Amazon CloudWatch vs. Site24x7 All-in-One Monitoring

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

[Site24x7 All-in-One Monitoring is] well suited in website monitoring where especially for uptime and availability of the website. Due to its cloud nature, the company has servers distributed globally that allow to check site availability from anywhere in the world.

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

• Very clean website UI. Tests are well categorized and navigation is very simple.
• The accompanying mobile app is very useful when on the go as it can also notify you of any issues.
• The cost of the platform is very cheap and the cost also scales at a low amount.
• No on-premise footprint. All cloud-based.

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

• Ability to edit an existing maintenance schedule, vs creating a new one each time
• Grouping of emails to SMS and non SMS alerts to save on false alerts
• Setup of Realtime user monitor was not as functional as expected with regard to adding 3rd party scripts.

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

I have only had to use support once, so I can't go into much detail about their support team. The one time I did use it the response was fast but the resolution took some time.

Incentivized

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

The biggest difference between Site24x7 and products like PRTG, Nagios, or Icinga, is that Site24x7 is hosted off the network, completely externally. The others do a great job on network alerts-- and some can even be configured to send SMS or phone calls with the right equipment and plugins-- but they usually reside in the network or at least on-site. Hosting them in the cloud might be a way around that, in which case they would be pretty similar to Site24x7 in capability, but without the additional software costs in the case of Nagios and Icinga (both open source).

Incentivized

• 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

• Cost savings have been substantial at approximately 70%.
• We do suffer delayed email notifications and regular locational failures from 24x7. However, this is easily overcome by extra locational checks.
• Much quicker responses from out of hours teams with the benefit of the mobile app, which is user-friendly.

Incentivized