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BigPanda vs VMware Aria Operations for Applications comparison

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Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive SummaryUpdated on Oct 9, 2024

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

BigPanda
Ranking in IT Infrastructure Monitoring
22nd
Average Rating
7.6
Reviews Sentiment
6.9
Number of Reviews
20
Ranking in other categories
IT Alerting and Incident Management (9th), AIOps (11th)
VMware Aria Operations for ...
Ranking in IT Infrastructure Monitoring
13th
Average Rating
8.0
Reviews Sentiment
6.3
Number of Reviews
14
Ranking in other categories
Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability (18th), Container Monitoring (6th), Cloud Monitoring Software (13th)
 

Mindshare comparison

As of November 2026, in the IT Infrastructure Monitoring category, the mindshare of BigPanda is 0.6%, down from 0.7% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of VMware Aria Operations for Applications is 1.4%, down from 1.6% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
IT Infrastructure Monitoring Mindshare Distribution
ProductMindshare (%)
VMware Aria Operations for Applications1.4%
BigPanda0.6%
Other98.0%
IT Infrastructure Monitoring
 

Featured Reviews

Michael Wenn - PeerSpot reviewer
CEO / Co-Founder at Aiops ltd
Automated incident workflows have reduced alert noise and now improve response efficiency
In my opinion, the best feature of BigPanda is its speed in terms of deployment. It has very strong integration with all of the major platforms and workflows that organizations need. The biggest customers are enterprises like HSBC and Barclays. Implementing something effective for them that dramatically reduces meantime to repair and the number of incidents is substantially difficult, as projects can often extend three years with very small results. BigPanda is different; it is a tool relied on by many enterprises, fitting over existing toolsets rather than trying to replace them, which makes it non-competitive to many existing alerts and monitoring tools. It enhances existing systems to provide actionable intelligence for business solutions.
AS
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.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"If you're looking for a SaaS which truly believes in software as a service, BigPanda is definitely the solution to go for."
"I rate BigPanda nine out of ten."
"I would definitely recommend BigPanda for its time-saving features, root cause analysis, topology overview, and visual event representation capabilities."
"BigPanda is different; it is a tool relied on by many enterprises, fitting over existing toolsets rather than trying to replace them, which makes it non-competitive to many existing alerts and monitoring tools."
"BigPanda improves service reliability with instant resolution, increased uptime, and reduced mean time to resolution, thus enhancing service quality."
"The best of a bad lot was the error message deduping."
"The features of BigPanda that have most improved my incident response times include AIOps, correlation pieces, and grouping, which is a big win for us."
"BigPanda is great in that it notifies us of problems as well as where they were triggered."
"Wavefront's monitoring tools and visibility into public cloud platforms are competing with the best out there."
"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."
"This solution will give you a single pane of glass for everything, and centralized monitoring."
"This solution allows me to have true visibility for any metrics when it comes to my cloud, and private."
"Using Wavefront, we have been able to reduce the complexity of our pipeline."
"We haven't had any issues with stability."
"The stability of Aria Operations for Applications has improved significantly over the years."
 

Cons

"BigPanda sometimes creates false incidents and workarounds, causing financial disturbances because we pay for each incident."
"BigPanda attempts a little of everything and fails at most; the AI, in particular, was worthless, and the visualization is primitive and not configurable."
"The usability needs to improve, because it is a pure code environment."
"Analytics is an area for improvement, being able to break down the actions that are being taken by users of BigPanda, as well as the auto-magical work that is being done by BigPanda."
"The planned maintenance feature in BigPanda needs enhancements due to its limited scheduling options."
"BigPanda attempts a little of everything and fails at most."
"When handling critical traffic, the BigPanda site can slow down, which we manage with a load balancer."
"The observability can be enriched with regards to infrastructure and the application-integrated environment. The dashboard and reports could be improved."
"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 solution could be expensive, which might be a limiting factor."
"An area for improvement would be more in-depth reporting, such as analyzing disk IO during business hours compared to after hours."
"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."
"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."
"However, it is still not a very mature product."
"The initial setup should be easier and more seamless."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"BigPanda is cheaper than the competitors."
"We pay $200,000 USD per year."
"They were great to work with on pricing/licensing. Given we are a high-growth company, we needed a flexible site license."
"The price of BigPanda is in the middle compared to other solutions."
"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
22%
Outsourcing Company
9%
Manufacturing Company
9%
Healthcare Company
6%
Manufacturing Company
10%
Financial Services Firm
9%
Comms Service Provider
8%
Outsourcing Company
8%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business6
Large Enterprise13
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business4
Midsize Enterprise1
Large Enterprise10
 

Questions from the Community

Any advice about APM solutions?
There are many factors and we know little about your requirements (size of org, technology stack, management systems, the scope of implementation). Our goal was to consolidate APM and infra monitor...
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for BigPanda?
Regarding extra expenses, I pay more for communication and do not incur costs for another dashboard perspective, but there are indirect costs related to managing open-source products, leading to re...
What needs improvement with BigPanda?
Something that comes to mind regarding improvements is communication, as I rely heavily on another tool. If BigPanda could provide communication capabilities beyond just sending notifications—such ...
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?
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...
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...
 

Also Known As

No data available
Tanzu Observability, Wavefront, Wavefront by VMware, VMware Tanzu Observability
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

Nagios, ServiceNow, ITSM, NOC, CMDB Evolved, RemedyIncident Management Process
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
Find out what your peers are saying about BigPanda vs. VMware Aria Operations for Applications and other solutions. Updated: November 2026.
920,929 professionals have used our research since 2012.