CA App Synthetic Monitor vs VMware Aria Operations for Applications comparison

CA App Synthetic Monitor and VMware Aria Operations for Applications are both solutions in the Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability category. CA App Synthetic Monitor is ranked #68, while VMware Aria Operations for Applications is ranked #20 with an average rating of 8.8. CA App Synthetic Monitor holds a 0.5% mindshare in APM, compared to VMware Aria Operations for Applications’s 1.3% mindshare. Additionally, 66% of CA App Synthetic Monitor users are willing to recommend the solution, compared to 93% of VMware Aria Operations for Applications users who would recommend it.

CA App Synthetic Monitor

Read 3 CA App Synthetic Monitor reviews

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762 Comparison Views

66% willing to recommend

VMware Aria Operations for ...

Read 14 VMware Aria Operations for Applications reviews

3,869 Views
1,973 Comparison Views

93% willing to recommend

CA App Synthetic Monitor

VMware Aria Operations for ...

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Executive SummaryUpdated on Jul 24, 2024

CA App Synthetic Monitor and VMware Aria Operations for Applications are two prominent monitoring solutions catering to different needs in application performance tracking. Based on user reviews, VMware Aria Operations for Applications appears superior due to its advanced features and perceived value, even though CA App Synthetic Monitor excels in pricing and support.

Features: CA App Synthetic Monitor is praised for its real-time performance tracking and simplicity. VMware Aria Operations for Applications stands out with its comprehensive analytics and integration capabilities. Users appreciate the extensive functionality of VMware Aria Operations for Applications, but CA App Synthetic Monitor is favored for its ease of use and straightforward monitoring.

Room For Improvement: Users of CA App Synthetic Monitor highlight the need for better reporting tools and enhanced alerting mechanisms. VMware Aria Operations for Applications users suggest improvements in configuration complexity and occasional performance issues. The key difference is that CA App Synthetic Monitor requires advancements in features, while VMware Aria Operations for Applications focuses on refining existing capabilities.

Ease of Deployment and Customer Service: CA App Synthetic Monitor users find the deployment process straightforward and appreciate responsive customer service. VMware Aria Operations for Applications deployment is viewed as more complex, often requiring significant initial setup effort, but users report efficient customer support. Despite the complexity, VMware's comprehensive support alleviates most concerns related to deployment challenges.

Pricing and ROI: CA App Synthetic Monitor is commended for its affordability and solid return on investment, particularly for smaller operations. VMware Aria Operations for Applications, although more costly upfront, is valued for its extensive capabilities which justify the higher investment through improved performance insights and operational efficiency. Ultimately, while CA App Synthetic Monitor is budget-friendly, VMware Aria Operations for Applications offers a more robust, feature-rich solution worth the cost for many users.

To learn more, read our detailed CA App Synthetic Monitor vs. VMware Aria Operations for Applications Report (Updated: March 2026).

Buyer's Guide

CA App Synthetic Monitor vs. VMware Aria Operations for Applications

March 2026

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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

CA App Synthetic Monitor

Ranking in Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability

68th

Average Rating

7.0

Reviews Sentiment

5.9

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

No ranking in other categories

VMware Aria Operations for ...

Ranking in Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability

20th

Average Rating

8.0

Reviews Sentiment

6.3

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

IT Infrastructure Monitoring (17th), Container Monitoring (6th), Cloud Monitoring Software (15th)

Mindshare comparison

As of March 2026, in the Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability category, the mindshare of CA App Synthetic Monitor is 0.5%, up from 0.1% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of VMware Aria Operations for Applications is 1.3%, up from 0.8% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.

Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability Mindshare Distribution
Product	Mindshare (%)
VMware Aria Operations for Applications	1.3%
CA App Synthetic Monitor	0.5%
Other	98.2%

Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability

Featured Reviews

reviewer2286675

System Administrator at a tech services company with 11-50 employees

A reliable solution for SSL offloading and to encrypt outside traffic

If you are responsible for monitoring the logs in F5, it isn't very easy. The format is complicated compared to different vendors. For example, Fortinet and Cisco have feasible formats for sending and fetching logs. Suppose I'm monitoring the logs and everything, and when I am retrieving logs from F5, I want to know whether it is regular traffic or any abnormality is happening. The logs itself is not user-friendly. It may not give you a clear way of what's happening. You have to go through different websites and work on it. You have to waste so much time on it.

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Ajay Shukla

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.

Read full review

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"Each had strengths in one area or another, but CA covered the majority of our needs end-to-end."

"From our experience, it really helps managers in measuring application SLAs and viewing historical performance data."

"The solution provides single-console management for multiple VMware environments and cloud integrations, whether hybrid, private, or public cloud."

"The features I find most valuable is the querying and alerting capabilities."

"Wavefront's monitoring tools and visibility into public cloud platforms are competing with the best out there."

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

"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."

"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."

"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."

"No issues with stability."

More VMware Aria Operations for Applications pros

Cons

"Pricing makes little sense. We had examples where it would be cheaper to have two basic accounts than one intermediate."

"The RBMS component is limited as you can only record using Internet Explorer."

"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."

"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."

"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."

"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."

"The initial setup should be easier and more seamless."

"They could make it more easy to plug-in data so that a nontechnical person will be able to use it, like accountants or finance people."

"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."

More VMware Aria Operations for Applications cons

Pricing and Cost Advice

Information not available

"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."

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

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

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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews

No data available

Financial Services Firm

12%

Manufacturing Company

11%

Government

Computer Software Company

Company Size

By reviewers

Large Enterprise

Midsize Enterprise

Small Business

No data available

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

Questions from the Community

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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...

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What needs improvement with VMware Tanzu Observability by Wavefront?

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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...

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Product Reports

Buyer's Guide

Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability

March 2026

Download CA App Synthetic Monitor product report

Buyer's Guide

VMware Aria Operations for Applications

March 2026

VMware Aria Operations for Applications report

Download VMware Aria Operations for Applications product report

Also Known As

CA ASM

Tanzu Observability, Wavefront, Wavefront by VMware, VMware Tanzu Observability

Overview

IT organizations require full visibility into business-critical applications regardless of where they're hosted in order to maintain service levels and proactively deal with issues before the end-user is impacted. CA App Synthetic Monitor uses synthetic transactions to provide performance insight for these applications no matter where they're hosted: outside the firewall, in the cloud or delivered via a managed service provider (MSP). Delivered as software as a service, CA App Synthetic Monitor provides end-to-end transaction response time visibility into cloud, mobile and traditional web applications using synthetic transactions delivered by a network of 95 monitoring stations across six continents, 48 countries, 93 cities and 15 time zones.

Broadcom

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

Lexmark

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

CA App Synthetic Monitor vs. VMware Aria Operations for Applications

March 2026

Free Report: CA App Synthetic Monitor vs. VMware Aria Operations for Applications

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