Amazon CloudWatch vs VMware Cloud Director (formerly vCloud Director)

Likelihood to Recommend

Ideal for monitoring AWS services and workloads. We have several of our websites entirely hosted on AWS and we're able to get a Grafana dashboard of all the relevant metrics from CloudFront, S3, EC2, RDS, and Elastic Beanstalk. This can be set up within the hour or templated on your code for infrastructure (we do this with terraform & cloud formation). By design, it isn't suited for non-AWS workloads.

Read full review

Verified User

Professional in Finance and Accounting

Financial Services Company, 501-1000 employees

View all 34 answers on this topic

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.

Read full review

Raffaello Poltronieri

Cloud Solutions Architect

Clouditalia TelecomunicazioniTelecommunications, 201-500 employees

View all 4 answers on this topic

Feature Rating Comparison

Amazon CloudWatch

VMware Cloud Director (formerly vCloud Director)

Multi-platform scheduling

Central monitoring

Logging

Alerts and notifications

Analysis and visualization

Application integration

Pros

Managing log retention periods is very simple with CloudWatch, and can be configured on a per-group basis.
Monitoring host performance is very easy when coupled with the CloudWatch Agent on an EC2 instance. A simple installation and configuration replaces an entire 3rd-party host monitoring stack.
CloudWatch is flexible enough for not just host monitoring, but application monitoring as well. It's easy to pipe local logs up to CloudWatch and extract structured data in order to monitor and set alerts on custom app metrics.

Read full review

Brian Dentino

Founder

finbox.ioInternet, 1-10 employees

View all 34 answers on this topic

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.

Read full review

Michael O'Riley

Director of Information Technology

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

View all 4 answers on this topic

Cons

CloudWatch doesn't monitor things outside of the cloud, it's not what it is intended for.
Billing is confusing as it bills on Dashboard, metrics called, custom metrics, etc. Hard to forecast the charge.
Paradigm is confusing sometimes and difficult to learn.

Read full review

Verified User

C-Level Executive in Information Technology

Retail Company, 1001-5000 employees

View all 34 answers on this topic

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.

Read full review

John Wellen

Cloud Technical Lead

DatalinkInformation Technology and Services, 10,001+ employees

View all 4 answers on this topic

Usability

Amazon CloudWatch 7.0

Based on 2 answers

The tool collects a great deal of data, and data that's not available many other places. But the data is hidden in obscure places, and the logs are hard to read and follow. The user interface could use a heavy rework, and several companies have made a business out of scraping the data and presenting it better.

Read full review

Verified User

Professional in Information Technology

Human Resources Company, 51-200 employees

View all 2 answers on this topic

No score

No answers yet

No answers on this topic

Support Rating

Amazon CloudWatch 7.6

Based on 16 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.

Read full review

Ramindu Deshapriya

Lead Consultant - Technology

VirtusaComputer Software, 10,001+ employees

View all 16 answers on this topic

VMware Cloud Director (formerly vCloud Director) 3.0

Based on 2 answers

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

Read full review

Esteban Rey

Socio / Director

On CloudComputer & Network Security, 11-50 employees

View all 2 answers on this topic

Alternatives Considered

I can only speak to how it's positively benefited my organization. The problem was that hosting in-house servers is no longer a cost-effective solution vs. containerization in the cloud. But once you rely on hosting servers in the cloud you need a tool to manage every aspect of that including log monitoring, resource utilization, and application performance. Amazon CloudWatch is exactly the tool you need.

Read full review

Verified User

Employee in Engineering

Information Services Company, 1001-5000 employees

View all 34 answers on this topic

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.

Read full review

Michael O'Riley

Director of Information Technology

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

View all 4 answers on this topic

Return on Investment

Scalability. Saving us cost when we can downgrade underperforming instances.
Great monitoring and peace of mine without always having to check logs to any services failure.
Support cost is high. It would be nicer if documentation would be easier to follow.

Read full review

Verified User

Engineer in Engineering

Computer Software Company, 51-200 employees

View all 34 answers on this topic

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

Read full review

Raffaello Poltronieri

Cloud Solutions Architect

Clouditalia TelecomunicazioniTelecommunications, 201-500 employees

View all 4 answers on this topic

Pricing Details

General

Free Trial

Yes

Free/Freemium Version

Yes

Premium Consulting/Integration Services

Yes

Entry-level set up fee?

No

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

Per Metric

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

VMware Cloud Director (formerly vCloud Director) Editions & Modules

—

Additional Pricing Details

—

Rating Summary

Amazon CloudWatch

VMware Cloud Director (formerly vCloud Director)

Amazon CloudWatch

VMware Cloud Director (formerly vCloud Director)

Amazon CloudWatch

VMware Cloud Director (formerly vCloud Director)

Amazon CloudWatch vs VMware Cloud Director (formerly vCloud Director)