Amazon CloudWatch vs VMware Aria Operations for Applications comparison

Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Broadcom are both solutions in the Cloud Monitoring Software category. Amazon Web Services (AWS) is ranked #15 with an average rating of 7.7, while Broadcom is ranked #13 with an average rating of 8.8. Amazon Web Services (AWS) holds a 1.6% mindshare in CMS, compared to Broadcom’s 2.1% mindshare. Additionally, 90% of Amazon Web Services (AWS) users are willing to recommend the solution, compared to 93% of Broadcom users who would recommend it.

Amazon CloudWatch

Read 49 Amazon CloudWatch reviews

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2,950 Comparison Views

90% willing to recommend

VMware Aria Operations for ...

Read 14 VMware Aria Operations for Applications reviews

7,303 Views
3,140 Comparison Views

93% willing to recommend

Amazon CloudWatch

VMware Aria Operations for ...

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Executive SummaryUpdated on Dec 18, 2024

VMware Aria Operations for Applications and Amazon CloudWatch both compete in the application performance management and cloud monitoring space. VMware Aria Operations for Applications shines with its detailed analytics and user-friendly experience, while Amazon CloudWatch's comprehensive integration with AWS services gives it an upper hand in cloud-native environments.

Features: VMware Aria Operations for Applications focuses on customization with precise application insights, dashboards, and alert systems for hybrid infrastructures. Its analytics and support for on-premise environments are key strengths. Amazon CloudWatch excels in real-time monitoring and seamless integration with AWS, offering automatic dashboards and robust log management, particularly suited for AWS cloud users.

Room for Improvement: VMware Aria Operations for Applications could enhance its scalability for larger cloud environments and further streamline its integration with third-party platforms. It may also expand its real-time monitoring capabilities to match its analytics depth. Amazon CloudWatch might benefit from improving its user interface for non-AWS users and expanding analytics features. Additional support for non-AWS integration could enhance flexibility for diverse cloud setups.

Ease of Deployment and Customer Service: VMware Aria Operations for Applications is known for straightforward deployment in hybrid and on-premise setups with strong customer support, ensuring minimal downtime. Amazon CloudWatch offers effortless deployment within AWS, backed by the extensive AWS support network. The deployment experience varies significantly with the infrastructure context and integration with AWS services.

Pricing and ROI: VMware Aria Operations for Applications involves higher initial costs but offers significant ROI through advanced performance insights. Its investment in detailed analytics pays off for users prioritizing performance monitoring over cloud-native integration. In contrast, Amazon CloudWatch provides cost-efficient pricing scaled by usage, ideal for AWS users targeting budget-friendly solutions. Its scalable model aligns well with businesses using AWS infrastructure, balancing cost with cloud monitoring capabilities.

To learn more, read our detailed Amazon CloudWatch vs. VMware Aria Operations for Applications Report (Updated: August 2026).

Buyer's Guide

Amazon CloudWatch vs. VMware Aria Operations for Applications

August 2026

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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

25th

Ranking in Cloud Monitoring Software

15th

Average Rating

8.0

Reviews Sentiment

7.2

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

Log Management (21st)

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 (14th), Container Monitoring (6th)

Mindshare comparison

As of August 2026, in the Cloud Monitoring Software category, the mindshare of Amazon CloudWatch is 1.6%, down from 2.3% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of VMware Aria Operations for Applications is 2.1%, up from 1.5% 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	2.1%
Amazon CloudWatch	1.6%
Other	96.3%

Cloud Monitoring Software

Featured Reviews

Azam S M

Infrastructure Lead at Danat Fz LLC

Has provided reliable monitoring and alerting through extensive metric tracking and dashboard configuration

Amazon CloudWatch itself provides a lot of data. However, for visualization, we need to use third-party tools. We are in a process of integrating Grafana, Loki, and Prometheus to have better visualization on Amazon CloudWatch. We are also integrating Grafana with the application itself to get the application data and logs. Alternatively, there is AWS Kinesis and Glue where you can scrape the logs and have visualization, but a more easy option is Grafana. If you want to get a proper visual representation to see what is happening, then you need to integrate a third-party tool. Amazon CloudWatch has all the data, but to see what is happening, you need some third-party tool.

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

"What I would advise anyone looking into using Amazon CloudWatch is to go for it especially when you're on the AWS environment."

