Amazon CloudWatch vs. ManageEngine ADAudit Plus

Cloud watch is great and essential if you decide to invest in AWS and have any need to monitor the health of all aspects of your VPC resources, or at the organizational level (multiple accounts). Another benefit of the service is constant upgrades at no additional costs; the software evolves to develop modules and interface improvements. For first-time users in AWS, this is going to take a bit to understand, so the learning curve to this metrics environment can seem overwhelming at first glance/use.

Incentivized

ManageEngine is mostly a "check the box" solution for SIEM systems. We needed something that satisfied our customer and was cost-effective. I would highly rate the system on "worth what paid for". Support is eager to please and prompt. My only issue is that it's mostly based outside the US with helpful, but non-native speakers so it's hard to understand them. I wish they would spring for better help "phone lines" so I'm not dealing with difficult to understand and unclear speakers.

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

• ManageEngine ADAudit Plus changes for user and group management can be looked up in builtin reports
• You can build your own reports based on almost every logic you can think of
• You have the ability to create alerts based on logic and filters and sendout custom alerts to email, SMS or other means.
• First you need to understand the basics of the software, after that the software itself is very helpfull in configuring specific items.
• I really love the support that ManageEngine is giving the customer, for all questions I use the chat on their website. This is for me the best remote support I ever saw, and I saw a lot in my 20 years of experience in IT.

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

• In earlier releases there were quite a few bugs and performance issues. These have since been resolved.
• When integrated with the Log360 Suite, it can be confusing on whether EventLog Analyzer or ADAudit Plus are "managing"/"Ingesting" the data from a given endpoint.

Incentivized

It works great for everything we need and use. Any issues in the software are pretty easy to resolve with tech support. And they are very responsive to resolving issues. Even ones where a fix/patch are required. At present, the software does everything we need it to for compliance, audit, and account review.

Incentivized

ADAudit with its cloud and on prem install option allows any organization to get in on AD report management. Whether you need to report internally only for for external audit controls its a great tool with flexibility to handle most any user or group report capability. Since this also includes m365 integration it enables IT pros to administer usage, license, cost control and permission access to most anything in Microsoft's portfolio. Its a great tool all around for AD integrated access needs.

Incentivized

uptime good

Incentivized

Integration/overlap between products could be improved

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

The attention to cases or situations with the tool has been exceptional. being able to count on the manufacturer either by mail, call or chat. generate cases directly from the application allows you to have personalized support in order to solve problems that has been able to appear.

Incentivized

knowledgable and prompt response

Incentivized

The remote setup team helped when i needed it and setup weas very straight forward and easy. The advanced setup for an external db and customizations for our latest version AD environment went pretty easy once they found documentation on customization.

Incentivized

I believe that CloudWatch is a better solution to use with AWS services and resources in terms of cost and ease of integration with AWS infrastructure services. But keep in mind that Elasticsearch is better at aggregating application-level metrics. We chose CloudWatch because of its capabilities to integrate and monitor AWS services in almost real-time.

Incentivized

In terms of features, ADAudit Plus offers a comprehensive set of features for monitoring and auditing Active Directory, including real-time alerts, detailed reports, and user behavior analytics. The platform also offers support for multiple platforms, including Windows, UNIX, and Linux, as well as integration with other ManageEngine tools.

Incentivized

updates are effective and system is reliable

Incentivized

• We were able to set up log streaming, retention, and simple downtime alerts within a few hours, having no prior experience with CloudWatch, freeing up our engineers to focus on more important business goals.
• CloudWatch log groups have made it relatively easy to detect and diagnose issues in production by allowing us to aggregate logs across servers, correlate failures, isolate misbehaving servers, etc. Thanks to CloudWatch, we are generally able to identify, understand and mitigate most production fires within 10-15 minutes.
• Choosing CloudWatch to manage log aggregation has saved us quite a bit of time and money over the past year. Generally, 3rd-party log aggregation solutions tend to get quite expensive unless you self-host, in which case you typically need to spend a fair amount of time setting up, maintaining, and monitoring these services.

Incentivized

• Positive impact- instead of paying an external source to do reports manually, ManageEngine has provided this in just a few clicks of a button
• Positive Impact- Less disruption to staff in gathering data for important occurrences
• Positive impact- full visibility into real time information , alerts etc.