Amazon CloudWatch vs Foglight

• 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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• Foglight NMS is very light on resources given the amount of monitoring connectivity options it provides. It is one of the few that I've trialed in the past that offers SNMP v3 connections.
• The dashboard is concise with the main areas of interest. It can be customized as well if you have a particular use case.
• Setting up alerts is straightforward with the ability to set custom thresholds. Alert emails get sent by configuring a primary mail server with the option to add a backup mail server in the event of a primary mail server outage or connectivity issues.

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• Its limitation on only Amazon resources.
• Cost is higher.
• Lack of ability to create graphs on distinct counts and histograms which can make it hard quickly identify specific IP addresses that have a high request volume in a certain period. We have worked around this but a feature on the dashboard would be nice.

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• There are not many problems with this product
• Limited ability to use Foglight itself to solve problems it identifies

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• CloudWatch is liked by the IT guys, in that it makes their job easier. Whether that actually is a positive ROI is debatable. It doesn't seem like it.
• CloudWatch could have a positive ROI in the sense that IT professionals consider it an integral tool to streamline their management of IT resources.
• Cloud is not a positive ROI in the sense that it doesn't appear to have saved any money on the personnel or software side.

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• For the past 5 years, we heavily leveraged their application synthetic capabilities which caught several outages to our online presence before our users did or as they did, saving us valuable time and money to get back up and running.
• Their ability to deep dive into databases has helped the rollout of our new software, speeding up the time to market. We have been able to identify problems with our code in the staging and development tiers, ensuring we release better, more stable software to our customers.

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