Amazon CloudWatch vs. vRealize Operations (discontinued)

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

With the introduction of API-based event alerts, there is no need for a proxy, which is a good option. Its ability to manage infra on a real-time basis is a good option that helps monitor, administer and troubleshoot virtual machines.

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

• Shows us where we can save on cost of keeping machines running, or boosting resources on VM's
• the ability to plan deployments with scenario plans that can be customized over a specific timeline
• reports that can be sent and shared with different teams or departments

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

• There are less space for customization.
• Cannot use for OS monitoring.
• Some option are very complex like getting an ideal VM report.

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

It has a good GUI to monitor real-time logs for cloud applications. This is quite a useful tool and preferred over most of the competitive applications in the market.

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

The support is pretty good however some of the KB articles still reference different versions of the product so it can be hard to find answers to common questions

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

SCOM was quite overwhelming when we first set up a POC for it. There was just too much for one person to handle. With vROPs I can manage the product and provide the support needed for my environment. We also have a Solarwinds environment that provides us with a level of detail and alerting we have come to rely upon. vROPS takes it to another level because it links directly into vCenter to provide you with a complete picture of your virtual environment.

Incentivized

Not involved in purchasing.

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

• We believe that the ability to preplan deployments with vRealize has proven its return on investments.
• Our troubleshooting time has been reduced with vrealize because its constantly collecting performance data. typically vrealize will tell us cause of fault before we can determine it ourselves.

Incentivized