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

"It's stable, the performance is good, it's reliable, there are no bugs or glitches, and it doesn't crash or freeze."

"The portability that we have in Amazon is great."

"Every time we get an alarm or have an incident, CloudWatch is always there. We use it not only for resources we've spun up in the cloud, but also for some of our on-premises resources."

"The scalability of Amazon CloudWatch rates as high scalability, scoring a perfect ten."

"Monitoring time and ensuring ease in it is the most valuable feature."

"It offers direct integrations with various storage providers, making it convenient to push logs from CloudWatch to these external platforms."

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."

"For us, the ease of deployment in combination with TMZ was the most important part because we don't have to manually deploy a complex monitoring solution. We can more or less do that with the click of a button, and we are not dependent on the developers to provide us with all the necessary features and functions to make that work. We can just deploy it on a workload cluster and monitor at least a good part of the workload. If we want to go into detail, we clearly need to make changes, but for a good part of application monitoring, it gives us good insights."

"People are very pleased with the implementation."

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

"The solution provides single-console management for multiple VMware environments and cloud integrations, whether hybrid, private, or public cloud."

"Tanzu itself, integrated with multiple solutions, bestows support and security upon a container platform, especially when it comes to managing open-source container platforms such as Kubernetes."

"Wavefront gives us the complexity we need, instead of spending time coming up with a nice dashboard from some other means, or just creating and coding our own app."

"The features I find most valuable is the querying and alerting capabilities."

More VMware Aria Operations for Applications pros

Cons

"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."

"The solution should provide human-readable metrics."

"The solution could benefit from a price decrease."

"It would be beneficial for CloudWatch to provide an API interface and some kind of custom configuration."

"The monitoring part and GUI are areas in Amazon CloudWatch that have shortcomings currently and can be considered for improvements in the future."

"There could be further enhancements through CloudWatch's partnerships."

"Adding conditional expressions would enhance its functionality."

"Even though the product works well with most AWS, it is a nightmare to use with Snowflake."

More Amazon CloudWatch cons

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

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

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

"The return on investment is best suited for organizations that do not have the resources for a dedicated VM environment team. However, the cost of the product doesn't show significant benefits."

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

"An area for improvement would be more in-depth reporting, such as analyzing disk IO during business hours compared to after hours."

"It could use a URL document server. Everything in the market is moving towards automation and everybody's looking for the single click operations as well relational data locality."

More VMware Aria Operations for Applications cons

Pricing and Cost Advice

"The pricing model is pay-as-you-go so you have to be mindful of usage to manage costs."

"The price is okay for me."

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

"The tool is not expensive."

"It’s an open-source solution."

"The solution is expensive."

"The price of Amazon CloudWatch is reasonable for detailed basic monitoring."

"The product's cost is relatively inexpensive."

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."

"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."

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

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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews

Financial Services Firm

14%

Manufacturing Company

Transportation Company

Outsourcing Company

Financial Services Firm

12%

Manufacturing Company

11%

Construction Company

Comms Service Provider

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?

No specific setup costs were mentioned.

See all answers

What needs improvement with Amazon CloudWatch?

See all answers

What is your primary use case for Amazon CloudWatch?

Amazon CloudWatch is a very small service that AWS provides. It is a monitoring service for applications within the AWS cloud, and we can integrate external applications using the APIs or SDK. The ...

See all answers

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...

See all answers

What needs improvement with VMware Tanzu Observability by Wavefront?

See all answers

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...

See all answers

Comparisons

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Compared 5% of the time

Amazon OpenSearch Service vs Amazon CloudWatch

Compared 4% of the time

Datadog vs Amazon CloudWatch

Compared 4% of the time

Grafana vs Amazon CloudWatch

Compared 3% of the time

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

Compared 3% of the time

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Compared 6% 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 4% of the time

Splunk AppDynamics vs VMware Aria Operations for Applications

Compared 3% of the time

Nagios XI vs VMware Aria Operations for Applications

Compared 3% of the time

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Product Reports

Buyer's Guide

Amazon CloudWatch

August 2026

Download Amazon CloudWatch product report

Buyer's Guide

VMware Aria Operations for Applications

July 2026

VMware Aria Operations for Applications report

Download VMware Aria Operations for Applications product 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

Buyer's Guide

Amazon CloudWatch vs. VMware Aria Operations for Applications

August 2026

Free Report: Amazon CloudWatch vs. VMware Aria Operations for Applications

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