We compared Amazon CloudWatch and Pandora FMS 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. Pandora FMS is highly regarded for its straightforward management process, effective dashboards, and efficient network monitoring capabilities.
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. Users say Pandora FMS could make its dashboards more customizable and improve its integration with other systems. Many also said they would like Pandora to add APIs for integration and offer better out-of-the-box analytics.
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. Pandora FMS support received high praise for their expertise, kindness, and fast response time.
Ease of Deployment: Amazon CloudWatch is generally described as easy to set up. Most users found Pandora FMS’s initial setup to be relatively easy.
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. Pandora FMS is considered reasonably priced, and the total cost depends on the environment.
ROI: Amazon CloudWatch offers a return on investment by minimizing the need for manual monitoring. Pandora FMS has also demonstrated advantages in terms of return on investment.
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. Users like Pandora FMS’s management and monitoring capabilities as well as its dashboards, but the solution has been criticized for its compatibility issues, limited customization options, and slower performance.
"It is a stable solution...I rate the technical support a ten out of ten."
"CloudWatch immediately hooks up and connects to the KPIs and all the metrics."
"The alarms are one thing I love about AWS CloudWatch. It has alerts that notify us when resource use is approaching the limit."
"Amazon CloudWatch is a cheap and easy-to-use solution."
"Every time we get an alarm or have an incident, CloudWatch is always there. We use it not only for resources we've spun up in the cloud, but also for some of our on-premises resources."
"Our team finds it overall quite useful."
"I can put it in a simple term, its simplicity is always there."
"I have found the memory metrics and the CPU metrics valuable."
"This solution has screens that are easy to understand and provide a wealth of information."
"It provides us with proactive monitoring and is very easy to configure and maintain."
"What I value most about Pandora FMS is the simplicity of working with it."
"Pandora's architecture is interesting. It's open so you can easily extend and enhance it. It's simpler to customize Pandora compared to other solutions. It's also scalable enough to support large environments."
"Thanks to this software and to the work of the support team, we have everything under control."
"The most valuable feature is that it is an all-in-one monitoring system."
"The administration of the console is very easy. I like that Pandora FMS is interactive and easy to manage."
"Thanks to its flexibility, I have been able to adapt the tool to our servers and find out quickly how their console works."
"It would be beneficial for CloudWatch to provide an API interface and some kind of custom configuration."
"CloudWatch doesn’t monitor disk throughput by default."
"I do not know whether or not CloudWatch can be integrated with on-prem services."
"When customers want to see the CPU or memory utilization there is a cost. This should be free to see the utilization."
"What would make Amazon CloudWatch better is if it includes more on-site checks, particularly status checks on the CPU, network input/output, etc. It would also be helpful if there's built-in swap space, disk, and memory monitoring in Amazon CloudWatch because, at the moment, my team has to configure it manually through a shell script."
"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."
"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."
"The solution could benefit from a price decrease."
"It would be useful if Pandora FMS included an ISO image (or «software appliance») for each big company that leases virtual private machines (VPS), just like in AWS."
"I think some improvements to the Android app would be good."
"We would like to see improvement in the mainframe integration that this solution is capable of."
"When it comes to the definition of local Software Agents for the first time in the open-source version, it can become very tedious."
"I find that this software is resource heavy, and demands a lot of processing capacity."
"Pandora FMS is relatively new, and the interface with the older version crashes at times. We have several different operating systems, such as Linux and Windows, and Pandora does not run as well in these."
"We would like the real-time monitoring of an interface to be improved within this solution."
"The price for Pandora FMS is expensive."
Amazon CloudWatch is ranked 12th in Log Management with 40 reviews while Pandora FMS is ranked 22nd in Log Management with 22 reviews. Amazon CloudWatch is rated 8.0, while Pandora FMS is rated 9.2. The top reviewer of Amazon CloudWatch writes "Instantaneous response when monitoring logs and KPIs". On the other hand, the top reviewer of Pandora FMS writes "The open architecture is easy to extend and enhance". Amazon CloudWatch is most compared with Zabbix, Datadog, Google Cloud's operations suite (formerly Stackdriver), Dynatrace and SolarWinds NPM, whereas Pandora FMS is most compared with Zabbix, Wazuh, PRTG Network Monitor, Nagios XI and SolarWinds NPM. See our Amazon CloudWatch vs. Pandora FMS 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.