Amazon CloudWatch vs VMware Aria Operations for Applications comparison

Amazon CloudWatch vs. VMware Aria Operations for Applications

Download the complete report

Helped 920,769 peers since 2012

Review summaries and opinions

We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use. Here are some excerpts of what they said:

Categories and Ranking

Amazon CloudWatch

Ranking in Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability

24th

Ranking in Cloud Monitoring Software

15th

Average Rating

8.0

Reviews Sentiment

7.2

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

Log Management (19th)

VMware Aria Operations for ...

Ranking in Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability

18th

Ranking in Cloud Monitoring Software

13th

Average Rating

8.0

Reviews Sentiment

6.3

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

IT Infrastructure Monitoring (13th), Container Monitoring (6th)

Mindshare comparison

As of November 2026, in the Cloud Monitoring Software category, the mindshare of Amazon CloudWatch is 1.7%, down from 2.4% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of VMware Aria Operations for Applications is 2.0%, up from 1.9% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.

Cloud Monitoring Software Mindshare Distribution
Product	Mindshare (%)
VMware Aria Operations for Applications	2.0%
Amazon CloudWatch	1.7%
Other	96.3%

Cloud Monitoring Software

Featured Reviews

Amandeep Pawar

Engineer Technology at Iris Software Technologies Private Limited

Monitoring microservices has improved and teams respond faster to production incidents

In my opinion, the best features Amazon CloudWatch offers are Metrics, Analytics, Logs, Alarms, Dashboards, and Log Insights, with standout features being real-time monitoring and centralized logging, proactive alerting, and fast troubleshooting. The dashboards in Amazon CloudWatch help with troubleshooting by allowing us to easily look into API latency and how much resource consumption is occurring. The CloudWatch dashboard provides real-time data and views of our application health while Log Insights lets us quickly search and analyze logs to identify root causes of production issues, making troubleshooting time efficient and monitoring much more streamlined. Amazon CloudWatch has positively impacted my organization by improving our ability to monitor production issues and easily find the root cause in the application. We can quickly fix issues at the point of occurrence, and real-time metrics for microservices provide centralized logging and automated alerts that enable fast incident detection, quicker troubleshooting, and better application reliability, ultimately reducing operational efforts by giving engineers a single platform for monitoring AWS resources and microservices. I have seen many positive outcomes in my organization, estimating that CloudWatch reduced troubleshooting time by around thirty to forty percent because engineers could correlate metrics and logging from a single platform. Early alerts also help us resolve many performance issues before they escalate into major incidents, contributing to improved service availability.

Read full review

Ajay Shukla

Consultant at HCLTech

Automation and insightful diagnostics elevate operations while improvements are welcome

The new version 8.18 has brought significant improvements. The main purpose of using this tool is having a single console to manage all entities. The cloud integration capabilities, including private, public, and hybrid, are already well-implemented. The ability to manage multiple vCenters across different geographical locations is very effective. The new Skyline health feature and certificate and licensing management are particularly useful improvements. The dashboard's overview tab provides comprehensive information about current vCenter status, resizable amounts, reclamation opportunities, anomalies, diagnostics, licensing, and certificates. However, there is room for improvement in application analysis. The current functionality lacks detailed monitoring at the kernel level, focusing mainly on CPU, memory, and storage matrices. Enhanced application monitoring capabilities, including tracking downtime for specific types of applications such as transactional or e-commerce applications, would be beneficial.

Read full review

Quotes from Members

We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use. Here are some excerpts of what they said:

Pros

"We use Amazon CloudWatch for logging."

"The most valuable feature of Amazon CloudWatch is reliability."

"Amazon CloudWatch has positively impacted my organization by improving our ability to monitor production issues and easily find the root cause in the application."

"I can put it in a simple term, its simplicity is always there."

"Setting up this product was easy. I found data analytics as its most valuable feature."

"CloudWatch immediately hooks up and connects to the KPIs and all the metrics."

"The tool enables live monitoring."

"It is very easy to use; as a monitoring tool, whenever your system experiences issues, it will notify you and is directly linked to your service."

More Amazon CloudWatch pros

"VMware Aria Operations for Applications offers significant features such as real-time statistics, the ability to identify possible issues within the VM environment, and helpful heat maps."

"I find VMware Aria Operations for Applications to be very stable, and I would rate it a ten out of ten."

"It significantly improves application performance management by offering recommendations for resource allocation to avoid wastage or overcommitment."

"It has a familiar interface, which makes it easy to get started."

"The solution is great for virtualization and preparing the infrastructure in Tanzu to test products. It's very fast and has good visibility."

"This solution allows me to have true visibility for any metrics when it comes to my cloud, and private."

