When Amazon Web Services (AWS) was first launched in 2006, no one could have anticipated that it would become the leading cloud service provider in the world. Countless enterprises use legacy networks with decentralized cloud services. In a cloud computing environment, it’s more important than ever that companies have Amazon Web Services monitoring tools to monitor performance.
Here is a list of the eight best Amazon web services monitoring tools:
- SolarWinds Server & Application Monitor (FREE TRIAL) Server and application monitoring solution with autodiscovery for EC2 instances and EBS volumes. It includes a dashboard, out-of-the-box templates, and a configurable alerts system.
- ManageEngine Applications Manager (FREE TRIAL) Application monitoring platform with autodiscovery for EC2 and RDS cloud instances. It monitors AWS EC2, RDS, S3, SNS, ELB and more.
- Site24x7 (FREE TRIAL) A server monitoring tool that can group supervision of servers located anywhere and also in the cloud. This is a cloud-based service.
- Paessler PRTG Network Monitor (FREE TRIAL) Free network monitoring tool that can monitor CloudWatch data. It includes a range of pre-configured sensors and alerts for AWS EC2, ELB, EBS, RDS, and more.
- Opsview Cloud Cloud monitoring tool that monitors AWS EC2, ELB, RDS, S3, Auto Scaling, DynamoDB, and more. It includes pre-configured packs to help monitor performance.
- Dynatrace Application performance monitor that automatically discovers AWS EC2 instances. It integrates data from the AWS cloud watch. Includes additional features like dependency mapping and AI.
- AppDynamics Application performance management tool with monitoring for AWS ECS, Amazon EC2, EKS, Fargate, and more. It includes features like anomaly detection and AI-driven root cause analysis.
- LogicMonitor Network monitoring software that can monitor AWS CloudWatch metrics. It is compatible with AWS, EC2, EKS, ECS, Amazon RDS, DynamoDB, ElastiCache, ELB, and more.
The best Amazon web services monitoring tools
1. SolarWinds Server & Application Monitor (FREE TRIAL)
SolarWinds Server & Application Monitor, or SAM, is a server and application monitoring tool that can be used to optimize the performance of AWS cloud services. With SolarWinds Server & Application Monitor you can automatically discover EC2 instances and EBS volumes.
Performance data is displayed through the dashboard, which includes a number of visualization options such as graphs and status icons making it easy to read from a glance. The software comes with out-of-the-box templates you can use to monitor your environment.
To speed up remediation time, SolarWinds Server & Application Monitor has an alerts system. The alerts systems let you configure alerts that notify you about issues like AWS throttling, AWS exceeded limits and status failures. Notifications are delivered by email and SMS.
Server & Application Monitor offers a complete server and application monitoring experience that comprehensively covers AWS infrastructure. SolarWinds Server & Application Monitor starts at $2,995 (£2,275). You can download the 30-day free trial.
2. ManageEngine Applications Manager (FREE TRIAL)
ManageEngine Applications Manager is a real-time application monitoring program with AWS monitoring. The software automatically discovers EC2 and RDS cloud instances. The tool collects performance data on CPU usage, latency, storage space, memory, network traffic, and more.
You can use the platform to monitor AWS services such as Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2), Amazon Relational Database Service (RDS), Amazon Simple Storage Service (S3), Amazon Simple Notification Service (SNS), Amazon Elastic Load Balancing (ELB), and more.
For EC2 monitoring, ManageEngine Applications Manager gathers information on availability, health, disk I/O, memory and disk utilisations, latency, volume I/O, and network traffic (all of this information can be viewed as pie charts and graphs).
You can use the alerts system thresholds that notify you about changes to your cloud environment via email and SMS. Once you see the alert you can then start the diagnostic process. The Root Cause Analysis (RCA) window can help you to troubleshoot and find the root cause.
ManageEngine Applications Manager is a good fit for enterprises that want to monitor the performance of AWS and other applications from one location. To find out the pricing information, you’ll need to request a quote from the company directly. You can download the 30-day free trial.
3. Site24x7 (FREE TRIAL)
Site24x7 Infrastructure is a cloud-based server monitoring system that is part of a wider platform of system administration tools. The Infrastructure tool also monitors the applications and services that support user-facing software and maps their dependencies.
This monitoring system is able to supervise servers wherever they are located. It can be tailored by the addition of specialized plugins, called “integrations” that add the capabilities of interfacing with specific products. There is a long list of AWS plugins available for Site24x7 Infrastructure. These include:
- AWS EC2
- AWS Lambda
- AWS Elastic Beanstalk
- AWS Elastic Container Service
- AWS Elastic Kubernetes Service
- AWS Lightsail Instance
These integrations each have their own tailored monitoring checks to perform; they don’t just apply standard monitoring processes to any and all resources that they supervise. Each service is tracked by a dedicated screen in the cloud-based dashboard, which can be accessed through any standard Web browser. Each screen in the dashboard can be customized through drag-and-drop widgets.
Each of the metrics that the Infrastructure module covers are subject to performance thresholds. These ensure that technicians don’t have to sit and watch the console of the monitoring service. When system performance drops below an acceptable level, the Site24x7 system generates an alert and sends out a notification to key staff through SMS messages or emails.
Get started with a 30-day free trial .
4. Paessler PRTG Network Monitor (FREE TRIAL)
Paessler PRTG Network Monitor is a free network monitoring software that can monitor AWS. You can use it to view CloudWatch data, and more through a range of onboard sensors. The sensors display metrics that are relevant to the service you are trying to monitor, with dials to make the output easier to read.
