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Cisco Intersight 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

Cisco Intersight
Ranking in IT Infrastructure Monitoring
10th
Average Rating
8.2
Reviews Sentiment
6.9
Number of Reviews
22
Ranking in other categories
Cloud Management (5th)
VMware Aria Operations for ...
Ranking in IT Infrastructure Monitoring
14th
Average Rating
8.0
Reviews Sentiment
6.3
Number of Reviews
14
Ranking in other categories
Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability (17th), Container Monitoring (6th), Cloud Monitoring Software (13th)
 

Mindshare comparison

As of October 2026, in the IT Infrastructure Monitoring category, the mindshare of Cisco Intersight is 1.6%, down from 1.7% 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 (%)
Cisco Intersight1.6%
VMware Aria Operations for Applications1.4%
Other97.0%
IT Infrastructure Monitoring
 

Featured Reviews

AS
Technical Marketing Engineer Hybrid Cloud Infrastructures at NetApp
Centralized policies have simplified hybrid operations and now support automated workflows
The challenge could be if there are any bugs. Most of the time, you may feel that the TCAM resources are getting full on the Nexus just because of some bug or the configuration is not supported. Or sometimes, if there are any vulnerabilities happening on the current running firmware, those are challenges we have. And if you talk about from the compute side, there were initial bugs such as a CPU throttle issue. Because of that, the chassis was not running in an optimum way. You may see performance issues during that time. For that, Cisco released a patch, and it got fixed. I think Cisco Intersight should allow more automation capabilities. It should be more open, and it should provide more automation capabilities. I think there is also a scope of making it a little bit simpler because a lot of policy and config sometimes becomes confusing for the user because it has a lot of config. Maybe they can do a little bit of simplification with Cisco Intersight.
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

"Intersight can validate our environment."
"Overall, I rate Cisco Intersight a ten out of ten."
"The tool helps to manage Cisco servers."
"The features enable you to abstract the server personality away from the hardware, similar to the B-Series."
"The product has good integration."
"I rate it a ten out of ten. I don't have any issues with it."
"Intersight is the best solution with the data center, and I like it because of the integration with HashiCorp, Kubernetes, and each cloud, as well as the orchestration of the data center system and integration with Pure Storage, Veeam, HashiCorp, and Umbrella."
"What I like best about Cisco Intersight is the way it's developing and converging into everything that the cloud has to offer, e.g. it's converging into one platform which is good."
"The most valuable aspects of the solution are its ease of use and its ease of implementation."
"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."
"It significantly improves application performance management by offering recommendations for resource allocation to avoid wastage or overcommitment."
"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."
"I find VMware Aria Operations for Applications to be very stable, and I would rate it a ten out of ten."
"We haven't had any issues with stability."
"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."
"Wavefront's monitoring tools and visibility into public cloud platforms are competing with the best out there."
 

Cons

"In the future, the solution needs to plan on an extension to cover a broader range of objects since, at present, there are some Cisco devices within the range of Intersight UCS that it can't manage."
"I believe Cisco Intersight's licensing is quite expensive for a public healthcare environment, and I would like to see lower prices for us."
"More products should be made compatible with iWORK, including more software and hardware."
"Regarding improvements for Cisco Intersight, I would say more third-party integration is needed."
"Regarding pricing for Cisco Intersight, all the prices from different vendors have drastically increased during these four years, so I would say it's expensive."
"The product could be easy to use, similar to CloudIQ."
"The UI and interface are too complex, and I believe visual focus or visual policies must be more easily managed."
"It's a very complex solution."
"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 main problem I have is that the license cost is very high."
"However, it is still not a very mature product."
"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."
"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. That way they don't have to ask us."
"They just need more capability. A few areas still need more enhancements in the technology capability space."
"I would like to see integration with Kubernetes cluster and APIs so that you can manage the entire stack."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"You can get a free license for monitoring but need to purchase a license if you need extra control."
"Cisco Intersight is not cheap, but it's not the most expensive product either."
"The product is cost-effective."
"It's just the standard licensing cost. There are no additional fees."
"Cisco Intersight has competitive pricing. On a scale of one to five, my rating for its pricing is four."
"I would rate the pricing as three out of five."
"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."
"Different locations require different setups. In your terms, around 300 to around 400K USD."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Manufacturing Company
13%
Financial Services Firm
8%
Computer Software Company
8%
Healthcare Company
7%
Manufacturing Company
10%
Financial Services Firm
10%
Comms Service Provider
8%
Outsourcing Company
7%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business10
Midsize Enterprise4
Large Enterprise10
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business4
Midsize Enterprise1
Large Enterprise10
 

Questions from the Community

What needs improvement with Cisco Intersight?
Regarding improvements for Cisco Intersight, I would say more third-party integration is needed. At the moment it does have a basic integration of Pure Storage, so I can add my Pure Storage if I ha...
What is your primary use case for Cisco Intersight?
My main use case for Cisco Intersight is to register our Cisco UCS servers and apply profiles to our servers with configurations, firmware deployment automatically, and install the operating system...
What advice do you have for others considering Cisco Intersight?
I would rate Cisco Intersight a nine out of ten. I give it a nine because personally, I think it is one of the best management tools ever. I have worked before with different server vendors and dif...
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

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

Overview

 

Sample Customers

EXMAR, RapidScale
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 Cisco Intersight vs. VMware Aria Operations for Applications and other solutions. Updated: September 2026.
915,341 professionals have used our research since 2012.