Amazon CloudWatch vs VMware Cloud Director

Likelihood to Recommend

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.

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Rob Domenico

Senior Systems Administrator

Bentek Inc.Computer Software, 51-200 employees

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For a CSP it's the best choice. For internal uses, even in presence of different business units, it's not so easy and flexible to manage. It assures a high level of multitenancy, often not needed for internal purposes. But it could be used in this case, just not created for these purposes. Network management is great.

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Raffaello Poltronieri

Cloud Solutions Architect

Clouditalia TelecomunicazioniTelecommunications, 201-500 employees

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Pros

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.

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Apurv Doshi

Senior Solutions Architect

InfostretchInformation Technology and Services, 1001-5000 employees

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The advantage to using vCloud Director is it a cloud based application allowing access anywhere. I have the ability to make changes to our virtual environment without being in the office or using a vpn.
The vCloud Director provides a lot of the same features as vSphere.

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Michael O'Riley

Director of Information Technology

International Food Protection Training InstituteNon-Profit Organization Management, 11-50 employees

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Cons

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.

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Verified User

Professional in Finance and Accounting

Financial Services Company, 501-1000 employees

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It is not good for end users or customers to use. The UI is geared more towards VMware admins.
There is somewhat of a learning curve to it, you have to think through and plan out how you want to set your OVDC and PVDCs up. It takes a lot of architecture experience.
Once you built workloads in vCloud director, it's real difficult to take them out or manage them directly in vSphere. This is a huge pain.

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John Wellen

Cloud Technical Lead

DatalinkInformation Technology and Services, 10,001+ employees

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Pricing Details

General

Free Trial

Yes

Free/Freemium Version

Yes

Premium Consulting/Integration Services

Yes

Entry-level set up fee?

No

Starting Price

$0.0,012 per canary run

Amazon CloudWatch Editions & Modules

Edition

First 10,000 Metrics	$0.30¹
Next 240,000 Metrics	$0.10¹
Next 750,000 Metrics	$0.05¹
Over 1,000,000 Metrics	$0.02¹
Dashboard	$3.00²
Alarm - Standard Resolution (60 Sec)	$0.10³
Alarm - High Resolution (10 Sec)	$0.30³
Alarm - Composite	$0.50⁴
Logs - Collect (Data Ingestion)	$0.50⁵
Logs - Store (Archival)	$0.03⁵
Logs - Analyze (Logs Insights queries)	$0.005⁶
Events - Custom	$1.00⁷
Events - Cross-account	$1.00⁷
Contributor Insights	$0.50⁸
Contributor Insights - Matched Log Events	$0.02⁹
Canaries	$0.0012¹⁰
CloudWatch Evidently - Events	$5¹¹
CloudWatch Evidently - Analysis Units	$7.50¹²
CloudWatch RUM	$1¹³

per month
per month per dashboard
per month per alarm metric
per month per alarm
per GB
per GB of data scanned
per million events
per month per rule
per month per one million log events that match the rule
per canary run
per 1 million events
per 1 million analysis units
per 100k events

Additional Pricing Details

With Amazon CloudWatch, there is no up-front commitment or minimum fee; you simply pay for what you use. You will be charged at the end of the month for your usage.

General

Free Trial

—

Free/Freemium Version

—

Premium Consulting/Integration Services

—

Entry-level set up fee?

No

Starting Price

—

VMware Cloud Director Editions & Modules

—

Additional Pricing Details

—

Support Rating

Amazon CloudWatch 8.1

Based on 14 answers

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.

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Ramindu Deshapriya

Lead Consultant - Technology

VirtusaComputer Software, 10,001+ employees

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VMware Cloud Director 3.0

Based on 2 answers

Like most VMware, the vCloud Director support is not the best.

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Esteban Rey

Socio / Director

On CloudComputer & Network Security, 11-50 employees

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Alternatives Considered

Amazon CloudWatch is efficient, reliable and has a high speed response as compared to its competitors and it maximizes an application's life at the same time giving you the best load balance and storage, the services that Amazon CloudWatch provides are way better and cheaper for the prices attached to them.

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muphulusi dzivhani

Network Engineer

JohannesburgInformation Technology & Services, 5001-10,000 employees

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Hyper-V is built on a Windows platform that includes services not needed for the virtual environment adding overhead. With vCloud I'm not required to maintain a host OS or it's updates. The requirement to maintain storage devices is no longer needed with vCloud as well.

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Michael O'Riley

Director of Information Technology

International Food Protection Training InstituteNon-Profit Organization Management, 11-50 employees

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Return on Investment

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.

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Brian Dentino

Founder

finbox.ioInternet, 1-10 employees

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Time to market = 0 means profits almost immediate after investment
Customers trust the VMware brand more than any other
Elasticity: allowing the company to choose the best HW in the lower layer

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Raffaello Poltronieri

Cloud Solutions Architect

Clouditalia TelecomunicazioniTelecommunications, 201-500 employees

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Amazon CloudWatch vs VMware Cloud Director Formerly vCloud Director