Amazon CloudWatch vs IBM Cloud Managed Istio

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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Currently use for traffic management for IOT edge devices and their sensor data flows. IoT generates lots of data and this data needs to processed at the edge devices before sending the processed result to cloud. Hence there is always ingress and egress data traffic in and out of the IoT edge devices which needs traffic management

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Verified User

Engineer in Information Technology

Computer Software Company, 1001-5000 employees

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Feature Rating Comparison

Amazon CloudWatch

IBM Cloud Managed Istio

Ease of building user interfaces

Scalability

Platform management overhead

Workflow engine capability

Platform access control

Services-enabled integration

Development environment creation

Development environment replication

Issue monitoring and notification

Issue recovery

Upgrades and platform fixes

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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Simple
Easy to setup
Quickly get the benefits

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Verified User

Professional in Information Technology

Human Resources Company, 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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Still missing functionalities for a full usage as traffic director.

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Verified User

Engineer in Information Technology

Computer Software Company, 1001-5000 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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IBM Cloud Managed Istio 6.9

Based on 2 answers

IBM has good track record, but we haven't used their support after getting setup initially. However, the training made available by them during our introductory experience was good, and provided us with a lot of useful background knowledge along with guidance on how to address the specific use cases we were looking for.

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Verified User

Professional in Information Technology

Human Resources Company, 51-200 employees

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Implementation Rating

No answers on this topic

We did not use IBM professional services to implement istio. Our experience was such that getting it setup quickly did not require assistance. We did however, make use of IBM's training opportunities at kube con 2019, which included a walkthrough setup of istio on IBM Cloud. This provided us with a strong base on which to build.

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Verified User

Professional in Information Technology

Human Resources Company, 51-200 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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It's a cost effective solution for my organization.

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Verified User

Engineer in Information Technology

Computer Software Company, 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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Simplify management and cost of instrumenting our application.

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Verified User

Professional in Information Technology

Human Resources Company, 51-200 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

IBM Cloud Managed Istio Editions & Modules

—

Additional Pricing Details

—

Rating Summary

Amazon CloudWatch

IBM Cloud Managed Istio

Amazon CloudWatch

IBM Cloud Managed Istio

Amazon CloudWatch

IBM Cloud Managed Istio