We compared Amazon CloudWatch and Centreon 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. Users also praised CloudWatch’s comprehensive monitoring and alerts. Centreon features a user-friendly interface with useful options for customization and manual configuration. Users like the solution’s flexible dashboards and the ability to create plugins.
Room for improvement: Some reviews mentioned that Amazon CloudWatch could improve performance and dashboard visualization. Others noted that the solution lacked compatibility with some databases. Some Centreon users requested better documentation and more flexibility to customize reporting. Other areas for improvement include auto-scanning efficiency and 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. Centreon is highly regarded for its prompt and knowledgeable customer service that offers support in multiple languages. However, some customers feel that the lower levels of support are inadequate.
Ease of Deployment: Amazon CloudWatch is generally described as easy to set up. Centreon's initial setup is described as time-consuming and complex. The deployment varies in duration depending on the IT infrastructure.
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. Centreon's cost depends on the company's size. It is affordable and suitable for small companies, but it can be costly to scale up.
ROI: Amazon CloudWatch offers a return on investment by minimizing the need for manual monitoring. Centreon delivers value by helping users identify and resolve critical issues fasters, which could yield large savings.
Comparison Results: Reviewers say that Amazon CloudWatch is a simple, intuitive solution that can handle large workloads, but some mentioned dashboard visualization and customizability as areas for improvement. Centreon is a flexible solution offering a range of customization options. The solution has earned high marks for support and affordability. At the same time, users say the setup can be complicated and time-consuming. Others said that auto-scanning and integration have room for improvement.
"It offers direct integrations with various storage providers, making it convenient to push logs from CloudWatch to these external platforms."
"It is a robust analytical tool and it goes beyond mere functionality and extends into the realm of providing comprehensive insights."
"The solution offers very detailed metrics for their services."
"The detection is the most valuable feature."
"The product can be integrated with AWS very easily."
"It is a stable solution...I rate the technical support a ten out of ten."
"We have found the pricing to be reasonable."
"We use Amazon CloudWatch for logging."
"Centreon's most valuable feature is Opsgenie."
"What we like about it is that, whereas with Nagios, by design, if you have five or six data centers, you have to open five or six web pages to see what's going on, In Centreon, this is all included in one page, a single site, one dashboard. You don't have to jump from one specific dashboard to the other."
"Centreon helps me detect where the problem is quickly. When we resolve a problem quickly, this lowers our overall costs."
"I find the product's scalability to be one of the most valuable features since it allows us to add unlimited devices for monitoring and to set up additional polling servers without additional license cost or downtime in our monitoring."
"The downtimes feature is helpful. If the ISP is doing some maintenance on its network, we have the option to put downtime on the devices or the services, so we won't get any false alarms."
"In addition, the flexibility, customizability, and analytics of Centreon's dashboards are all very good. The dashboards help us see the whole network map, and that is quite valuable for us. In addition, the dashboards have helped to improve our visibility and ability to proactively ensure the right data is available at the right time... The flexibility has given us the ability to add in our own monitoring metrics and that has been quite interesting and very useful for us."
"It is decentralized, which is better, because you can reduce the load from a single system. Also, you get a better view because it's more independent. Then, for the management, it's nice because they have one central system. With that, they can manage all the other systems, as well. This means they don't have to configure each system by system. They can configure it from one single interface."
"For servers and for applications, it was very, very efficient."
"There's a learning curve with Amazon CloudWatch since we have to learn to write the queries to extract the keys and logs."
"Amazon CloudWatch's pricing needs improvement."
"The product's configuration has some challenges. The solution needs to be more user-friendly."
"Right now, in relation to monitoring services, there are too many services and too many metrics per service."
"The product’s documentation must be improved."
"Incorporating a straightforward method or a plug-and-play solution for integrating these databases with our systems, facilitating smooth data transfer, and enabling the creation of dashboards for monitoring and analysis would be beneficial."
"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."
"It would be beneficial for CloudWatch to provide an API interface and some kind of custom configuration."
"Currently, we have to go through all of the different templates and take a look at how the template is configured, and how specific parameters may change across different templates with different precedents, megatons, etc. It's a lot of work and involves trial and error. I wish they could simplify the process."
"I would like to see an improvement of the communication with big data systems, because Centreon is a monitoring system. In our point of view, Centreon should be a part of a source for a big data system, not a big data system itself. So, it should be easier to add data from the Centreon system to a big data system. For example, it should be able to teach machine learning."
"During the initial setup we faced some issues. Part of it was because we had to become more knowledgeable in the solution. There are some gray areas and if you don't know the product well you may have issues. Another part of it was some bugs that we came across, although that's part of every software solution in IT nowadays. But the initial setup could be easier."
"Improvements are needed in the area of cloud monitoring, as that's a newer feature."
"Centreon needs to improve the granularity of the data as well as the graphical data. It would also be better to if there was improvement to the filtering/grouping system as well as the creation of views."
"Release management and quality of testing need improvement, because with each major upgrade we have many issues coming in. Then, it takes several minor upgrades to get rid of them."
"There are improvements that they need to make to their API. When we're using different systems and we want to disable monitoring for a specific server, we still can't do that through the API. That's something that's lacking."
"To get it started is a lot of work, since it comes empty. We had to push information into it to make it work."
Amazon CloudWatch is ranked 9th in Cloud Monitoring Software with 40 reviews while Centreon is ranked 12th in Cloud Monitoring Software with 27 reviews. Amazon CloudWatch is rated 8.0, while Centreon is rated 8.6. The top reviewer of Amazon CloudWatch writes "Instantaneous response when monitoring logs and KPIs". On the other hand, the top reviewer of Centreon writes "Proactive reporting guides our NOC on what needs to be fixed, saving them time". Amazon CloudWatch is most compared with Zabbix, Datadog, Google Cloud's operations suite (formerly Stackdriver), Dynatrace and SolarWinds NPM, whereas Centreon is most compared with Zabbix, PRTG Network Monitor, Nagios Core, Icinga and Datadog. See our Amazon CloudWatch vs. Centreon report.
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