Amazon CloudWatch vs. Quali CloudShell

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

• LaaS
• IaaS
• PaaS
• CRaaS
• Training
• DevOps
• DevSecOps
• Demo Portals
• TaaS

Almost any workflow and any infrastructure are supported.

• 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

• Self service single pane of glass for any workflow and infrastructure
• Complete lifecycle management of your workflow and infrastructure
• Vendor agnostic cloud, service, application, appliance support

• 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

• Requires SME to get the full ROI first year
• Requires a culture change for Agile Automation
• Price could be less (not cheap)

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 tool can automate almost any workflow and infrastructure consumption. It has state of the art develop and support with great online training, online full manual set, and a comprehensive support team and network of SIs/VARS that are very qualified.

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

VMware is too hard to use, too expensive to support, and not a full lifecycle tool for workflows and Infrastructure (no support of physical either). AWS or Azure or Google solutions are good if you are only in the cloud and only using their tools. Not good if you have on-prem or non-Cloud based tools/infrastructure. Build it yourself automation frameworks can be good for people with unlimited funds, but they are not the best way to go and missing many capabilities typically.

• 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

• Our customers have an average ROI of less than 6 months.
• Our customers renew their maintenance almost 100% of the time.
• It has allowed us to build specific solutions across many use cases enabling us to profit.