Amazon CloudWatch vs. Join.me (discontinued) vs. Zoom Workplace

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.

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I would neither recommend nor dissuade anyone from using Join.Me. When it first came on the scene, it was a game-changer as far as providing remote access to other authorized individuals and helped save a great deal of time trying to walk someone less proficient through all the detailed steps of computer repair. However, with the proliferation of Zoom and other conferencing products that also provide built-in remote access through its service, the need for a separate application is now limited and not as essential as its own product.

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Zoom Workplace is ideal for any business looking for a communication/collaboration solution. This is more so for businesses with a hybrid workforce. It makes holding virtual meetings and collaboration sessions easy, and teams can participate seamlessly thanks to features such as Zoom Whiteboard, Zoom Teams chat, and Zoom Phone, among others. In a nutshell, Zoom Workplace makes teamwork and productivity easy.

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• 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.

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• No need to download anything to get started. Once you sign up you can get started from within your browser. This is probably the single best feature, its a get up and go solution for video conferencing and you do not need any software for it to work.
• The one click join a meeting URL is genius. Users who struggle with remembering passwords or invites can just click a link and immediately participate in a meeting which means one email and a couple of clicks and a meeting can start.
• Good control features - As the main user, you have many control features including deciding who can speak, annotations, screen sharing easily.
• Screen Recordings to the Cloud - This can save on time when you have had a long conference, you can save a recording to the cloud and download it later.

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• Audio quality of phone calls is spot on. Calls are clear and crisp.
• Video quality of video meetings are clear and there aren't any pixelization artifacts that some systems can have.
• Having AI summaries have been life changing for us. We no longer have to concentrate on note taking, like we did in the past. The summaries are accurate and enable us to put our efforts in the meeting or conversation. Plus, we can save them into our practice management system as required.

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• 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.

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• There should be a complete guide to understand its features before installation because if one feature will be missed then, we can’t get them working properly.
• Furthermore, there should be high-quality internet for getting its function and it won’t work without good network coverage.
• I think its interface is a little hard for beginners and is not that user friendly.

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• I don't think there is any malfunction in their solution; it's extremely convenient to use, be it creating a meeting invite, adding people, sending any extra stuff to them. It's quick, and this is the only tool that works seamlessly even on Androids.

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This platform enables a very high ROI for the solution that it provides to our team to support our end-users.

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We're sticking with Zoom for the foreseeable future--given its compelling feature set, ease of use, and advanced technology, there's just no other competition to be excited about. Plus it's a Gartner-recognized industry leader, so it's a rather easy choice.

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.

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Join.me is one of the easiest programs I've ever used. It's so easy to get it set up and installed and even easier for someone to join a meeting. The controls are very intuitive and labeled appropriately. The UIX makes sense. It's been a reliable product in my app stack-I love it!

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Zoom is made for the non tech office. It has features that can be made to do what you need to run things on a day to day basis. Immediately we we able to get meetings going with remote employees. The ability to be able to add smartphone connected people was a big plus. Zoom met our needs at the time.

There have been less than a handful of outages during our two years with Zoom, and whenever there was one, an email informing us of the outage went out immediately, and they had the issue resolved shortly thereafter.

Zoom has among the best performance of any video conference platform, as I've mentioned several times. Besides that, their Chat platform works great, and their back end always runs smooth. It's unfortunate that reporting can now only be done by one month at a time, but nonetheless, it only takes a second to run any kind of Zoom report, whether it's an attendee report, Poll results, a user report, a list of meetings from the past month, etc.

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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I honestly haven't reached out to their Support team. I get notifications of what they are working on which is good to see, but I haven't directly spoken with any of them. I think my main reason for this is that join.me gives me just what I need (not much more and not much less).

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Because I got a response right away, and was assigned one specific individual to work with me from the beginning to the resolution. I had an actual email address and direct contact with this person without having to start over and over every time I contacted Zoom - this singular individual remained attentive and was well informed on the subject matter and quite able to resolve my needs.

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This is a fairly simple product which doesn't require much "implementation" work for our use cases.

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If you receive any pushback from higher ups, point to any of the various positive reviews like this one. Or show Zoom's excellent Gartner report, or articles describing Zoom's partnership with Sequoia capital. It's not difficult to show how Zoom is a trustworthy industry leader with best-in-class technology.

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

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If you're looking for something basic that handles a little bit of everything when it comes to meetings, screen shares and remote desktop control join.me is a great options. If you're a super user and really wanting a lot of detailed features and rich user interfaces and money is not an issue you may want to consider use specific options.

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Teams do not stack up to Zoom at all. My clients use Teamas because it is a corporate policy, and they use it most of the time between employees of the same company. It makes sense for this, NOT for me. Every time a Teams meeting is launched, since I am not part of this company, the meeting is laborious, the interface is not as nice as Zoom's, sharing documents is more difficult, etc., etc. Zoom is superior to Teams in every way!!!

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The billing and price model is really fair for so many functions that they offer, our remote work requires each of the features that Zoom offers, so accepting payment for a tool like this is the least we can do. I like that billing arrives on time and that they offer opportunities and payment times.

Because the Basic licenses are completely free, and because it's very easy to configure and install Zoom, and because anyone can join Zoom from a link without needing an account, scaling is a Breeze. There are absolutely no roadblocks. My company keeps adding more Zoom Pro license every week since it's so in demand. We were able to convert users from several different platforms onto Zoom with no trouble at all.

Zoom is perfect for our business. We use it to video chat with prospective clients. The name recognition alone gives us credibility and it is very easy to screen share and send content out.

• 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.

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• Customer support solution - join.me has made it so much easier to quickly get with a customer and see their trouble and show them a solution. This saves lots of back and forth time and gives the customer more power over owning their solution.
• More efficient communication - without join.me we would waste time going back and forth on emails or slack trying to get our message across. Join.me lets us quickly show AND tell others what's going on. I honestly don't know how we ever functioned without it.

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• Cost savings and improvement of call routing switching from land line to Zoom soft phone technology (moved from Verizon)
• The Business license platform is always evolving and including new technology and tools - without raising our prices - a great business model
• We were able to drop our separate service for after hours / on-call services and created IVR/queues for handling after hours calls
• Integration with Outlook and Salesforce and proven to be a time saver for scheduling events and meetings

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