Amazon CloudWatch vs. Splunk Cloud

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

I will highly recommend this software because using Splunk
Cloud has helped us become more proactive about handling our security concerns
and better manage our environment. It is one of the finest security software
that is easy to use and also provides analytics. It has excellent features like
creating dashboard security and managing features etc. So you must give it a try once!

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

• Splunk Cloud allows me to search the volumes of information help in Windows Server Logs quickly and accurately.
• Splunk Cloud allows me to create Dashboards for everyday monitoring of multiple parameters.
• Splunk Cloud allows me to create and schedule reports for Management on network usage and statistics.

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

• Splunk Cloud support is increasing a lot now a days and I see no cons other than the price factor to the other compared products. Overall Splunk Cloud is a very good product all together.
• I can see that Splunk Cloud can still improve in the form of SLA.
• Splunk Cloud generally lags behind the available splunk upgrades. They are always one version behind the one available for enterprise.

Incentivized

Overall, it is very usable. I would like if recent searches were saved for longer because I always have to refer to my notes when I'm looking for something specific and it's been a few weeks. But that's a small issue, and the actual search and browsing interface is easy to use and powerful.

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 Cloud support is sorely lacking unfortunately. The portal where you submit tickets is not very good and is lacking polish. Tickets are left for days without any updates and when chased it is only sometimes you get a reply back. I get the feeling the support team are very understaffed and have far too much going on. From what I know, Splunk is aware of this and seem to be trying to remedy it.

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

Splunk Cloud blows Sumo Logic out of the water. The experience is night and day. We went from several highly stressed IT security professionals who were unsure if the data they were getting was valuable, to very happy IT security professionals who can now be more proactive and get all the information they need.

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

• The biggest return on investment is how quickly logs are now consumed, and how quickly we can follow events that occur in logs.
• The number of logs that can be consumed by Splunk is much higher than previous solutions.
• We have much better visibility into our logs, and are able to spot patterns in events with the built-in graphs and reports.

Incentivized