Amazon CloudWatch vs. Uptrends

For out business we find that AWS Cloudwatch is good at providing real-time metrics for monitoring and analysing the performance and usage of our platform by customers. It is possible to create custom metrics from log events, such people adding items to a basket, checking out or abandoning their orders.

Incentivized

Uptrends has more than 100 checkpoints all around the world. Which helps to track product performance and uptime in 1, 5, 10, or more minutes check interval. Alerts with error info got during checks help to determine issue type and transfer it to the relevant department. A synthetic check needs some improvements to cover standard web application needs, but recording those scripts is very easy with google extension.

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

• Monitors downtime.
• Waterfall of resources when loading pages.

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

• Custom alert text option on mail
• The synthetic tool needs some improvement when the last used device has not to support for recording scenarios in iframe located elements.

Incentivized

It's excellent at collecting logs. It's easy to set up. The viewing & querying part could be much better, though. The query syntax takes some time to get used to, & the examples are not helpful. Also, while being great, Log Insights requires manual picking of log streams to query across every time.

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

Support average response time is 24 hours, which is quite a significant time when having some issues and needs help. They have notification issues as well. I mean, when a customer needs to be notified, for example canceling anything related acc maybe they sent notification and service suspend immediately, no pre notifications to act and be ready not to be blind.

Incentivized

Grafana is definitely a lot better and flexible in comparison with Amazon CloudWatch for visualisation, as it offers much more options and is versatile. VictoriaMetrics and Prometheus are time-series databases which can do almost everything cloudwatch can do in a better and cheaper way. Integrating Grafana with them will make it more capable Elasticsearch for log retention and querying will surpass cloudwatch log monitoring in both performance and speed

Incentivized

The price range is good if compared with the following tools. Alerts are informative, easy to connect with chat ops software, like slack, which is widely used by teams in my company. Performance measurement, which can be tracked day by day and can be delivered to stakeholders, all this made me decide to choose this tool.

Incentivized

• 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

• Ability to monitor uptime.
• Cost savings over competitors.

Incentivized