While more and more organizations are moving their infrastructure and application workloads to the cloud, Amazon Web Services (AWS) has stormed their way into becoming the premier cloud service provider. AWS offers scalable storage and content delivery, with no physical overhead. Businesses rely on the cloud service provider for databases, servers, load balancer, content delivery and much more with no physical overhead. However, keeping track of the health and performance of AWS resources is a challenge. Traditional infrastructure monitoring solutions aren’t cut out to monitor distributed environments in AWS. In the pursuit of modern solutions to monitor the cloud environment, organizations are looking for a capable AWS monitoring tool. A refined AWS monitoring tool can help DevOps teams collect performance data in the form of logs, metrics, and traces.

Choosing the Right AWS Monitoring Tools

While choosing an AWS monitoring and optimization tool, you can pick a tool that solely focuses on performance metrics or the one that leverages log data. Organizations might also try their hand in open-source options although they don’t come with a customer-service infrastructure to help them with end-user issues. Eventually, the lack of a customer-service infrastructure makes it difficult to install, manage, and update. Closed-source AWS monitoring tools, on the other hand, come with customer support and regular vendor updates, and are much more user-friendly.

In this blog, we have picked the top 5 AWS monitoring tools for you.

1. AppOptics

SolarWinds AppOptics is one of the leading application performance monitoring (APM) solutions offering end-to-end monitoring with several AWS offerings including metrics, traces, and logs. The solution offers 150 out-of-the-box integrations and plugins along with 30 AWS services. Businesses will get a holistic view of the availability and performance of all the AWS services using pre-configured dashboards. By leveraging these dashboards, you can monitor basic CPU usage, memory and disk utilization, and network I/O, and drill down further with different metrics.

Unlike other monitoring tools, AppOptics is much easier to implement and deploy. By leveraging code-level diagnostics, this tool will help you identify the root cause of issues faster than ever. With AWS logging integrated to the tool, it allows single-click access to logs associated with every transaction. Configuring threshold-based alerts and a high degree of automation makes AppOptics a favorable solution for AWS monitoring.

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2. Papertrail

Papertrail is a tailor-made cloud-based log management solution for searching and analyzing AWS logs. DevOps teams find this tool extremely helpful in troubleshooting performance issues, as AWS logs contain crucial information regarding all the events. Papertrail also integrates easily with AppOptics.

The monitoring tool analyzes AWS logs along with other application and infrastructure logs in one location for unified search and analytics. Some Amazon services can be configured to send logs to Papertrail directly, rather than routing them via CloudWatch. These logs are automatically parsed to view events in real-time using an intuitive event viewer. DevOps teams can refrain from typing complex queries during the troubleshooting process. Papertrail allows identification of surges in log volumes and integrates with common notification services like Slack, Pagerduty for alerts.

3. Zabbix

Zabbix is a free, open-source tool that monitors servers, virtual machines, cloud infrastructure, network devices, and more. Since the tool is open-source, this is a highly flexible tool to configure a monitoring setup based on your organization’s requirements. With different widgets on offer, you can automatically discover your AWS S3 buckets and instances running over AWS services including EC2, RDS, EMR, etc.

4. Prometheus

This is yet another open-source monitoring solution offering easy visibility into cloud-based infrastructure with metrics. Prometheus can gather time-series data under different metric names. Offering auto-discovery, this tool allows you to monitor EC2 instances without spending a lot of time in initial setup. Organizations can also use CloudWatch exporter to collect metrics from ELB and other services of AWS. With its notification manager, organizations can make full use of intelligent alerts.

5. Nagios

Known for its IT infrastructure monitoring capabilities, Nagios is another open-source tool that helps in monitoring AWS resources. Amazon S3 and EC2 wizards can be used to simplify initial setup and collect a wide range of metrics. With these metrics, you can quickly detect network issues within your cloud setup. If you can proactively monitor your applications, you can maximize the availability of various servers, applications, and services.

With a wide range of AWS monitoring tools available, we’ve listed down the top 5 available in the market.

Contact our team of cloud experts if you are still skeptical about which tool suits your organization best.

 

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