Cisco UCS Manager vs VMware Aria Operations for Applications comparison

Cisco and Broadcom are both solutions in the IT Infrastructure Monitoring category. Cisco is ranked #17 with an average rating of 8.8, while Broadcom is ranked #14 with an average rating of 8.8. Cisco holds a 1.3% mindshare in IM, compared to Broadcom’s 1.6% mindshare. Additionally, 96% of Cisco users are willing to recommend the solution, compared to 93% of Broadcom users who would recommend it.

Cisco UCS Manager

Read 27 Cisco UCS Manager reviews

1,801 Views
1,585 Comparison Views

96% willing to recommend

VMware Aria Operations for ...

Read 14 VMware Aria Operations for Applications reviews

2,878 Views
1,468 Comparison Views

93% willing to recommend

Cisco UCS Manager

VMware Aria Operations for ...

Comparison Buyer's Guide

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Executive SummaryUpdated on Oct 9, 2024

Cisco UCS Manager and VMware Aria Operations for Applications compete in IT infrastructure management. Cisco has an advantage in networking and compute integration, whereas VMware stands out for its monitoring capabilities.

Features: Cisco UCS Manager includes comprehensive network, storage, and compute unification, ease of server deployment and management, and robust support for enterprise environments. VMware Aria Operations for Applications provides strong application monitoring, extensive metrics for cloud environments, and container platform support.

Room for Improvement: Cisco UCS Manager needs improvements in firmware upgrade processes, user interface complexity reduction, and streamlined update procedures. VMware Aria Operations for Applications could offer enhanced integration with Kubernetes, improve predictive abilities, and simplify licensing complexities.

Ease of Deployment and Customer Service: Cisco UCS Manager typically involves on-premises deployment with highly rated technical support. VMware Aria Operations for Applications supports both on-premises and hybrid cloud deployments and is praised for its proactive support model.

Pricing and ROI: Cisco UCS Manager is regarded as expensive but offers good ROI with fewer hardware failures. VMware Aria Operations for Applications involves high licensing costs yet is valued for its comprehensive capabilities, offering efficient management that can save development time. Both products ensure good ROI when suited to the organizational needs, though Cisco may have higher initial costs.

To learn more, read our detailed Cisco UCS Manager vs. VMware Aria Operations for Applications Report (Updated: September 2025).

Buyer's Guide

Cisco UCS Manager vs. VMware Aria Operations for Applications

September 2025

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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

Cisco UCS Manager

Ranking in IT Infrastructure Monitoring

17th

Average Rating

8.2

Reviews Sentiment

7.0

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

No ranking in other categories

VMware Aria Operations for ...

Ranking in IT Infrastructure Monitoring

14th

Average Rating

8.0

Reviews Sentiment

6.3

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability (17th), Container Monitoring (5th), Cloud Monitoring Software (13th)

Mindshare comparison

As of November 2025, in the IT Infrastructure Monitoring category, the mindshare of Cisco UCS Manager is 1.3%, down from 1.6% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of VMware Aria Operations for Applications is 1.6%, up from 1.3% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.

IT Infrastructure Monitoring Market Share Distribution
Product	Market Share (%)
VMware Aria Operations for Applications	1.6%
Cisco UCS Manager	1.3%
Other	97.1%

IT Infrastructure Monitoring

Featured Reviews

Mohsin-Raza

Manager Data Center & Services at a financial services firm with 1,001-5,000 employees

Has high availability with reliable clustering while being able to easily add scale up /out compute resources

As I am working in a financial institute, we primarily use Cisco UCS Manager for non-core applications, which can be described as tier two applications A main feature of Cisco UCS Manager is its reliability, as all of the computing blades are in cluster mode. We experience high availability and…

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ToniLindberg

senior consultant at Virtual Consultants Sverige AB

Troubleshooting capabilities have improved application monitoring and support engagement

I can see what happens end to end, which is pretty beneficial. The solution has troubleshooting capabilities, providing a direct connection to knowledge base articles from VMware Broadcom. When I encounter an error, I can search directly within the system to see what solutions have been employed by others. It has a familiar interface, which makes it easy to get started.

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Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"Cisco UCS Manager is overall a good package because it gives a GUI interface and a CLI."

"I can deploy something in my 50-odd servers all in one go, in parallel, whereas if I was to do that individually, it could be a nightmare."

