Chronosphere vs VMware Aria Operations for Applications comparison

Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability

Download the complete report

Helped 902,988 peers since 2012

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

Chronosphere

Ranking in Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability

33rd

Average Rating

8.6

Reviews Sentiment

6.6

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

Log Management (33rd), AIOps (20th)

VMware Aria Operations for ...

Ranking in Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability

16th

Average Rating

8.0

Reviews Sentiment

6.3

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

IT Infrastructure Monitoring (16th), Container Monitoring (6th), Cloud Monitoring Software (12th)

Mindshare comparison

As of July 2026, in the Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability category, the mindshare of Chronosphere is 0.7%, up from 0.3% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of VMware Aria Operations for Applications is 1.4%, up from 0.9% 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	1.4%
Chronosphere	0.7%
Other	97.9%

Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability

Featured Reviews

Karthik Doreswamy

Dev Ops Engineer at a tech services company with 11-50 employees

Centralized monitoring has unified alerts and dashboards for critical cloud applications

We can improve a bit of UI aspects. The UI could be made more user friendly. Sometimes when identifying the specific logs patterns and identifying what metrics and what logs are coming in, going to a specific log explorer and finding it there is a little difficult. It would be very useful if we could group according to projects and have that UI a little more user friendly. The user interface part was a bit confusing in the beginning. To make it better, I believe we would need some more open sourced or freely available courses on Chronosphere which would help us understand the platform a bit more. The team provides detailed walkthroughs whenever you get into that. However, it would be better if we could have proper video sessions or documentation which would help us understand the tool a bit more.

Read full review

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

"Integrating Chronosphere was pretty much easy coming from an open source tool and it helped us to streamline our monitoring and alerting setup across our organization, which directly impacted on the streamlining of the process as well as reducing errors and also keeping our environment uptime to a greater extent by those alerts and quick responses."

"The alerting features are good"

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

"People are very pleased with the implementation."

"The most valuable aspects of the solution are its ease of use and its ease of implementation."

"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."

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

"I gladly recommend VMware Aria Operations for Applications because it is cost effective and has commendable AI response capabilities."

"Wavefront gives us the complexity we need, instead of spending time coming up with a nice dashboard from some other means, or just creating and coding our own app."

More VMware Aria Operations for Applications pros

Cons

"It's not easy for everyone."

"Sometimes when identifying the specific logs patterns and identifying what metrics and what logs are coming in, going to a specific log explorer and finding it there is a little difficult."

"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."

"The support from VMware is not very helpful. This is because you always receive many questions from the support service but few actual solutions."

"However, it is still not a very mature product."

"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."

"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."

"So far, the solution's learning curve has been pretty high."

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

"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."

More VMware Aria Operations for Applications cons

Pricing and Cost Advice

Information not available

"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."

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

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

See which vendors are best for you

Use our free recommendation engine to learn which Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability solutions are best for your needs.

See recommendations

902,988 professionals have used our research since 2012.

Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews

Construction Company

13%

Transportation Company

13%

Financial Services Firm

10%

Manufacturing Company

Financial Services Firm

13%

Manufacturing Company

12%

Construction Company

Government

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

What needs improvement with Chronosphere?

It isn't very easy. It's not easy for everyone. It would be much easier if there could be a simpler version, like a data number version or an SQL version. It's hard to debug if you don't know the s...

What is your primary use case for Chronosphere?

I work as a data engineer, and we have many streaming pipelines. We use Chronosphere to monitor various metrics, such as how much data our pipeline is processing in each batch, the volume of incomi...

What advice do you have for others considering Chronosphere?

If you want to monitor pipelines and use something like Kafka or any streaming platform, Chronosphere is the best option for monitoring pipelines with real-time alerts. It is loosely coupled with y...

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?

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...

Dynatrace vs Chronosphere

Comparisons

Datadog vs Chronosphere

Compared 13% of the time

Compared 9% of the time

Honeycomb Enterprise vs Chronosphere

Compared 8% of the time

Splunk Observability Cloud vs Chronosphere

Compared 7% of the time

Cribl vs Chronosphere

Compared 7% of the time

More Chronosphere Competitors

Datadog vs VMware Aria Operations for Applications

Compared 6% of the time

LogicMonitor vs VMware Aria Operations for Applications

Compared 4% of the time

Splunk Observability Cloud vs VMware Aria Operations for Applications

Compared 4% of the time

Nagios XI vs VMware Aria Operations for Applications

Compared 3% of the time

Dynatrace vs VMware Aria Operations for Applications

Compared 3% of the time

More VMware Aria Operations for Applications Competitors

Product Reports

Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability

Download Chronosphere product report

VMware Aria Operations for Applications

Download VMware Aria Operations for Applications product report

VMware Aria Operations for Applications report

Also Known As

No data available

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

Overview

Chronosphere provides a robust platform for managing and monitoring cloud-native applications with features like real-time observability, incident management, and capacity planning. It offers scalable, detailed observability across complex systems, an intuitive interface, and cost-efficient resource management. Users report enhanced productivity, improved collaboration, and better decision-making, bolstering operational capabilities and organizational growth.

Chronosphere

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

Information Not Available

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

Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability