Virtual Deliverability Manager is AWS’s answer to the question “how is my mail actually doing?” It lives inside the SES console and has to be switched on for your account.
What it offers
- Dashboards for deliverability data at the account, mailbox provider (ISP), sending identity and configuration set level.
- An Advisor that flags infrastructure issues and recommends solutions.
- Global deliverability, which AWS describes as campaign analytics, inbox placement rates, inbox placement testing and blocklist monitoring, covering providers beyond Amazon SES.
What it leaves out
VDM is built for looking, not for being told. If your bounce rate doubles overnight, you see it when you next open the console, and AWS does not describe alerting in the VDM documentation. It adds no searchable suppression list beyond the standard SES view either.
VDM and the rest of your tooling
For alerts on SES metrics, the AWS-native route is to build CloudWatch alarms and an SNS topic of your own. That works, and it is more work than most teams expect. The other route is a monitoring tool that does the alerting for you.
The two are not exclusive. A common setup is VDM for its advice and provider-level views, and a separate tool for alerting and day-to-day visibility.
Comparing
The SendScope vs. VDM comparison goes through the features side by side, including where VDM is the better pick. For the wider picture of what to watch, see email deliverability monitoring.
Common questions
Does VDM send me alerts?
VDM is a dashboard and advisory tool. You can build alarms from SES metrics with CloudWatch, but VDM itself does not notify you when a rate drifts.
How is VDM priced?
Per email sent, on top of the normal SES price. See the comparison page for the current figure and how it behaves at volume.