Psychz - Manish
Votes: 0Posted On: Oct 04, 2017 00:40:59
About Cloudwatch
CloudWatch is AWS native component for real-time monitoring of AWS cloud resources: EC2 instances, EBS volumes, Elastic Load Balancers, RDS instances, and more. As a native AWS offering, the service is directly accessible from within the AWS management console.
About Nagios
Nagios XI encompasses and augments Core with web-based dashboards, configuration/customization, wizards, and reporting for streamlined enterprise use.
We'll cover a few basic areas where both the tools differ with each other
Capability
CloudWatch's capabilities excel when it comes to AWS specific capabilities like autoscaling and setting up alarms for EC2 instances, Elastic Load Balancers, and Amazon RDS database instances.
Nagios is an open source platform that was designed for interoperability with 3rd party tools.Hence, when it comes watching multi-cloud deployments and integrating into custom monitoring frameworks, Nagios is much more capable of doing the job right in comparison to CloudWatch.
Ease of use
Nagios is sophisticated in terms of its usability which was addressed with Nagios XI. However, XI's streamlined interface and visual management console come at a hefty enterprise price.
Amazon CloudWatch's centralized monitoring service is easy to set up and manage. But it is limited in its capabilities.
Alerting System
AWS CloudWatch Alarms are ALWAYS ON. Which means it can keep sending alerts for basic things that might not be of immediate concern. Amazon CloudWatch alerts appear to only allow you to set “Alarms” for things already exposed & integrated to publish metrics to CloudWatch.
Nagios's alerting system supports the ability to configure when you want to be alerted. This means you can categorize alarms into priority levels, and only pay attention to things that really matter.
Monitoring services
With cloud watch, you can monitor the health of the ec2 instance. While using Nagios or any other monitoring tool you can actually watch the service running on that server.
Our recommendation
If you are going for AWS server then it is a simple choice to opt for AWS CloudWatch simply because of its simplicity, usability, and pricing. AWS offers Metered pricing model which is very effective if your size of the business is considerable.
However, if you are planning to go for a dedicated server, then we strongly recommend Nagios (not the enterprise) since it is elaborate, robust, detailed, and free. The Enterprise version Nagios XI is not recommended here simply because of its pricing which ranges between $1,995 and tops out at $6,495 (enterprise edition) for unlimited nodes.
