Amazon CloudWatch vs. Scout Monitoring

For out business we find that AWS Cloudwatch is good at providing real-time metrics for monitoring and analysing the performance and usage of our platform by customers. It is possible to create custom metrics from log events, such people adding items to a basket, checking out or abandoning their orders.

Incentivized

To me, it's the best APM out there for a Rails application. It is really easy to set up, configure and start debugging any kind of bad-performing endpoint. We have solved issues going from High Response Time to Memory Leaks/Bloats. All of this can be achieved even if you are hosting your app in a PaaS like Heroku. (Where sometimes is difficult to install an agent like in other vendors).

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

• I specifically use the risk assessment module and do risk assessments on any new product we introduce into our network or any company that we are thinking about taking on as a client.
• I also use the vendor management module for any due diligence that comes up with a new company or a company that we may use once and then not use again.

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

• Errors (is a new functionality but I didn't get well how it can replace rollbar for example).
• Usage measuring: In some cases is easy to get "disabled" due to a peak of bad requests.
• Editing app's names

Incentivized

It's excellent at collecting logs. It's easy to set up. The viewing & querying part could be much better, though. The query syntax takes some time to get used to, & the examples are not helpful. Also, while being great, Log Insights requires manual picking of log streams to query across every time.

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

Grafana is definitely a lot better and flexible in comparison with Amazon CloudWatch for visualisation, as it offers much more options and is versatile. VictoriaMetrics and Prometheus are time-series databases which can do almost everything cloudwatch can do in a better and cheaper way. Integrating Grafana with them will make it more capable Elasticsearch for log retention and querying will surpass cloudwatch log monitoring in both performance and speed

Incentivized

I've already explained why this product beats Excel hands down in time and money. I also love the way it sends you an email when you forget any due diligence or testing that needs to be done.

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

• Speed to solve incidents
• Easy to monitor new endpoints or deployments
• Easy to monitor background jobs (like sidekiq)

Incentivized