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BigPanda vs VMware Aria Operations for Applications comparison

 

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 (10th), AIOps (9th)
VMware Aria Operations for ...
Ranking in IT Infrastructure Monitoring
17th
Average Rating
8.0
Reviews Sentiment
6.3
Number of Reviews
14
Ranking in other categories
Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability (16th), Container Monitoring (5th), Cloud Monitoring Software (12th)
 

Mindshare comparison

As of June 2026, in the IT Infrastructure Monitoring category, the mindshare of BigPanda is 0.6%, down from 0.9% 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 Mindshare Distribution
ProductMindshare (%)
VMware Aria Operations for Applications1.6%
BigPanda0.6%
Other97.8%
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

"The most useful feature has been the AI/ML, and the way BigPanda uses the AI/ML is good compared to other SRE tools."
"BigPanda is great in that it notifies us of problems as well as where they were triggered."
"The best of a bad lot was the error message deduping."
"The program is very stable."
"BigPanda simplifies the process by consolidating multiple monitoring platforms into a single console where I can view all issues."
"One of the most valuable features of BigPanda is its user-friendly interface."
"Alert aggregation was the primary requirement. BigPanda pulls all this together into a single UI for us, allowing us to see related alerts grouped together into an incident, and enables us to easily create a JIRA ticket and Slack channel to manage an issue."
"We have also made extensive use of the outbound integrations to ticketing systems (JIRA) and collaboration tools (Slack). The main driver for us has been getting all alerting into a single UI and enabling us to streamline our incident management process."
"The most valuable aspects of the solution are its ease of use and its ease of implementation."
"This solution allows me to have true visibility for any metrics when it comes to my cloud, and private."
"This solution will give you a single pane of glass for everything, and centralized monitoring."
"The solution is great for virtualization and preparing the infrastructure in Tanzu to test products. It's very fast and has good visibility."
"People are very pleased with the implementation."
"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."
"Using Wavefront, we have been able to reduce the complexity of our pipeline."
"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."
 

Cons

"When handling critical traffic, the BigPanda site can slow down, which we manage with a load balancer."
"BigPanda could improve by syncing its threshold settings with Dynatrace to align with users' familiarity."
"It would be beneficial for BigPanda to offer detailed error descriptions similar to what AppDynamics and ThousandEyes provide."
"BigPanda sometimes creates false incidents and workarounds, causing financial disturbances because we pay for each incident."
"In terms of product stability, I can rate it around nine. It is quite good, though I would not rate it a full ten because every time there is a new feature, I have to go through documents or contact support."
"The UI for this solution could be improved. It is very hard to find what you are looking for."
"We'd like to see additional dashboard features included as part of the solution."
"BigPanda attempts a little of everything and fails at most; the AI, in particular, was worthless, and the visualization is primitive and not configurable."
"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."
"The main problem I have is that the license cost is very high."
"So far, the solution's learning curve has been pretty high."
"The documentation and integration with Kubernetes could be improved."
"They just need more capability. A few areas still need more enhancements in the technology capability space."
"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 implementation is a long process that should be improved."
"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."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"BigPanda is cheaper than the competitors."
"The price of BigPanda is in the middle compared to other solutions."
"They were great to work with on pricing/licensing. Given we are a high-growth company, we needed a flexible site license."
"We pay $200,000 USD per year."
"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 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."
"I would rate the pricing as three out of five."
"Different locations require different setups. In your terms, around 300 to around 400K USD."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Financial Services Firm
24%
Manufacturing Company
9%
Healthcare Company
6%
Outsourcing Company
6%
Financial Services Firm
13%
Manufacturing Company
12%
Government
7%
Construction Company
6%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business6
Large Enterprise12
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: June 2026.
900,747 professionals have used our research since 2012.