Popular cloud monitoring solutions on the market include Datadog, AppDynamics, Dynatrace, SolarWinds and New Relic.
If you recently researched and chose a cloud monitoring solution for your company, what solutions did you evaluate? What did you ultimately choose and why? What were the pros and cons of the different options you considered?
Hi @Rony_Sklar ,
I would recommend Zabbix as it is a free and open-source tool.
Zabbix is an open-source monitoring software tool for diverse IT components, including networks, servers, virtual machines (VMs) and cloud services. Zabbix provides monitoring metrics, among others network utilization, CPU load and disk space consumption. Zabbix monitoring configuration can be done using XML-based templates which contain elements to monitor. The software monitors operations on Linux, Hewlett Packard Unix (HP-UX), Mac OS X, Solaris and other operating systems (OSes); however, Windows monitoring is only possible through agents. Zabbix can use MySQL, MariaDB, PostgreSQL, SQLite, Oracle or IBM DB2 to store data. Its backend is written in C and the web frontend is written in PHP. Zabbix offers several monitoring options:
It comes with a lot of integrations with cloud solutions and is very efficient and easy to use. On the cloud, it presently supports AWS, Cloudstack, Google Cloud, Azure, open stack, and many more to name
While the environment does matter in the selection of an APM tool, I prefer to use Dynatrace to manage the entire stack. Both production and Dev/Test. I find it to be quite superior to anything else on the market today.
@Mark Kaplan I don't know when you had a look, but if it was a while ago it might be worth it just to check out their site. So many solutions to so many challenges out there.
It depends on your requirements. For example, do you need to monitor the complete infrastructure, applications, network devices and security including, for example, Amazon or Azure or any other cloud vendor, and what kind of applications? I run IBM cloud monitoring but I've also worked with BMC, Dynatrace and AppDynamics. IBM has a total solution for enterprise environments, the other ones are more focussed on the application site. Also it depends on your knowledge of performance. Most tools are pointing to what is happening but you need to come up with the solution.
Regards Tjeerd
@Dawid Van Der Merwe I have read the documentation from New Relic but no working experience or tested New Relic I have worked and certified with a lot of monitoring tools for our customers. What I see is always missing parts for example the microcode is responsible for a lot of performance issues specially for SAN's, NAS, Power Systems and storage devices. However nobody is monitoring if this is causing delays. Also everybody is pointing in the direction where a problem can be but no advice what is exactly wrong and how to resolve it.
The first question is - what type of cloud service are you making use of? IaaS, PaaS, SaaS (Storage and/or Software)? Do you have specific business requirements, applications, etc. that will determine the type of data you require? What kind of metrics are you looking for; fault, configuration, security, assurance/accounting, performance? On top of that, do you require identity management e.g. CIEM solutions? And finally, on which cloud platform are you; GCP, AWS, Azure? All of those questions should drive your decision making. Once you have that buttoned down, you can start asking the next set of questions; do you want it as a service, do you require on-prem solutions, agent vs agentless, polling vs event, vs passive (tap/packet broker/netflow), etc.
Sorry for all the questions, but I think the more questions you ask right from the beginning, the better the solution will fit.
The answer to this question depends upon what you mean by Cloud Monitoring "Software".
Do you mean the applications software that you built or bought and that implements your business functionality? In that case look at Dynatrace, New Relic, and Instana.
There is also a drill down on this question that focuses upon the current and future architecture of your applications. If your applications are comprised of highly dynamic microservices orchestrated by Kubernetes you need to pay very careful attention to the problem of selecting tools that can keep up with the pace of change in your environment.
If you mean the infrastructure software that comprises the cloud and the services on the cloud that your applications rely upon, then Datadog is the clear leader in this space. But there are also very strong offerings from Dynatrace, New Relic, and Instana.
I'll answer based on my requirements.... Cloud for me is just another platform. PaaS, SaaS, IaaS, on-premise hosts, VMWare, mainframe, multiple clouds are all part of my problem. With an APM solution a key capability is transaction trace so I need a common solution across my problem set or I just start bouncing between tools. I also have infrastructure monitoring requirements and historically we used multiple tools to cover individual technologies and fill gaps. We selected Dynatrace as it had the most extensive coverage, with event correlation across transaction traces and the topology (host -> app relationships). The event correlation is easily a differentiating feature. It has an additional benefit as a highly automated deployment/maintenance. I can upgrade my entire environment with a push of a button. Prior to our decision we had the other 3 magic quadrant solutions (BMC, AppD & New Relic) in house. We are migrating away from all of them. We still have a need for a separate tool for network/appliances in full transparency (solarwinds) and use ELK for logs (we have a highly customized logging solution that will be difficult to migrate away from). I'm looking forward to Dynatrace maturing their log analytics offering to open up that opportunity.
If I was cloud only, I would consider Dynatrace or New Relic. If I'm heavy non-cloud, easily Dynatrace. If I didn't care about real user monitoring I would consider DataDog.