Amazon CloudWatch vs. Splunk Log Observer

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

Great for organizations that need to centralize different types of logging across integration, qa, sandbox and production environments. Would be less impactful for organizations that don't have complex logging needs.

• 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

• Providing in-depth insights
• A related content feature which really helps us to figure out which service is breaking the infrastructure.
• The Log explorer which helps us to explore the entire log and pin point the errors/issues.
• Fast and powerful log investigation

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

• Integrating the system with Slack channels
• Saving the logs in different cloud provider
• Viewing the logs at more fine grained level based on user roles and permissions

Incentivized

I'm a Splunk specialist, and I'm involved in its use and improvement.

Incentivized

It gives access to data features for every level of users: from managers and executives to Analysts, each one with the correct level of observation and analysis.

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

Splunk support is very quick and efficient. Pre-sale specialists are very skilled and available.

Incentivized

Follow a training before starting.

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

I had not considered other products because Splunk Log Observer was in use in my company before I started working there.

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

• Significantly reduced the MTTR (Mean Time To Recovery), which in turn has improved the end-user experience tremendously.
• Meets compliance requirements of security policies, audit, regulation, and forensics.
• Helps us to track/manage the resource usage on our cloud instances which has a direct implication on the recurring cost.

Incentivized