Amazon CloudWatch vs. SolarWinds Kiwi Syslog Server

If you use any AWS services, CloudWatch is the natural choice to monitor & troubleshoot your workload. Thankfully, for most AWS services, CloudWatch is either built-in or very easy to set up. However, being proficient in browsing & tracking the log events would take some training & practice. Having some experienced people on the team would help immensely, especially in spreading the skill to the rest of the team.

Incentivized

The SolarWinds Kiwi Syslog Server does what it's supposed to do. It's a bare-bones Syslog Server. If your company is just trying to fulfill security requirements or doesn't need all the advanced features of a product such as Splunk, then Kiwi will work well and not break the bank. Using the tool is very straightforward as there aren't a lot of options outside of just viewing logs.

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

• Collection of SNMP traps a reliable and stable collection server for these is crucial to troubleshooting and time to ROS. Kiwi excels at this.
• Easy to install set up and train users on.
• The free version is a good free tool and handy to use for personal labs and other smalle use cases.
• SNMP traps to user readable format is great, sometimes syslog and smnp messages can be hard to interpret and read with out a knowledge of how to do this.

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

• Minimalistic; If you're looking for something with analysis features look elsewhere.
• Operating System support is Windows only.
• Some management features cannot be configured via web interface.

Incentivized

Although the tool itself is easy to integrate and is readily available for use, it has its limitations. The key limitations of cloudwatch are with respect to cost incurred on log retention and log querying. While for key use cases this is sufficient, for more advanced use cases, Amazon CloudWatch doesn't work out. Also, obviously it is tightly coupled with AWS, which makes you look away if you need a single tool for all monitoring

Incentivized

Kiwi Syslog has the best usability of any syslog server. While not being able to offer the most features, the ones it does have are intuitive and easy to work with. Everything that it has is where you think it should be. If you can't find it in the menus, it doesn't exist.

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

Because the solution is so simple to use and implement, support wasn't very necessary. The one time I did call them to better understand where logs were stored, they were very helpful and friendly. Kiwi has been around for some time and not a lot has changed over the years, so support for it is pretty straightforward and quick.

Incentivized

We use Cloudwatch for simpler monitoring, but these metrics and logs often feed into bigger ecosystems across our organization. The metrics and logs in Cloudwatch allow our developers quick and easy access to the data they need whilst easily integrating the same data into more prominent platforms for wider analysis, including Service desk support, SecOps, and ITOps monitoring within the organization.

Incentivized

Syslog-ng don't have customer support or technical support .But its a free software and no clarity on limitations ingestion bandwidth. No gui feature and everything should be done from backend. Gui can easily help to start and stop service ,easy to configure. Unlimited technical and customer support . Even when server got shutdown will get on-call or immediate support that will helps a lot to resolve errors

• 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

• SolarWinds Kiwi Syslog Server has made it easier for me to monitor events on all of my network devices and servers.
• As a small business, we needed something powerful but inexpensive and SolarWinds Kiwi Syslog Server is exactly that.

Incentivized