Amazon CloudWatch vs Microsoft Sentinel | TrustRadius (2024)

Cloud watch is great and essential if you decide to invest in AWS and have any need to monitor the health of all aspects of your VPC resources, or at the organizational level (multiple accounts). Another benefit of the service is constant upgrades at no additional costs; the software evolves to develop modules and interface improvements. For first-time users in AWS, this is going to take a bit to understand, so the learning curve to this metrics environment can seem overwhelming at first glance/use.

Incentivized

Sentinel is the best "cloud-native" in the market yet, so if the organization has a cloud presence (which almost everyone has) then Sentinel is the right choice for having a single pane of glass for all your security monitoring needs. Sentinel is a very good tool for log analysis and event management purposes as well. With KQL and ASIM parsers, organizations can retrieve invaluable insights even from the most complex data. And of course, Sentinel is a great choice for automating the incident response process to a very good extent.

Incentivized

• It provides lot many out of the box dashboard to observe the health and usage of your cloud deployments. Few examples are CPU usage, Disk read/write, Network in/out etc.
• It is possible to stream CloudWatch log data to Amazon Elasticsearch to process them almost real time.
• If you have setup your code pipeline and wants to see the status, CloudWatch really helps. It can trigger lambda function when certain cloudWatch event happens and lambda can store the data to S3 or Athena which Quicksight can represent.

Incentivized

• It has a native integration with all Microsoft products, from Entra to Azure, Microsoft 365
• Being built upon native Azure functionality benefits in automation and infrastructual solutions
• The KQL language is relatively easy to learn and powerful.
• Microsoft is listening very careful to the customers and develops new functionality at a fast pace

Incentivized

• Memory metrics on EC2 are not available on CloudWatch. Depending on workloads if we need visibility on memory metrics we use Solarwinds Orion with the agent installed. For scalable workloads, this involves customization of images being used.
• Visualization out of the box. But this can easily be addressed with other solutions such as Grafana.
• By design, this is only used for AWS workloads so depending on your environment cannot be used as an all in one solution for your monitoring.

Incentivized

• It takes some time to learn how to use and install it properly, and it does not connect effectively with external PaaS systems such as Salesforce CRM, Salesforce Commerce Cloud, and so on.
• Microsoft can simplify the display of the logs to make them easier to study, and the user interface occasionally delays, which can also be enhanced.

Incentivized

The Microsoft Azure Sentinel solution is very good and even better if you use Azure. It's easy to implement and learn how to use the tool with an intuitive and simple interface. New updates are happening to always bring new news and improve the experience and usability. The solution brings reliability as it is from a very reliable manufacturer.

Incentivized

Support is effective, and we were able to get any problems that we couldn't get solved through community discussion forums solved for us by the AWS support team. For example, we were assisted in one instance where we were not sure about the best metrics to use in order to optimize an auto-scaling group on EC2. The support team was able to look at our metrics and give a useful recommendation on which metrics to use.

Incentivized

Azure Sentinel is very easy to use and configure. If you are stuck somewhere, Microsoft support is excellent in assisting and solving your issue.

Incentivized

I believe that CloudWatch is a better solution to use with AWS services and resources in terms of cost and ease of integration with AWS infrastructure services. But keep in mind that Elasticsearch is better at aggregating application-level metrics. We chose CloudWatch because of its capabilities to integrate and monitor AWS services in almost real-time.

Incentivized

The key advantage of using Sentinel lies in Microsoft already being a renowned name in cloud services. Hence, the Collection of data at the cloud scale across all users, devices, applications, and infrastructure, both on-premises and especially in the MS Cloud, is super easy. Additionally, leveraging Threat Intel from Microsoft itself gives a sense of security, given their years of experience in the collection of intel. The AI and Machine learning features provided by MS is one of the finest.

Incentivized

Did not use professional services

Incentivized

• We were able to set up log streaming, retention, and simple downtime alerts within a few hours, having no prior experience with CloudWatch, freeing up our engineers to focus on more important business goals.
• CloudWatch log groups have made it relatively easy to detect and diagnose issues in production by allowing us to aggregate logs across servers, correlate failures, isolate misbehaving servers, etc. Thanks to CloudWatch, we are generally able to identify, understand and mitigate most production fires within 10-15 minutes.
• Choosing CloudWatch to manage log aggregation has saved us quite a bit of time and money over the past year. Generally, 3rd-party log aggregation solutions tend to get quite expensive unless you self-host, in which case you typically need to spend a fair amount of time setting up, maintaining, and monitoring these services.

Incentivized

• Microsoft Sentinel is a good investment, especially when sided with other solutions such as Microsoft 365 Defender, as it provides 360° protection on every level of the infrastructure.
• When deployed on infrastructures that have never had an SIEM, Microsoft Sentinel helps to assess vulnerabilities and misconfigurations.
• As with any other SIEM, Microsoft Sentinel basically eliminates the need to put effort into every single platform (like EDR, NDR, XDR) and converge that effort on a single product that correlates and orchestrates the rest.

Incentivized