"Creating UCS service profiles for quickly deploying servers and replicating that configuration to another server makes it easier for deployment."

"Cisco Infrastructure is one of the top vendors and no one can beat them in terms of switching and routing."

"The most valuable features are flexibility and management."

"What I like most about Cisco UCS Manager is the ease of administration. It also allows the central management of maintenance, installation, and configuration activities."

"It's robust."

"Cisco UCS Manager is recommended for its ease of deployment and management capabilities."

More Cisco UCS Manager pros

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

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

"The stability of Aria Operations for Applications has improved significantly over the years."

"VMware comes with a support team, and if you have trouble, you can easily create a ticket, and VMware will help you. Therefore, the best aspect is the support."

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

"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."

"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."

"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."

More VMware Aria Operations for Applications pros

Cons

"Cisco UCS is expensive compared to others. The Cisco UCS Chassis is more expensive than a standalone server, but some companies require standalone servers because of their production load and affordability. You need to pay more if you require more features on the Blade or if you need more ports on the switch."

"I would like to see Cisco UCS optionally work as a hyper-converged system because right now, it only operates as a converged system."

"Cisco UCS Manager is not a scalable solution because once you have 160 blades, it cannot be expanded more."

"There is room for improvement in the software part of Cisco UCS Manager. It should be more user-friendly, especially when creating policies."

"I found it a bit of a challenge to get training on UCSM. I've been trying to get that for some time now. I feel like I have to figure it out a lot of things myself. For years I've to log calls with support whenever I've got challenges that I cannot resolve. If I had some training or more manuals, I'd be better able to handle more things on my own."

"The automation within the solution needs to be simplified."

"What's lacking in Cisco UCS Manager is the performance dashboard. If a blade has any performance issues, you should be able to create a dashboard on Cisco UCS Manager. Currently, this feature isn't present."

"The installation and upgrade sytems need to be improved."

More Cisco UCS Manager cons

"VMware technical support has declined since the Broadcom acquisition. Previously, they were more focused on issue resolution, but now they prioritize licensing verification before providing support."

"I find that there could be improvements in the support service response time, as the urgency varies unless specified as Priority 2 or 1 cases."

"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."

"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 initial setup should be easier and more seamless."

More VMware Aria Operations for Applications cons

Pricing and Cost Advice

"Cisco UCS Manager’s annual licensing fee is expensive."

"With product discounts which can be negotiated, the product is a great value."

"The pricing for Cisco UCS Manager is okay for its market, so it's a four out of five for me."

"Cisco UCS is more expensive than Dell and HP, but it is more reliable. I see less issues and it's quite stable."

"You buy the hardware and then you get Cisco UCS Manager for free."

"We need to take a license for each port, which amounts to a big sum."

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

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

"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."

"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."

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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews

Computer Software Company

16%

Financial Services Firm

15%

Manufacturing Company

Government

Financial Services Firm

13%

Manufacturing Company

11%

Computer Software Company

Government

Company Size

By reviewers

Large Enterprise

Midsize Enterprise

Small Business

By reviewers
Company Size	Count
Small Business	8
Midsize Enterprise	3
Large Enterprise	18

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

Questions from the Community

What do you like most about Cisco UCS Manager?

When one server fails, we can attach the service profile to a new server, which saves a lot of time.

See all answers

What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Cisco UCS Manager?

My experience with the pricing of Cisco UCS Manager ( /products/cisco-ucs-manager-reviews ) is that it is reasonable. Recently, we acquired an excellent bundle with significant discounts, with offe...

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What needs improvement with Cisco UCS Manager?

For improvements, while the current graphical user interface is satisfactory, it could be further simplified for different tasks. While it has been improved from using Java to HTML, simplifying 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?

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 priva...

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

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Product Reports

Buyer's Guide

Cisco UCS Manager

November 2025

Download Cisco UCS Manager product report

Buyer's Guide

VMware Aria Operations for Applications

October 2025

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

Cisco UCS Manager helps significantly reduce management and administration expenses by automating routine tasks to increase operational agility. Customers can extend the benefits of Cisco UCS Manager globally across an enterprise to thousands of servers in multiple domains with Cisco UCS Central Software.

Cisco

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

Management Science Associates, Peak 10, Virtual Consulting Professionals

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

Cisco UCS Manager vs. VMware Aria Operations for Applications

September 2025

Free Report: Cisco UCS Manager vs. VMware Aria Operations for Applications

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