Amazon CloudWatch vs. Freshping (discontinued)

For out business we find that AWS Cloudwatch is good at providing real-time metrics for monitoring and analysing the performance and usage of our platform by customers. It is possible to create custom metrics from log events, such people adding items to a basket, checking out or abandoning their orders.

Incentivized

Freshing is well suited for user-facing systems, the systems they directly use. It also serves as nice eye-candy for them to look at. It does not monitor internal IT systems as well as we had hoped, so we use other tools to monitor those systems.

Incentivized

• It provides lot many out of the box dashboard to observe the health and usage of your cloud deployments. Few examples are CPU usage, Disk read/write, Network in/out etc.
• It is possible to stream CloudWatch log data to Amazon Elasticsearch to process them almost real time.
• If you have setup your code pipeline and wants to see the status, CloudWatch really helps. It can trigger lambda function when certain cloudWatch event happens and lambda can store the data to S3 or Athena which Quicksight can represent.

Incentivized

• The UI is neat. It's very easy to use, and with lots of information.
• It's very easy to set up.
• The "badge" feature is interesting for showing up on institutional website.

Incentivized

• Memory metrics on EC2 are not available on CloudWatch. Depending on workloads if we need visibility on memory metrics we use Solarwinds Orion with the agent installed. For scalable workloads, this involves customization of images being used.
• Visualization out of the box. But this can easily be addressed with other solutions such as Grafana.
• By design, this is only used for AWS workloads so depending on your environment cannot be used as an all in one solution for your monitoring.

Incentivized

• Better integration with Freshservice to generate tickets
• Monitor internal systems
• Better ability to customize

Incentivized

It's excellent at collecting logs. It's easy to set up. The viewing & querying part could be much better, though. The query syntax takes some time to get used to, & the examples are not helpful. Also, while being great, Log Insights requires manual picking of log streams to query across every time.

Incentivized

It's perfectly easy and straightforward to use. There's no need to read documentation, you just register and will surely be able to configure whatever monitor you want to set up. It's also very easy to use other features like the status page, reporting, alerts, etc.

Incentivized

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.

Incentivized

To date we have had no need of support from Freshping, it has just been that easy to use. It is highly intuitive and self-explanatory.

Incentivized

Grafana is definitely a lot better and flexible in comparison with Amazon CloudWatch for visualisation, as it offers much more options and is versatile. VictoriaMetrics and Prometheus are time-series databases which can do almost everything cloudwatch can do in a better and cheaper way. Integrating Grafana with them will make it more capable Elasticsearch for log retention and querying will surpass cloudwatch log monitoring in both performance and speed

Incentivized

We use Uptime Robot, and also some internal health checks, which report directly to our emails and chat applications. They all work "pretty fine," but unfortunately all of them have had some false positives or missed some minor downtime, so as for us, it doesn't add too much overhead, and we prefer to use several. I would say all the ones mentioned are good for the job.

Incentivized

• Positive for alarms and alert notifications once configured/customized.
• Has upfront learning curve, and cost can increase as does the alarm activity and monitoring details you may require.
• Cost-effective for any size organization keeping with AWS and utilizing its native tools is a savings in long-term ROI.

Incentivized

• Good visual for end users
• Adds another check to verify uptime/outages
• Cost for us was free, so we had nothing to lose by adding it

Incentivized