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Cribl vs VMware Aria Operations for Applications comparison

 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive SummaryUpdated on Jun 15, 2025

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

Cribl
Ranking in Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability
14th
Average Rating
8.4
Reviews Sentiment
6.2
Number of Reviews
15
Ranking in other categories
Log Management (8th), Security Information and Event Management (SIEM) (12th), Observability Pipeline Software (1st)
VMware Aria Operations for ...
Ranking in Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability
18th
Average Rating
8.0
Reviews Sentiment
6.3
Number of Reviews
14
Ranking in other categories
IT Infrastructure Monitoring (17th), Container Monitoring (5th), Cloud Monitoring Software (14th)
 

Mindshare comparison

As of August 2025, in the Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability category, the mindshare of Cribl is 0.9%, up from 0.2% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of VMware Aria Operations for Applications is 0.9%, up from 0.8% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability
 

Featured Reviews

Joe Cicero - PeerSpot reviewer
Facilitates seamless log integration and reduces data costs with efficient compression
My favorite feature is Cribl Stream. That's probably the only Cribl product I have a lot of experience with, and Cribl Stream makes it very easy to identify where all the customer's log sources are and to quickly connect them to a destination source such as Microsoft Sentinel and Microsoft Azure Data Storage. Cribl Stream does two things: not only does it make it easy to connect one log source or one dataset to multiple storage locations, but it also has compression features, which greatly reduce the storage cost for that data. It strips out and compresses data so that only the absolute information remains and not any duplicates. Dual destination and compression are the two top features.
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 product's most valuable features include the internal management of events, coding perspective, data processing, and serialization."
"My favorite option in Cribl is the Stream product."
"The support team was very helpful and managed to get everything production-ready."
"When it comes to the product's installation phase, it is not tough for people who have good knowledge...The tool is worth the investment."
"I'd rate the solution ten out of ten."
"Cribl offers easy plugin configurations and source collection settings, allowing us to collect logs from any source."
"Cribl offers other valuable features. For instance, you can replay data from an edge device, store your daily data in a stream, and replay specific event data into Splunk if a security incident occurs"
"Features such as Cribl Stream, Cribl LogStream, and Cribl Edge have been the most beneficial. The Cribl LogStream, in particular, is valuable for routing data, creating firewalls on pipelines, and putting security measures in place to ensure data reaches its destination without issues."
"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."
"The solution provides single-console management for multiple VMware environments and cloud integrations, whether hybrid, private, or public cloud."
"It has a familiar interface, which makes it easy to get started."
"I gladly recommend VMware Aria Operations for Applications because it is cost effective and has commendable AI response capabilities."
"The solution is great for virtualization and preparing the infrastructure in Tanzu to test products. It's very fast and has good visibility."
"It significantly improves application performance management by offering recommendations for resource allocation to avoid wastage or overcommitment."
"The features I find most valuable is the querying and alerting capabilities."
"The stability of Aria Operations for Applications has improved significantly over the years."
 

Cons

"Perhaps more flexibility in terms of metrics would be helpful."
"Cribl could improve by offering easier integrations with enterprise products, similar to what Splunk provides."
"Cribl should consider adding more features that are applicable to smaller firms, allowing broader access to their data migration through Cribl."
"Cribl doesn't have as many packs available"
"There is room for improvement in the documentation and knowledge base, particularly regarding configurations like sources where logs are being ingested"
"Cribl could have developed some version that can give backward compatibility."
"There have been several administrative issues. Another point is that the browsing functions aren't very intuitive."
"There is no alerting mechanism for the leader/worker nodes status."
"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."
"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."
"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."
"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."
"I would like to see integration with Kubernetes cluster and APIs so that you can manage the entire stack."
"The implementation is a long process that should be improved."
"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."
"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

"I would not say it is a cheaply priced tool as it has been doing wonders in the market. The tool has been budget-friendly for organizations."
"The product pricing is reasonable compared to other solutions."
"Different locations require different setups. In your terms, around 300 to around 400K USD."
"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."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Financial Services Firm
16%
Computer Software Company
9%
Healthcare Company
8%
Manufacturing Company
7%
Manufacturing Company
13%
Financial Services Firm
13%
Computer Software Company
10%
Government
7%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
 

Questions from the Community

What needs improvement with Cribl?
Something that Cribl could do better is processing time. There is not enough customization to improve performance. An example would be with AWS Lambda functions, the way we were doing it before. Th...
What is your primary use case for Cribl?
Our use cases that we are exploring Cribl for right now are for data parsing and data manipulation.
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

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
Find out what your peers are saying about Cribl vs. VMware Aria Operations for Applications and other solutions. Updated: July 2025.
865,384 professionals have used our research since 2012.