"I gladly recommend VMware Aria Operations for Applications because it is cost effective and has commendable AI response capabilities."

"People are very pleased with the implementation."

More VMware Aria Operations for Applications pros

Cons

"The pricing model can get very expensive as the project's scope grows."

"I think the machine learning aspect of it probably does help because machine learning is not really machine learning."

"I think something that can be improved are the alerts and alerting mechanism based on no rejects. We want to have it more flexible and that is one of the key things that is required."

"What would make Amazon CloudWatch better is if it includes more on-site checks, particularly status checks on the CPU, network input/output, etc. It would also be helpful if there's built-in swap space, disk, and memory monitoring in Amazon CloudWatch because, at the moment, my team has to configure it manually through a shell script."

"Adding conditional expressions would enhance its functionality."

"When connecting to Google Cloud, there is no visibility or traceability from Google Cloud into CloudWatch."

"Some of our customers want to use Kubernetes to monitor their CICD flow but Amazon CloudWatch does not support it. We need to use another solution, such as Datadog or Dynatrace has the needed capability."

"There's a learning curve with Amazon CloudWatch since we have to learn to write the queries to extract the keys and logs."

More Amazon CloudWatch cons

"The support from VMware is not very helpful. This is because you always receive many questions from the support service but few actual solutions."

"Its billing model is consumption-based. I understand the consumption-based model, but it is not necessarily easy to estimate and guess how many points or how much we are going to consume on a specific application up until we get to that point. So, for us, it would be helpful to have more insights or predictability into what we can expect from a cost perspective if we are starting to use specific features. This can potentially also drive our consumption a bit more."

"The documentation and integration with Kubernetes could be improved."

"The main problem I have is that the license cost is very high."

"However, it is still not a very mature product."

"In the new version, I would love to see more prediction capabilities. It would be great if one could see the alerts get a little more enriched with information and become more human-friendly instead of the technical stuff that they put in there. I think those would be really awesome outcomes to get."

"The solution could be expensive, which might be a limiting factor."

"The initial setup should be easier and more seamless."

More VMware Aria Operations for Applications cons

Pricing and Cost Advice

"Amazon CloudWatch has very cheap pricing, and it hardly costs my company $25-$30 a month for fifty systems, so it's pretty affordable."

"It is a free-of-charge service."

"We have monthly licensing costs. The licenses are probably in the vicinity of about $300 - $350/month."

"The product's cost is relatively inexpensive."

"Its pricing is reasonable. It is sometimes tricky, but it is reasonable as compared to others."

"The price is okay for me."

"Amazon CloudWatch is a cheap solution."

"I consider it as a medium-priced solution."

More Amazon CloudWatch pricing and cost advice

"I don't have the details. In our case, there is a mixture in place. We have production usage, and we are also doing training for VMware. So, we also have a training instance. It is worth the money you would spend on it. That's because if you were to build all of this yourself by using some of the open source tools, then you would need a lot of time."

"I would rate the pricing as three out of five."

"Different locations require different setups. In your terms, around 300 to around 400K USD."

"The licensing costs are very high, particularly when you consider that we have to purchase a level 1 license for every integration, such as the load balancer, HAProxy, and the MSSP. And if you want to use vSAN, that's another license. Then, of course, Tanzu Observability has its own separate license."

See which vendors are best for you

Use our free recommendation engine to learn which Cloud Monitoring Software solutions are best for your needs.

See recommendations

920,769 professionals have used our research since 2012.

Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews

Financial Services Firm

13%

Manufacturing Company

10%

Outsourcing Company

Comms Service Provider

Manufacturing Company

10%

Financial Services Firm

Comms Service Provider

Outsourcing Company

Company Size

By reviewers

Large Enterprise

Midsize Enterprise

Small Business

By reviewers
Company Size	Count
Small Business	17
Midsize Enterprise	8
Large Enterprise	26

By reviewers
Company Size	Count
Small Business	4
Midsize Enterprise	1
Large Enterprise	10

Questions from the Community

What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Amazon CloudWatch?

The experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing for Amazon CloudWatch has been positive. It was very easy to set up because it is built into AWS and does not require separate licensing, bein...

What needs improvement with Amazon CloudWatch?

For improvements, I think Amazon CloudWatch could enhance certain areas, particularly regarding pricing structure. I wish to see simpler pricing, more intuitive dashboards, easier log queries for b...

What is your primary use case for Amazon CloudWatch?

My main use case for Amazon CloudWatch is the monitoring and analytics of the application servers. I basically use Amazon CloudWatch to monitor the microservices and AWS infrastructure, helping me ...

What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for VMware Tanzu Observability by Wavefront?

The solution includes cost drivers that can be configured according to your environment. You can input server-wise, CPU-wise, storage, and memory costs per hour or day. Once cost drivers are provid...