These sensors offer monitoring for Amazon Elastic Cloud Computing (EC2), Amazon Elastic Block Store (EBS), Amazon Elastic Load Balancing (Amazon ELB), Amazon Relational Database Service (Amazon RDS), and more. Each sensor monitors a different component of your AWS infrastructure.
For example, if you want to monitor EBS then you can use the Amazon CloudWatch EBS Sensor. With the EBS sensor, you can monitor Disk Read, Disk Write, Downtime, Total Read Time, Total Write Time, and more. You can then use the configurable alerts system to notify you when a parameter crosses a certain threshold. Alerts can be sent through email, SMS, push notification, Slack message, and more.
Setting up PRTG Network Monitor is simple, but you need to have an AWS CloudWatch account. PRTG Network Monitor is available for free for less than 100 sensors. If you need more sensors you can purchase an upgrade. Paid versions start at $1,600 (£1,222) for 500 sensors. You can download the 30-day free trial.
5. Opsview Cloud
Opsview Cloud is a cloud monitoring solution that can monitor AWS. With Opsview Cloud you can monitor AWS Auto Scaling, AWS Custom, AWS DynamoDB, AWS EC2, AWS ELB, AWS RDS, AWS Route 53, and AWS S3. Each of these components has an Opspack available, that acts as a plugin. Each plugin records different performance metrics.
For example, the AWS – EC2 CloudWatch Opspack monitors information such as CPU utilization and CPU credit usage. For ELB, you can monitor latency, health host counts, and backed connections errors. Using a range of packs gives you a comprehensive view of performance and availability across your entire AWS stack.
If you’re looking for a cloud-based monitoring tool, Opsview Cloud is an excellent choice for monitoring AWS infrastructure. Opsview Cloud supports enterprises between 150 hosts to over 50,000. There is also a free on-premises version that supports up to 25 hosts. You can schedule a live demo.
6. Dynatrace
Dynatrace is an application performance monitor with AI-driven AWS monitoring. The platform integrates with data from AWS CloudWatch and can automatically discover EC2 instances. Once the instances have been discovered you can view a rundown of performance data through one pane of glass.
The software is compatible with Amazon DynamoDB, Amazon EBS, Amazon EC2, Amazon RDS, Amazon S3, AWS CodePipeline, AWS ELB, and AWS Lambda. For EBS monitoring, Dynatrace collects data on throughput, IOPS, disk latency, and idle time. If you’re monitoring RDS instances then you can measure CPU utilization, storage space, throughput, database connections, network read/write latency, and IOPS rate.
See exactly how your cloud infrastructure fits together with the dependency mapping feature, which displays Applications, Services, Processes, Hosts, and Datacenters on an onscreen map. Mapping is very useful because it allows you to put your virtual resources in context when troubleshooting performance issues.
Dynatrace is a natural choice for enterprises that want an AI-led AWS and application monitoring experience. The solution is available as an on-premise or SaaS-based platform. Contact the company directly for pricing information. You can start the 15-day free trial.
7. AppDynamics
AppDynamics is an application performance management solution that can monitor Amazon ECS, Amazon EC2, Amazon EKS, AWS Fargate, and AWS Lambda. With AppDynamics, the user can automatically discover cloud services to monitor the performance down to the code level. After discovering the services you can view them on an application dependency map.
To diagnose performance issues the software uses performance baselining. The tool creates dynamic baselines of key performance metrics and uses anomaly detection to identify abnormal performance. Then you can use the AI-powered root cause analysis to find out what caused the problem.
AppDynamics offers a high-quality AWS monitoring experience that will meet the needs of most large organizations. There are three App Performance Monitoring Packages available to purchase: APM Pro, APM Advanced, and APM Peak.
APM Pro offers monitoring for application business transactions. APM Advanced monitors network and server performance. APM Peak includes business performance monitoring with transaction analytics. You can request a quote from the company directly. Start the 15-day free trial.
8. Logic Monitor
LogicMonitor is an infrastructure monitoring tool for enterprises that can monitor AWS. and AWS CloudWatch metrics out-of-the-box. There is performance and availability monitoring for Amazon EC2, Amazon EKS, Amazon ECS, Amazon RDS, Amazon DynamoDB, Amazon ElastiCache, Amazon ELB, and more.
An autodiscovery feature automatically detects AWS infrastructure in your environment. From then onwards you can keep track of performance events and AWS data through the dashboard. For EC2, you can monitor CPU utilization, disk read metrics, disk write metrics, network in, network out, and more.
For fast resolution, LogicMonitor has an alerts system. You can configure alerts to be sent out by email, SMS, and voice messages if an AWS service is down. You can also set escalation chains so that if the first point of contact is unavailable then the alert will be rerouted to another individual.
LogicMonitor is a tool that works best in hybrid environments where the user wants to monitor cloud services and physical devices with one unified solution. Standard Pricing packages start at 50, 100, or 200 devices. You can start the 14-day free trial.
Choosing an AWS Monitoring Tool
While you can use CloudWatch to monitor AWS, the visibility and depth of features offered by network monitoring agents are a must-have. When so many platform Amazon Web Services Monitoring tools allow you to integrate external CloudWatch data it makes sense to take advantage and use a third-party tool for improved visibility.
All of the products on this list are formidable AWS monitoring tools. SolarWinds Server & Application Monitor, Paessler PRTG Network Monitor, and ManageEngine Applications Manager stand out as some of the more accessible tools. If you want more advanced capabilities then it is worth looking at Dynatrace and AppDynamics (particularly for dependency mapping).
