I work as a consultant providing solutions to customers, and I use cloud native services for monitoring. I primarily recommend CloudWatch, and if the customer has a preference for a third-party tool, I provide solutions for DataDog or other services.
I function as an architect in cloud services, particularly hybrid cloud. I need these tools and services that I always offer to customers. When I design solutions, I provide a monitoring solution and recommend these services.
I have multiple customers to whom I have recommended monitoring tools. I have worked on many projects including McAfee, CarMax, AMC, and American Media Corporation. I have recommended these services across different projects.
I have been using CloudWatch for more than ten years. I primarily recommend CloudWatch because customers do not want to spend additional money on other tools. I would recommend a native service so they can save cost. AWS is introducing synthetic monitoring for applications, which is crucial for precise monitoring. AWS X-Ray and Amazon QuickSight integration makes CloudWatch a centralized monitoring tool.
LogicMonitor is used for application insights monitoring, collecting, analyzing, and visualizing data from application infrastructure, and identifying errors. It boasts features including real-time alerting, log ingestion, and visualization dashboards. LogicMonitor offers microservices monitoring and more features in terms of alerting and support compared to CloudWatch, but it is costlier.
CloudWatch's integration is very quick. Since these are all connected internally with the AWS backbone network, no significant integration is needed. I simply enable CloudWatch across AWS services. This centralized tool also offers logs query through Amazon QuickSight, creating visual alert dashboards.
Technical support is obviously good in LogicMonitor, rating it a ten. CloudWatch's support rates at eight to eight and a half.
LogicMonitor excels in performance monitoring, tracking performance, bolstering security, and real-time alerting. However, LogicMonitor can struggle with high ingestion costs, data retention limitations, delayed alerts, and missing critical security events.
There are several areas for LogicMonitor to improve. Overly sensitive real-time monitoring leads to too many alerts, which could be managed via AI to reduce false positives. Cost optimization by offering discounts to enterprises could help manage pricing concerns. LogicMonitor should become more centralized to handle heterogeneous environments, as plugins sometimes do not work across platforms like F5 firewall. Complexity and steep documentation also need simplification.
LogicMonitor might struggle with delayed detection, as alerts may not be immediate under high infrastructure load. Other weaknesses include ingestion costs, data retention limitations, missing critical security events, real-time analysis gaps, and delayed alerts.
I have been working with this solution for more than seven years.
Technical support is obviously good in LogicMonitor.
I have experience with AWS, DataDog, and CloudWatch. LogicMonitor offers logs monitoring capabilities. Integration-wise, LogicMonitor also has an agent that can be installed on a particular service, and all data gets populated on LogicMonitor. I can see all the documents and everything. I can also integrate with ServiceNow and other platforms. The choice depends on how the customer is using their infrastructure to monitor.
The main consideration is cost optimization. Some customers want to optimize their cost for their infrastructure, so I would recommend CloudWatch. For other customers who are open to spending additional funds, I would recommend LogicMonitor or DataDog.
LogicMonitor provides application dynamic monitoring and application insights monitoring. It collects, analyzes, and visualizes data from application infrastructure and identifies errors. I can track performance and bolster security with microservices monitoring using LogicMonitor.
LogicMonitor has more features compared to CloudWatch in terms of real-time alerting, log ingestion, alerting, visualization dashboards, and complaint support. However, cost is the only matter of concern. LogicMonitor has more features compared to CloudWatch.
I find a few weaknesses at the moment. Alert fatigue sometimes occurs when there is a peak load on the AWS infrastructure, and LogicMonitor takes some time to alert. High ingestion cost is another concern. Data retention limitations present challenges because sometimes I need to check alerts from six months back, but the data retention is only one week, maximum ten days, or one month. Missing critical security events is an issue where some non-critical logs get flagged as false positives. Real-time analysis is required but sometimes only works in a few services and not in all services. Some security breaches cannot be identified through LogicMonitor because those logs are not captured when something happens to a particular service. For example, if an application has vulnerabilities, the application acts like a legitimate service, but I do not know that. LogicMonitor hardly identifies these things. Even when I collect the logs, I cannot exactly know if the log is the faulty one. I think most service vendors are trying to implement AI models to identify this, but it takes some time to get this done. I think LogicMonitor is also trying to do this.
Delayed detection is a significant issue. Because of high load on the infrastructure, sometimes I will not find the alert immediately. It takes five to ten minutes, and after the impact happens, I get notified five to ten minutes later. This delayed detection is the main issue.
Real-time monitoring is required, and that means overly sensitive alerts with too many false positives. If LogicMonitor can use AI or other methods, they can remove those duplicates and maintain the actual alerts. They can identify false positives prior and prevent them by nullifying those things. Cost is another area where LogicMonitor can provide discounts to enterprise companies using most of their infrastructure to reduce their license cost. Complexity should be addressed because if a customer has multiple heterogeneous environments, LogicMonitor should be centralized to get all the data and do the log monitoring. Sometimes some plugins and agents do not work on few services. For example, on F5 firewalls and on-premises firewall physical servers where I want to get some logs, those do not get logged on LogicMonitor. A lack of context and understanding of the tool is also an issue. The documentation should be more clear and simple in simple language. When I first see the documentation, it is pages upon pages, and it is very difficult to understand everything until I gain some control of that tool. The documentation should be reduced so people can easily use that tool. Instead of going very complex, straightforward guidance should be required. My overall rating for this product is nine out of ten.