Amazon CloudWatch vs. OpenText SiteScope

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

It can be used to monitor the uptime and availability of the URLs in the production and non production environments and detailed reports of the URL availability can be extracted to check, monitor the performance of the URL in variety of regions from where it is accessed. It requires specific knowledge of integration with the other Micro Focus tools for alerts generation and routing to correct focal points, so needs to improve a little on the UI part of the tool as it is a licensed tool and needs to ace the game for many free tools are also available in the market, which can do the job.

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

• Custom monitors with custom thresholds, timing, polling, and many other configuration options.
• Custom ways to alert and notify. Of course you have email and text message capabilities, but SiteScope also allows for specific messages and variables within those messages to be sent out so that your alert is data filled and you can know exactly what is going on and why you received that specific alert.
• Monitor templates for quick and rapid deployment of one's standard set of monitors. Easy ability to "copy" and "paste" monitors so there is no need to re-create from scratch.
• Scripting. SiteScope also allows for custom scripts to be called from specific alerting triggers. This allows for HUGE and POWERFUL customization and automation through SiteScope. You can easily have scripts that "take action" on a specific alert so you don't have to!!
• Very easy to use in my opinion. Learning curve is very short and you can master this system fairly quickly for all of the depth of customization that it offers.

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

• SiteScope could be a bit more user friendly.
• The interface is very "clunky" and slow. It is also difficult sometimes to find what you are looking for.

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

Very straightforward and easy to use once you get past the short learning curve.

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

Can't really answer this. Setup was easy and no support has really been used at this point.

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

I will begin by saying that I "inherited" SiteScope". So, it really was not my choice as to whether or not I was going to use it. Also, we were so heavily ingrained in SiteScope, that it would have taken a HUGE overhaul of our monitoring system to switch to something else.
SiteScope does not have a discovery option. Not like others you may have sampled (i.e. SolarWinds). The plus is that you monitor exactly what you want with no plethora of other junk you may not want. The "negative" is that you must set up all the monitors. I know I did mention the templates and copy/paste features, although it can be streamlined, it is still a manual process for each server. SiteScope is all a very manual process while others crawl your network and discover stuff.

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

• Checking processes using a ps command and other indexing steps is very expensive in splunk.
• Infrastructure monitoring is no more an issue for our company after getting HP sitescope.

Incentivized