Amazon CloudWatch vs DX Application Performance Management

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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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

DX Application Performance Management

Application monitoring

Database monitoring

Threshold alerts

Predictive capabilities

Application performance management console

Collaboration tools

Out-of-the box templates to monitor applications

Application dependency mapping and thresholding

Virtualization monitoring

Server availability and performance monitoring

Server usage monitoring and capacity forecasting

IT Asset Discovery

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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Alerting which can be customized by the end user.
Visualization of the metrics and data presented to provide a unique and attractive interface.
Flexibility to manage actions and commands that we deem important for each application. The ability to define these and customize the metrics reported for each individual application is huge for us.

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Verified User

Project Manager in Information Technology

Banking Company, 10,001+ 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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We are facing challenges to meet RFP requirements in few areas where I would recommend CA to improve.
We are facing challenges for non (java and dotnet application) which CA APM does not support. SAP is another solution where CA APM is not able to address our business requirement.

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Verified User

Team Lead in Information Technology

Banking Company, 10,001+ 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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DX Application Performance Management 1.7

Based on 3 answers

We have never received any support from CA on this product

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Daniel Garrett

Senior Performance Engineer

FiservFinancial Services, 10,001+ 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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We only have 1 application using DX APM, while most of other applications are instrumented using Dynatrace. Dynatrace provides a better monitoring and instrumentation for applications. The required effort to setup monitoring capability using DX APM is way more work compared to Dynatrace, also the amount of KPIs offered from Dynatrace is more than DX APM.

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Verified User

Technician in Information Technology

Banking Company, 10,001+ 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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Introscope is deeply utilized within the organization. However, CEM and Team Center not as much. Those that use one piece don't generally use the others. Partially because of the curve in learning how to use the consoles effectively.
reporting is pretty well configured and easy to setup if you know how to use the tools. So this can be easy to use and takes less time to configure for the different groups within the organization.

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Jayson E. Conry

Lead Monitoring Engineer

Cambia Health SolutionsHealth, Wellness and Fitness, 5001-10,000 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

DX Application Performance Management Editions & Modules

—

Additional Pricing Details

—

Rating Summary

Amazon CloudWatch

DX Application Performance Management

Amazon CloudWatch

DX Application Performance Management

Amazon CloudWatch

DX Application Performance Management