Amazon CloudWatch is a native AWS monitoring tool for AWS programs. It provides data collection and resource monitoring capabilities.
$0
per canary run
Cisco ThousandEyes
Score 9.0 out of 10
N/A
Cisco ThousandEyes offers Digital Experience Monitoring that integrates application performance monitoring within a broader network monitoring platform. It primarily focuses on connectivity monitoring and supports SaaS and hybrid systems monitoring.
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Pricing
Amazon CloudWatch
Cisco ThousandEyes
Editions & Modules
Canaries
$0.0012
per canary run
Logs - Analyze (Logs Insights queries)
$0.005
per GB of data scanned
Over 1,000,000 Metrics
$0.02
per month
Contributor Insights - Matched Log Events
$0.02
per month per one million log events that match the rule
Logs - Store (Archival)
$0.03
per GB
Next 750,000 Metrics
$0.05
per month
Next 240,000 Metrics
$0.10
per month
Alarm - Standard Resolution (60 Sec)
$0.10
per month per alarm metric
First 10,000 Metrics
$0.30
per month
Alarm - High Resolution (10 Sec)
$0.30
per month per alarm metric
Alarm - Composite
$0.50
per month per alarm
Logs - Collect (Data Ingestion)
$0.50
per GB
Contributor Insights
$0.50
per month per rule
Events - Custom
$1.00
per million events
Events - Cross-account
$1.00
per million events
CloudWatch RUM
$1
per 100k events
Dashboard
$3.00
per month per dashboard
CloudWatch Evidently - Events
$5
per 1 million events
CloudWatch Evidently - Analysis Units
$7.50
per 1 million analysis units
No answers on this topic
Offerings
Pricing Offerings
Amazon CloudWatch
Cisco ThousandEyes
Free Trial
Yes
Yes
Free/Freemium Version
Yes
Yes
Premium Consulting/Integration Services
Yes
No
Entry-level Setup Fee
No setup fee
Optional
Additional Details
With Amazon CloudWatch, there is no up-front commitment or minimum fee; you simply pay for what you use. You will be charged at the end of the month for your usage.
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.
At least for me, it is a very important tool to diagnose bandwidth / Routing issues. Any global company should have ThousandEyes, it will avoid you many headaches. You'll need to invest in servers (on-prem and remote) in all locations in which you need, you can take advantage of all the monitoring tools.
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.
Alerting on outages. ThousandEyes provides a few different options to receive alerts: you can have alerts emailed to a subset of (or all) users, there is a basic Slack integration, and if more flexibility is required (or your preferred method of being alerted isn't built-in) webhooks can be used to hit another API.
Speeding up mean time to resolution (or mean time to innocence if you're a more siloed and blame-happy organization). Failure alerts can be configured to include the cause of the failure instead of just "resource x is down." For example, the alerts can come out and say that a website was down due to an HTTP 500, which will help prevent staff from spinning their wheels trying to diagnose the network from the client to the web server.
Post mortems and root cause analyses. After an outage has been resolved, it is possible to go back for up to 30 days without losing any level of detail for the test in question, and to view information like the DNS response received, the network path taken by the traffic, and any added latency incurred by an individual link. It can also be used to view Internet routing changes surrounding the incident.
Support. Every ticket or chat I have opened has been met by a friendly and helpful staff member that has been able to provide helpful insight into what is causing a particular issue, and what steps they will take on their side to resolve an issue or provide suggestions of steps to take on our side if necessary.
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.
Continue to innovate and support more and more services. In the world of IOT and point to point traffic being more and more prevalent creating a flexible product is fantastic. Build on the end user product, last mile and even more sharing.
We will definitely renew and maybe even extend our usage of ThousandEyes. We have been using ThousandEyes now for a couple of years and it has shown us major benefits. With the new options it offers for SD-WAN for us it is a no brainer to renew our current licenses
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.
You have online support from the tool itself 24/7 and they are very responsive. We also have a specific account manager and specific engineer assigned to help us with very specific questions for our environment. The level of response to our requirements is always super high. We have requested specific features to be added and these have been developed and introduced very quick tot he product (within weeks). Their DevOps and agile approach seems to pay off.
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.
Simple Network Management Protocol cannot achieve what an agent-based monitoring solution can. Access layer testing gives you visibility into the user's endpoint. ThousandEyes is able to provide both telemetry and user experience in a bundled solution. The way that Cisco has built in the enterprise agents to their 9300 and 9500 switches has made exposure to the platform widespread.
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.
