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DX Spectrum 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

DX Spectrum
Ranking in IT Infrastructure Monitoring
30th
Average Rating
8.4
Reviews Sentiment
6.7
Number of Reviews
118
Ranking in other categories
Network Management Applications (11th), Network Monitoring Software (32nd), Network Troubleshooting (8th), DX NetOps (1st)
VMware Aria Operations for ...
Ranking in IT Infrastructure Monitoring
17th
Average Rating
8.0
Reviews Sentiment
6.3
Number of Reviews
14
Ranking in other categories
Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability (20th), Container Monitoring (6th), Cloud Monitoring Software (15th)
 

Mindshare comparison

As of February 2026, in the IT Infrastructure Monitoring category, the mindshare of DX Spectrum is 1.2%, up from 0.8% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of VMware Aria Operations for Applications is 1.6%, up from 1.2% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
IT Infrastructure Monitoring Market Share Distribution
ProductMarket Share (%)
VMware Aria Operations for Applications1.6%
DX Spectrum1.2%
Other97.2%
IT Infrastructure Monitoring
 

Featured Reviews

PinchasAlbalya - PeerSpot reviewer
Network Engineer at a educational organization with 1,001-5,000 employees
Monitoring has become centralized and management now sees real‑time health of key network assets
The time investment required is significant, not because of difficulty but because of the need for free time to invest in it. We need to get the knowledge. We know there are many options, but we took an external vendor to install and make the customization. If we want to make others changes without paying for customization, we need to learn it deeply by ourselves. The tutorials are very complicated. They could work on that area. The tutorial part could be more simplified. I know there are many explanations, and you can get help or documents in one click on the current page in the product, but it is not very clear. If you want to do something new that you did not see from the vendor in the installation, it is not very simple. The documents are good for people that know how to operate the product well, but for new users, it is not simple.
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

"Spectrum is very useful for us, because the product lets us monitor and control all the various components of our infrastructure that support our business from an IT perspective."
"CA is very complicated but has a lot of features."
"It helps our NetOps group actually handle alarms in a way that lets them see the bigger picture of those alarms, and how they might affect our services. It helps us communicate information about the network state better to services that might be impacted by a specific network condition."
"The most valuable feature is automatic discovery."
"​Stability has been good. We really have not had any issues.​"
"The product’s stability and robustness are valuable."
"We can monitor MPLS network VPN, network configuration, and backups. It's highly scalable for network configuration management."
"Spectrum is great for root cause analysis. It has excellent correlation event management. Spectrum's stability and scalability are also amazing."
"People are very pleased with the implementation."
"It has a familiar interface, which makes it easy to get started."
"No issues with stability."
"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."
"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."
"The solution is great for virtualization and preparing the infrastructure in Tanzu to test products. It's very fast and has good visibility."
 

Cons

"The GIS map feature needs to be enhanced and synced with topology views of containers and global collections."
"I would suggest improving the web GUI to improve the device monitor configuration and to improve or to integrate the new tool for reporting."
"For us, the implementation was quite complex but it's because of the large number of different environments we're dealing with."
"The solution's stability needs improvement."
"I would recommend AI capability built-in so it becomes more predictable and we jump ahead of the curve. This is the one really important feature I would really like to see in any product that provides alarms."
"If the integration is simplified or improved, it will be a unique selling point in comparison to the competition on the market."
"For my use case, incident coordination was an area of improvement. The internal software engine for coordinating outages could use improvement because sometimes, we used to get false alerts for unrelated devices. They did a really good job of trying to make sure that you got one major alert and any of the subsequent devices downstream were just additions to that, but occasionally, the engine wouldn't properly catch the right things, and we used to get a flood of alerts."
"We have a lot of different monitoring tools in the background, so orchestration has been a little bit of a challenge."
"The documentation and integration with Kubernetes could be improved."
"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."
"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."
"An area for improvement would be more in-depth reporting, such as analyzing disk IO during business hours compared to after hours."
"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."
"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."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"It’s a great tool, but an expensive one. Learn how to use it properly."
"DX Spectrum's pricing is neither expensive nor cheap."
"The price is good enough to expect an ideal solution. It's expensive."
"It is very pricey. With the current trend of enterprises moving towards cheaper and more modern looking solutions like ManageEngine, SevOne, ServicePilot, and Paesller."
"It is expensive compared to other tools in the market."
"Spectrum is expensive."
"The price is very high."
"The price of the solution is reasonable."
"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."
"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."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Financial Services Firm
16%
Manufacturing Company
8%
Comms Service Provider
7%
Marketing Services Firm
6%
Financial Services Firm
12%
Manufacturing Company
11%
Government
8%
Computer Software Company
7%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business25
Midsize Enterprise19
Large Enterprise90
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business4
Midsize Enterprise1
Large Enterprise10
 

Questions from the Community

What do you like most about DX Spectrum?
The solution's most valuable features are its integration with Broadcom tools and scalability.
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for DX Spectrum?
The price of DX Spectrum is not competitive when compared to other solutions, such as SolarWinds. The high price has caused us to lose many deals.
What needs improvement with DX Spectrum?
I would like to see improvements in making the interface more user-friendly. Many people find it not simple to use. One of the common customer complaints is about the alarm notifications. Currently...
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

CA Spectrum
Tanzu Observability, Wavefront, Wavefront by VMware, VMware Tanzu Observability
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

National Informatics Centre India, Banese, Olympus, AlphaServe Technologies, Sicredi
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 DX Spectrum vs. VMware Aria Operations for Applications and other solutions. Updated: January 2026.
882,207 professionals have used our research since 2012.