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Cisco Intersight 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

Cisco Intersight
Ranking in IT Infrastructure Monitoring
12th
Average Rating
8.0
Reviews Sentiment
7.2
Number of Reviews
15
Ranking in other categories
Cloud Management (13th)
VMware Aria Operations for ...
Ranking in IT Infrastructure Monitoring
30th
Average Rating
8.0
Reviews Sentiment
6.9
Number of Reviews
12
Ranking in other categories
Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability (28th), Container Monitoring (6th), Cloud Monitoring Software (23rd)
 

Mindshare comparison

As of June 2025, in the IT Infrastructure Monitoring category, the mindshare of Cisco Intersight is 2.0%, down from 2.1% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of VMware Aria Operations for Applications is 1.3%, up from 1.2% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
IT Infrastructure Monitoring
 

Featured Reviews

ItzikLiberman - PeerSpot reviewer
Provides data center management and full infrastructure visibility
Cisco Intersight is a very effective tool for data center infrastructure management. It provides visibility into other products and storage, and is beneficial for environments where Cisco and other vendors coexist, allowing full visibility of the entire infrastructure. We have visibility to other products and storages, some networking. It is also valuable for its integration capabilities with other products.
ToniLindberg - PeerSpot reviewer
Troubleshooting capabilities have improved application monitoring and support engagement
I can see what happens end to end, which is pretty beneficial. The solution has troubleshooting capabilities, providing a direct connection to knowledge base articles from VMware Broadcom. When I encounter an error, I can search directly within the system to see what solutions have been employed by others. It has a familiar interface, which makes it easy to get started.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"The tool helps to manage Cisco servers."
"Intersight offers many features that provide great value to companies."
"Our organization uses Cisco Intersight since it helps manage our physical infrastructure."
"I like Intersight because of the integration with HashiCorp, Kubernetes, and each cloud because Intersight is the IO module."
"It offers visibility and optimization of workloads, which are very important features for a company."
"We enjoy having an inside view of all the data centers and all the EdgeX nodes within a single portal rather than going into the EdgeX connections one by one."
"Cisco Intersight has valuable features for workflow automation and inventory administration."
"Cisco Intersight is a very effective tool for data center infrastructure management."
"The solution is great for virtualization and preparing the infrastructure in Tanzu to test products. It's very fast and has good visibility."
"No issues with stability."
"The features I find most valuable is the querying and alerting capabilities."
"It significantly improves application performance management by offering recommendations for resource allocation to avoid wastage or overcommitment."
"It has a familiar interface, which makes it easy to get started."
"This solution allows me to have true visibility for any metrics when it comes to my cloud, and private."
"The stability of Aria Operations for Applications has improved significantly over the years."
"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."
 

Cons

"The unique problem with Cisco Intersight is that it's not supporting some players."
"The product's setup should be easier."
"An area for improvement in Cisco Intersight is automation. It needs more automation capabilities. Apart from enhanced automation, I want Cisco Intersight to integrate with third-party monitoring tools in its next release."
"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."
"It's a very complex solution."
"The solution needs some enhancement in order to build the cluster in two nodes."
"I do not have notes for improvement."
"When new features are added, the service becomes full of bugs."
"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."
"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."
"The implementation is a long process that should be improved."
"The solution could be expensive, which might be a limiting factor."
"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."
"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."
"An area for improvement would be more in-depth reporting, such as analyzing disk IO during business hours compared to after hours."
"I would like to see integration with Kubernetes cluster and APIs so that you can manage the entire stack."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"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."
"You can get a free license for monitoring but need to purchase a license if you need extra control."
"The product is cost-effective."
"Cisco Intersight is not cheap, but it's not the most expensive product either."
"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."
"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."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Computer Software Company
33%
Financial Services Firm
8%
Manufacturing Company
7%
Healthcare Company
6%
Financial Services Firm
15%
Computer Software Company
12%
Manufacturing Company
11%
Government
6%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
 

Questions from the Community

What do you like most about Cisco Intersight?
Intersight can validate our environment.
What needs improvement with Cisco Intersight?
I would like AI to be more integrated into Cisco Intersight. It would be great to have a chat session mode AI so that when I am on standby and encountering issues, I could engage with it, much like...
What is your primary use case for Cisco Intersight?
We use Cisco Intersight ( /products/cisco-intersight-reviews ) for operational tasks. We run patches and import firmware updates from the Cisco site. In the event of a component failure, such as a ...
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for VMware Tanzu Observability by Wavefront?
The cost of VMware Aria Operations for Applications is fair and reasonable compared to what we receive in support and packages from VMware.
What needs improvement with VMware Tanzu Observability by Wavefront?
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.
What is your primary use case for VMware Tanzu Observability by Wavefront?
Our primary use case for VMware Aria Operations for Applications is to enhance application monitoring tasks, allowing us to set up alerts for different components and send them via SMTP to a team d...
 

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: June 2025.
859,533 professionals have used our research since 2012.