What needs improvement with VMware Tanzu Observability by Wavefront?

What is your primary use case for VMware Tanzu Observability by Wavefront?

I have been involved in several projects where I had to implement automation and monitoring alerting. I performed automation using VMware Aria Operations for Applications. There is an automation ta...

Zabbix vs Amazon CloudWatch

Comparisons

Compared 5% of the time

Datadog vs Amazon CloudWatch

Compared 4% of the time

Amazon OpenSearch Service vs Amazon CloudWatch

Compared 4% of the time

Google Cloud's operations suite (formerly Stackdriver) vs Amazon CloudWatch

Compared 4% of the time

Sematext Cloud vs Amazon CloudWatch

Compared 3% of the time

More Amazon CloudWatch Competitors

Datadog vs VMware Aria Operations for Applications

Compared 5% of the time

OpenText Real User Monitoring vs VMware Aria Operations for Applications

Compared 4% of the time

Splunk AppDynamics vs VMware Aria Operations for Applications

Compared 4% of the time

Splunk Observability Cloud vs VMware Aria Operations for Applications

Compared 4% of the time

LogicMonitor vs VMware Aria Operations for Applications

Compared 3% of the time

More VMware Aria Operations for Applications Competitors

Product Reports

Amazon CloudWatch

Download Amazon CloudWatch product report

VMware Aria Operations for Applications

Download VMware Aria Operations for Applications product report

VMware Aria Operations for Applications report

Also Known As

No data available

Tanzu Observability, Wavefront, Wavefront by VMware, VMware Tanzu Observability

Overview

Amazon CloudWatch integrates seamlessly with AWS, providing real-time monitoring and alerting features. Its interface supports task automation, enhancing troubleshooting and analytics capabilities, while offering strong security and scalability at a cost-effective rate.

Amazon CloudWatch is an impactful platform for monitoring AWS resources and managing application performance. It simplifies infrastructure performance monitoring by providing comprehensive analytics capabilities, including application insights and event scheduling. Users appreciate CloudWatch for its detailed metrics, dashboards, and support in issuing alerts to detect anomalies. It efficiently tracks performance, optimizes resource utilization, and ensures service availability. CloudWatch is recognized for its robust alerting features and integration with other AWS services, further supporting its resource monitoring capabilities. However, there is room for improvement in dashboard customization, log streaming speed, and integration with non-AWS services. Enhancements in API integration, machine learning features, and support for third-party tools are also desired.

What features does Amazon CloudWatch offer?

Seamless Integration: Works effortlessly with AWS for cohesive service management.
Advanced Metrics: Provides detailed monitoring of CPU, memory, and more.
Real-time Monitoring: Offers up-to-the-minute alerts on infrastructure status.
Dashboards: User-friendly and informative for quick insights.
Automation: Supports task automation for efficient troubleshooting.

What benefits does Amazon CloudWatch provide?

Cost-effectiveness: Efficient resource monitoring without high costs.
Scalability: Easily adapts to growing infrastructure needs.
Security: Strong protocols for safe monitoring activities.
Improved Performance: Enhances application insights and operational efficiency.
Operational Insights: Provides comprehensive logging and performance analysis.

Industries implementing Amazon CloudWatch often focus on optimizing IT infrastructure. Companies in sectors like finance and e-commerce rely on its monitoring and alerting capabilities to ensure service uptime and performance. The platform's automation and analytics features empower teams to proactively manage performance and detect potential issues promptly.

Amazon Web Services (AWS)

VMware Tanzu Observability by Wavefront is a powerful tool for monitoring and analyzing the performance and availability of applications and infrastructure in real-time.

With its comprehensive monitoring capabilities, visualizing and analyzing data becomes effortless. The real-time alerting system ensures timely issue resolution, while scalability and a user-friendly interface provide a seamless experience for smooth operations.

Broadcom

Sample Customers

AirAsia, Airbnb, Aircel, APUS, Avazu, Casa & Video, Futbol Club Barcelona (FCBarcelona), National Taiwan University, redBus

1. Atlassian 2. Cisco 3. Databricks 4. DigitalOcean 5. Equinix 6. Fidelity Investments 7. Google 8. Hewlett Packard Enterprise 9. Honeywell 10. IBM 11. Intel 12. JetBlue Airways 13. LinkedIn 14. Lyft 15. Mastercard 16. Microsoft 17. MongoDB 18. Netflix 19. Nvidia 20. Oracle 21. PayPal 22. Pinterest 23. Qualcomm 24. Red Hat 25. Salesforce 26. SAP 27. Spotify 28. Square 29. TMobile 30. Twitter 31. Uber 32. VMware

Amazon CloudWatch vs. VMware Aria Operations for Applications