Dynatrace vs AWS CloudWatch Monitoring

[Sahil2308]

I wanted to understand how does Dynatrace is better than CloudWatch in monitoring AWS resources(both server(eg EC2, etc) and serverless(eg lambda function, Fargate etc)).
Is CloudWatch monitoring on-prem servers real-time?

[DanielS · Accepted solution]

Well, at first and depending on your observability model, you can consolidate everything on one platform for all your valuable assets. In our case, being a large company, this is key. Because this eliminates the different observability silos, thus reducing the search for the root cause of problems.

From a more technical point of view, the integration and alerting flexibility found in Dynatrace is unrivaled. We can quickly understand the impact to our end users if you have everything integrated with your application, and this is key for any business. As a user of Cloudwatch I think that I can found information there, but with Dynatrace I can go far beyond as the following graph states.

[Sahil2308]

Thanks @DanielS 

While exploring the integrations possible between Dynatrace and AWS, I found these integrations (Integrations such as role-based integration and CloudWatch metric stream) just scraping/API calling out data from CloudWatch into Dynatrace, so we only have few basic metrics and few customizations possible using these integrations such as alerting, but we don't get any end-to-end insights.

I believe wherever oneagent deployment is possible (eg: EC2, EKS) we get end-to-end visibility with RCA.
But are there any integrations for AWS serverless services (eg: lambda functions, DynamoDB, aurora, CI-CD services), which will provide us with end-to-end visibility with RCA?

[DanielS]

Yes, you can find all the detail in the Dynatrace Hub https://www.dynatrace.com/hub/?query=lambda  and then query the topic of choice, that guide you to the documentation about that topic. AWS integrations are good enough to provide you end-to-end visibility with RCA.

[nmarchini]

We see a 5 minute lag in things appearing in Dynatrace vs Cloudwatch, the 5 min delay is too long for us so we've had to switch some things back to Cloudwatch