Amazon CloudWatch vs DX Application Performance Management

Likelihood to Recommend

CloudWatch is highly recommended for monitoring EC2 services. It provides easy setup, straight forward alarm creation, easy to read monitoring.It is great for scalability/cost. We know when to increase an EC2 instance or when it can be scaled down. I do have a concern on the documentation. I would say it is not for AWS beginners and to actually talk to support can be costly.

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Verified User

Engineer in Engineering

Computer Software Company, 51-200 employees

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We use APM for application-specific monitoring, initially our high priority apps that are used most heavily. The product is flexible and customizable to set up specific monitoring on each application and alert criteria/thresholds. We have used other tools and considered alternatives, but APM shines in this area.

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Verified User

Project Manager in Information Technology

Banking Company, 10,001+ employees

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Feature Rating Comparison

Amazon CloudWatch

—

DX Application Performance Management

8.3

Application monitoring

—

9.4

Database monitoring

—

8.9

Threshold alerts

—

9.5

Predictive capabilities

—

7.9

Application performance management console

—

8.6

Collaboration tools

—

8.0

Out-of-the box templates to monitor applications

—

6.9

Application dependency mapping and thresholding

—

7.6

Virtualization monitoring

—

7.7

Server availability and performance monitoring

—

9.0

Server usage monitoring and capacity forecasting

—

8.4

IT Asset Discovery

—

8.0

Pros

Solid support for posting data from a variety of AWS services to CloudWatch logs.
Can setup alarms alert teams when certain resources hit a particular metric threshold.
CloudWatch Metric view allows for custom graphs based on whatever AWS criteria you would need.

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Kevin Van Heusen

Software Architect

SpringAheadInternet, 51-200 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

Alerting could be beefed up, the options in terms of notification of alerts are pretty slim.
The usability of the Metric graph view could be improved, it can be tricky to find the metrics of interest and setup graphs.
The CloudWatch log view is pretty basic, the search options could stand to be more fleshed out.

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Kevin Van Heusen

Software Architect

SpringAheadInternet, 51-200 employees

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The product was overly complex to set up and required a lot of interaction from CA and third-party resources. Make sure you have the appropriate amount of vendor services when you implement the tool.
Support/documentation is also not as available as other products we have used in the past. The user community is not quite as strong either.
Authentication setup was difficult also and took lots of troubleshooting and vendor help to set up.

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Verified User

Project Manager in Information Technology

Banking Company, 10,001+ employees

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Alternatives Considered

Amazon CloudWatch is great in terms of the CloudWatch Logs feature, it integrates easily with other AWS services (CloudFormation, S3, Lambda, etc.) and is reasonably low cost, so it was a no-brainer for that area. For alerting, CloudWatch didn't offer much in the way of notification options so we went with PagerDuty for that area.

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Kevin Van Heusen

Software Architect

SpringAheadInternet, 51-200 employees

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We used Dynatrace for years and got very little value out of the product. The sales staff sold the product and disappeared and the technical staff provided little value to actually help us get value from the product. We moved to CA because it was less expensive and met our needs. We have been happy with the sales and technical support

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Verified User

Project Manager in Information Technology

Banking Company, 10,001+ employees

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Return on Investment

Looking at logs is necessary for software development.
Cloudwatch provides what our users need to get the job done
It won't directly affect the bottom line but less time spent on support issues means less wasted money.

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Verified User

Project Manager in Engineering

Computer Software Company, 1001-5000 employees

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APM has allowed us to customize a dashboard view for each specific application. This allows for unique monitoring of top functions and unique alerts. It is awesome for this use.
APM allows us better data and faster alerting compared to previous products. We moved away from another product because it was not reporting on problems accurately.
Once set up, APM requires little management and overhead time. The setup can be somewhat time consuming, but once setup we see no issues

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Verified User

Project Manager in Information Technology

Banking Company, 10,001+ employees

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Amazon CloudWatch vs DX Application Performance Management