It is common in modern manufacturing to simultaneously monitor more than one process quality characteristic. In such a multivariate scenario, the monitoring of the covariance matrix, along with the mean vector, plays an important role in assessing whether a process stays in control or not. However, monitoring the covariance matrix is technically more difficult, especially when there is only one observation available in each subgroup, disabling the usual sample covariance matrix as an effective estimator. To monitor the covariance matrix with individual observations in Phase II stage, several exponentially weighted moving average (EWMA) control charts have been constructed based on the distance between the estimated process covariance matrix and its target value.In this paper, two new control charts are devised using the sum of the square roots of the absolute deviations and its combination with the sum of squared deviations. These distance-based control charts are compared via the simulation experiments on different simulated out-of-control covariance matrices with respect to the number of quality characteristics being monitored, the shift pattern, and the shift magnitude. The simulation results identify the control charts that perform relatively robust and show that these various control charts may have their respective merits on different out-of-control scenarios.