Amazon CloudWatch vs. NetApp Cloud Insights

If you use any AWS services, CloudWatch is the natural choice to monitor & troubleshoot your workload. Thankfully, for most AWS services, CloudWatch is either built-in or very easy to set up. However, being proficient in browsing & tracking the log events would take some training & practice. Having some experienced people on the team would help immensely, especially in spreading the skill to the rest of the team.

Incentivized

For example, we had an application slowdown. It looked like the slowdown was storage. However, it was a malformed SQL query that no one realized was pulling data from the storage location that also housed the application. Cloud Insights saved us hours of downtime and frustration. Cloud Insights pinpointed which system was hogging resources. What makes Cloud Insights special is the way it looks at the data collected from the data sources. The insights it provides into the flow of data; sheds new light on how things work in your environment.

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

• Cloud service is the best part
• Alerts about any abnormal activity on the system before it's too late
• Track usage across all applications, units, etc.

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

• Need to add more cloud resources for optimization, as many are still not compatible
• Data retention time is limited.
• Premium subscription is costly.

Incentivized

Although the tool itself is easy to integrate and is readily available for use, it has its limitations. The key limitations of cloudwatch are with respect to cost incurred on log retention and log querying. While for key use cases this is sufficient, for more advanced use cases, Amazon CloudWatch doesn't work out. Also, obviously it is tightly coupled with AWS, which makes you look away if you need a single tool for all monitoring

Incentivized

I have been extremely happy with its usability. You can take thins as they are out of the box and it is useful. You can carry it as far as you want to go and every step you take improves your ROI.

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

Before using Cloud Insights, we quickly resolved all the issues we had by talking with the support team. The support team is eager to assist and technically well equipped. They quickly understood what we needed and helped us during the setup and the first use period so that we could adapt easily.

Incentivized

We use Cloudwatch for simpler monitoring, but these metrics and logs often feed into bigger ecosystems across our organization. The metrics and logs in Cloudwatch allow our developers quick and easy access to the data they need whilst easily integrating the same data into more prominent platforms for wider analysis, including Service desk support, SecOps, and ITOps monitoring within the organization.

Incentivized

Cloud Insights allows us to create custom dashboards to monitor and trend any aspect of their infrastructure including CPU, memory, storage network utilization, IOPS, capacity utilization and more. Cloud Insights also provides visibility into the inter-connectivity of the components in our infrastructure by providing topology views of any component.

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

• Highly positiveROI in terms of resource optimization and cost cutting on IT services.
• Efficiently identify areas of wastes and make IT operations cost effective.

Incentivized