Amazon CloudWatch vs. Pandora FMS

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

Pandora FMS adjusts to the client's need, from a simple configuration of a single server to a complex scenario with high availability support without additional licensing costs.

• 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

• All-in-one software
• Flexible and easy configuration
• Multi-platform
• Design in PERL, CCS and HTML5

• 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

• Community version small features

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 support team answers very quickly. They are always willing to find a solution to any need that is required by us or one of our clients.

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

Before using Pandora FMS, tests were carried out with all these tools:

• Nagios
• Zabbix
• System Center Operations Manager (SCOM)
• IBM Tivoli
• PRTG
• SolarWinds

Pandora FMS allows simple customization by making adjustments to text files, developing agent add-ons without the need to be a programmer, there is no scenario where we could not take data and save it in PandoraFMS, IoT, industrial products, and everything that any client needs to monitor.

• 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

• It is a tool with an appropriate cost that allows to have results in a very limited time.
• Having a health dashboard and alerts of important business in the company is an important differential with any other monitoring solution on the market.
• Monitoring can be adjusted to the business, considering service SLAs and adjusting the platform according to the needs of each department of the company.