We compared Amazon CloudWatch and USM Anywhere based on our users' reviews in five categories. We reviewed all of the data and you can find the conclusion below.
Features: Amazon CloudWatch users liked the solution’s simplicity, intuitive interface, and ability to handle large workloads. USM Anywhere is highly regarded for its extensive reporting capabilities, thorough vulnerability assessment, seamless file integration, and user-friendly management features. Users also praised CloudWatch’s comprehensive monitoring and alerts. Some reviews mentioned that Amazon CloudWatch could improve performance and dashboard visualization. Others noted that the solution lacked compatibility with some databases. USM Anywhere users have suggested improvements in self-service plugin management, database optimization, and third-party threat intelligence integration.
Service and Support: Customers generally have positive opinions about Amazon's customer service. They commended the support team for its availability and timely issue resolution. Some users say that USM Anywhere's customer service is knowledgeable and responsive, while others have faced delays and incomplete answers.
Ease of Deployment: Amazon CloudWatch is generally described as easy to set up. The initial setup for USM Anywhere is generally considered to be straightforward if the user has technical knowledge. Vendor assistance is also available during the deployment phase.
Pricing: Amazon CloudWatch offers a flexible pricing structure based on usage and processing, without any separate licensing cost. Some users said that scaling up can be costly due to the need for additional storage space. USM Anywhere is seen as more cost-effective than premium solutions like IBM QRadar and Splunk, with pricing considered reasonable and relatively low.
ROI: Amazon CloudWatch offers a return on investment by minimizing the need for manual monitoring. USM Anywhere has garnered favorable feedback regarding its ROI.
"CloudWatch immediately hooks up and connects to the KPIs and all the metrics."
"You can enable alarms and metrics, and it has robust integration with AWS services. You can also trigger events. For example, if the CPU utilization is above 80%, it can launch a new instance for you."
"We have found the pricing to be reasonable."
"The tool's UI is good. One can scroll through the logs very easily."
"The most valuable feature of Amazon CloudWatch is the monitoring and UI."
"The solution offers very detailed metrics for their services."
"We can create events and alerts. We use the information to dive down into the infrastructure performance."
"The most valuable feature of Amazon CloudWatch is intrusion prevention."
"On any given day I could give you a different answer regarding the most valuable features of the product. The feature that is most important is the fact that it has a lot of features, that it's not just a log collection and correlation system, that it has a lot of other components built in. The bundle of features is really the killer feature."
"Easy to use, scalable, stable, and very intuitive platform that provides protection against security threats."
"Reports are customized, so you can present them to executives or engineers."
"The other big selling feature for us was its integration capabilities with all the other security-based products."
"The IDS and the threat intelligence are very useful. They are very intuitive and data-rich."
"The ease of implementation is the most valuable feature."
"AlientVault has helped us in improving our visualization and incident response during cybersecurity situations."
"The vulnerability scanning is helpful to identify the areas that need patching or fixes installed."
"CloudWatch doesn’t monitor disk throughput by default."
"The dashboard of Amazon CloudWatch is not very customizable right now."
"There is room for improvement in the pricing, because they have a premium version, but it's not really a premium version. It's just an enhanced monitoring version, and it can be a bit expensive depending on your usage."
"The solution's integration could be easier for laypersons."
"It would be beneficial for CloudWatch to provide an API interface and some kind of custom configuration."
"I found several areas for improvement in Amazon CloudWatch. First is that it's tough to track issues and find out where it's going wrong. The process takes longer. For example, if I get an exception error, I read the logs, search, go to AWS Cloud, then to the groups to find the keyword to determine what's wrong. Another area for improvement in Amazon CloudWatch is that it's slow in terms of log streaming. It requires an entire twenty-four hours for scanning, rather than just one hour. This issue can be solved with Elasticsearch streaming with Kibana, but it requires a lot of development effort and integration with Kibana or Splunk, and this also means I need a separate developer and software technical stack to do the indexing and streaming to Kibana. It's a manual effort that you need to do properly, so log streaming should be improved in Amazon CloudWatch. The AWS support person should also have a better understanding of the logs in Amazon CloudWatch. What I'd like added to the solution is a more advanced search function, particularly one that can tell you more information or special information. Right now, the search function is difficult to use because it only gives you limited data. For example, I got an error message saying that the policy wasn't created. I only know the amount the customer paid for the policy, the mobile number, and the customer name, but if I use those details, the information won't show up on the logs. I need to enter more details, so that's the type of fuzzy matching Amazon CloudWatch won't provide. If this type of search functionality is provided, it will be very helpful for businesses and companies that provide professional services to customers, like ours."
"CloudWatch's scalability could be improved."
"Improvement of SSSD logs would be beneficial."
"AlienVault cannot automatically respond to threats like other SIEM solutions, such as Sentinel and LogRhythm. Most of our clients are far away, so it's often challenging to handle alerts when they come up on our dashboard."
"Support can be slow at times, but the quality is high. Posted knowledge base articles could use improvement."
"The lack of mature functionality and expertise in any of those areas is a strong negative."
"The other thing is the agent is OSSEC. They needed to create its own agent to help to find threats on the devices that it happens to be installed."
"More complimentary training needs to be done for use with this tool. If you get into a bind, then it will cost you."
"USM Anywhere relies a lot on the community putting the data in. Often, you'll right-click on the attack, but nothing will be found. That's a weakness of it."
"It should be able to communicate with other security solutions to stop threats."
"The only complex area of the setup was writing the custom scripts."
Amazon CloudWatch is ranked 12th in Log Management with 40 reviews while USM Anywhere is ranked 15th in Log Management with 113 reviews. Amazon CloudWatch is rated 8.0, while USM Anywhere is rated 8.4. The top reviewer of Amazon CloudWatch writes "Instantaneous response when monitoring logs and KPIs". On the other hand, the top reviewer of USM Anywhere writes "Easy to use and affordable". Amazon CloudWatch is most compared with Zabbix, Datadog, Google Cloud's operations suite (formerly Stackdriver), Dynatrace and SolarWinds NPM, whereas USM Anywhere is most compared with Wazuh, AlienVault OSSIM, IBM Security QRadar, Splunk Enterprise Security and Microsoft Sentinel. See our Amazon CloudWatch vs. USM Anywhere report.
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We monitor all Log Management reviews to prevent fraudulent reviews and keep review quality high. We do not post reviews by company employees or direct competitors. We validate each review for authenticity via cross-reference with LinkedIn, and personal follow-up with the reviewer when necessary.
