Amazon CloudWatch vs. Lansweeper vs. SolarWinds Hybrid Cloud Observability

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

Lansweeper I believe is well suited for any environment - its low cost and small footprint make it an easy addition to any organization, big or small, that is looking for an asset inventory solution that can either replace or supplement existing asset management systems. It may not be well suited for situations where a lot of customization is necessary, such as pulling in custom fields or details from equipment that don't reside in a registry.

Incentivized

- For small teams serving big organizations - it's a really simple tool to install and set up relatively quickly. - the new installer is also great - I don't have to understand what modules need to be installed; it's all streamlined. - The HCO Licensing allows you to run the Additional polling engines at a scale where the previous licensing model didn't. We can deploy APEs in locations now, which would not have been worth the investment in previously as there weren't enough devices in that location/region to spend the $$$$ on an APE License.

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

• Inventory - LANSweeper scans the network for devices - anything with an SNMP trap or using AD or local credentials. We can get an in-depth look at devices.
• Reporting - LANSweeper can generate just about any report you can imagine. We can check RAM in groups and determine where upgrades are needed. We can find local printers (which aren't allowed on our network) and address that issue with the user. We can check CPU type to help determine end of life without our network.
• Printers - It's nice to have a quick look at printer statuses. Toner levels, out of paper, and service errors are all reported via LANSweeper.

Incentivized

• Automated dependency mapping is a big hit.
• High availability is extremely simple to implement.
• Simple to use and drill into issues.
• Analysis of growth patterns driving the recommendation engine.

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

• Can only scan what it sees. Doesn't show every item on the machine. Patches are also absent.
• Software Recognition is OK with Microsoft. It is dire within our network of multiple products. Recognition is at about 35% with constant manual work needed to baseline for each manufacturer in each network
• Datacenter compliance is a manual project. We used Excel extensively.
• License optimization is limited to installations v surplus licenses. We need to know who's using what and how.

Incentivized

• Can be complex to setup
• Is strongest with network resources
• Assumes a fairly large amount of base knowledge

Incentivized

Superb tool

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

The tool is a web gui, and is mostly easy to navigate, but certain areas are more unclear than others. Identifying what im filtering for, or what menu option has what impact can be less straightforward than I'd like. Overall though, this tool will provide me with information other tools in my box just don't.

Incentivized

- decent ease of use - good training materials - good documentation - acceptable level of expected knowledge

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

Lots of info online there are tons of SQL Reports you can copy from the web as Lansweeper and users post many of them. They also send out alerts that pop up on Lansweeper, letting you know of an update that you need for certain software and provide an SQL report so you can scan your system to see what PCs need this update.

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

In short it has more features and its a more robust solution and it works well with those solutions. I am sure it will keep track with Ai and action recommendations in the future as I didnt see any of it on the platform (at least the one we use) I thin that is the only thing that is missing in the current product

Incentivized

Solarwinds has the best overlap of the two others I've mentioned - the other two tools (Datadog and Dynatrace) are great in their own way but Solarwinds is just good at everything; if I had to pick one tool of the above, it would be Solarwinds for the compatibility and ease of use, the other tools are more focused on being great at certain things while Solarwinds is the jack of all trades.

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

• It had a positive impact on solutions expense cause several teams we're using different solutions with different costs that used several servers and DB resources. Now, we've been able to simply that a lot with Lansweeper.
• With my previous point, people had to train and learn about each of their solutions. Now we can put a team in charge and so the other teams can focus on other tasks.
• Last year Lansweeper changed their licencing prices a lot so it slashed our budget.

Incentivized

• one license requiring 1 PO to be raised
• sharing costs between departments for monitoring under one platform using APEs

Incentivized