Company, 501-1000 employees

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Likelihood to Renew

No score

No answers yet

No answers on this topic

Cisco ASA 9.0

Based on 1 answer

I am committed to low-OpEx usage model, know most (nearly all) hw and sw features and have a good customer base to continue to use Cisco ASA.

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Sergei Chernooki

Network and Project engineer, IT. Cisco Certified Trainer

FreelanceComputer Networking, 51-200 employees

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Usability

Amazon CloudWatch 7.0

Based on 2 answers

The tool collects a great deal of data, and data that's not available many other places. But the data is hidden in obscure places, and the logs are hard to read and follow. The user interface could use a heavy rework, and several companies have made a business out of scraping the data and presenting it better.

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Verified User

Professional in Information Technology

Human Resources Company, 51-200 employees

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No score

No answers yet

No answers on this topic

Support Rating

Amazon CloudWatch 7.6

Based on 16 answers

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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Ramindu Deshapriya

Lead Consultant - Technology

VirtusaComputer Software, 10,001+ employees

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Cisco ASA 8.4

Based on 12 answers

The support is usually very good and gets back to you very quickly. However I had some instances of when two engineers will give me wildly different answers to what I thought was a simple question. Overall however I do rate the support highly and they are generally always very good.

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Fraser Clark

Network Engineer

People's Postcode LotteryGambling & Casinos, 201-500 employees

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Alternatives Considered

I can only speak to how it's positively benefited my organization. The problem was that hosting in-house servers is no longer a cost-effective solution vs. containerization in the cloud. But once you rely on hosting servers in the cloud you need a tool to manage every aspect of that including log monitoring, resource utilization, and application performance. Amazon CloudWatch is exactly the tool you need.

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Verified User

Employee in Engineering

Information Services Company, 1001-5000 employees

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Cisco made sense from the standpoint that my engineers already knew it and there was little learning curve. Personally, I prefer a purpose-built hardware solution. Untangle is not ready for the enterprise as a whole but works great to do web/application filtering . Checkpoint and Palo are VERY high cost and have few support options

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Larry Chisholm

Network Engineer

Würth Industries of North America (WINA)Logistics and Supply Chain, 1001-5000 employees

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Return on Investment

Scalability. Saving us cost when we can downgrade underperforming instances.
Great monitoring and peace of mine without always having to check logs to any services failure.
Support cost is high. It would be nicer if documentation would be easier to follow.

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Verified User

Engineer in Engineering

Computer Software Company, 51-200 employees

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We've gotten every penny's worth of use with our Cisco ASA firewalls - they were a few thousand dollars to purchase, even in HA, and have been in production for over 5 years
I'm glad that when the Cisco ASA IKE buffer overflow vulnerability was released, Cisco provided a code update, even though the 8.2-series code was EOL. This saved us and many companies from scrambling and spending big $ and time to put a workaround in.

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Verified User

Engineer in Information Technology

Financial Services Company, 201-500 employees

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Pricing Details

General

Free Trial

Yes

Free/Freemium Version

Yes

Premium Consulting/Integration Services

Yes

Entry-level set up fee?

No

Amazon CloudWatch Editions & Modules

Edition

First 10,000 Metrics	$0.30¹
Next 240,000 Metrics	$0.10¹
Next 750,000 Metrics	$0.05¹
Over 1,000,000 Metrics	$0.02¹

Per Metric

Additional Pricing 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.

General

Free Trial

—

Free/Freemium Version

—

Premium Consulting/Integration Services

—

Entry-level set up fee?

No

Cisco ASA Editions & Modules

—

Additional Pricing Details

—

Rating Summary

Amazon CloudWatch

Cisco ASA

Amazon CloudWatch

Cisco ASA

Amazon CloudWatch

Cisco ASA

Amazon CloudWatch

Cisco ASA