Elastic Observability vs VMware Aria Operations for Applications comparison

Elastic and VMware are both solutions in the Cloud Monitoring Software category. Elastic is ranked #7 with an average rating of 8.1, while VMware is ranked #23 with an average rating of 9.0. Elastic holds a 5.3% mindshare in CMS, compared to VMware’s 1.7% mindshare. Additionally, 88% of Elastic users are willing to recommend the solution, compared to 92% of VMware users who would recommend it.

Elastic Observability

Read 27 Elastic Observability reviews

4,483 Views
787 Comparison Views

88% willing to recommend

VMware Aria Operations for ...

Read 12 VMware Aria Operations for Applications reviews

1,015 Views
161 Comparison Views

92% willing to recommend

Elastic Observability

VMware Aria Operations for ...

Comparison Buyer's Guide

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Executive SummaryUpdated on Feb 3, 2025

VMware Aria Operations for Applications and Elastic Observability compete in the observability and performance management sector. Elastic Observability holds the advantage with its advanced analytics capabilities, suited for feature-rich environments.

Features: VMware Aria Operations for Applications offers comprehensive application monitoring, predictive analytics, and workload optimization. Elastic Observability provides real-time insights with powerful log analysis, advanced data visualization tools, and extensive customization options.

Room for Improvement: VMware could enhance its analytics capabilities, offer more customization options, and improve its support for non-VMware environments. Elastic Observability could improve ease of integration with third-party tools, simplify its setup process, and enhance customer support for complex deployments.

Ease of Deployment and Customer Service: VMware Aria Operations for Applications integrates seamlessly into VMware-centric infrastructures and offers responsive support. Elastic Observability provides flexible cloud and on-premise deployment options, supported by thorough documentation and a strong community.

Pricing and ROI: VMware Aria Operations for Applications involves higher upfront costs but provides significant ROI through integration and infrastructure efficiency. Elastic Observability offers a flexible pricing model and delivers compelling ROI due to its advanced analytical features, despite potentially higher setup costs.

To learn more, read our detailed Elastic Observability vs. VMware Aria Operations for Applications Report (Updated: June 2025).

Buyer's Guide

Elastic Observability vs. VMware Aria Operations for Applications

June 2025

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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

Elastic Observability

Ranking in Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability

7th

Ranking in IT Infrastructure Monitoring

11th

Ranking in Container Monitoring

4th

Ranking in Cloud Monitoring Software

7th

Average Rating

8.0

Reviews Sentiment

6.8

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

Log Management (16th)

VMware Aria Operations for ...

Ranking in Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability

27th

Ranking in IT Infrastructure Monitoring

30th

Ranking in Container Monitoring

6th

Ranking in Cloud Monitoring Software

23rd

Average Rating

8.0

Reviews Sentiment

6.9

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

No ranking in other categories

Mindshare comparison

As of June 2025, in the Cloud Monitoring Software category, the mindshare of Elastic Observability is 5.3%, down from 6.8% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of VMware Aria Operations for Applications is 1.7%, up from 1.2% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.

Cloud Monitoring Software

Featured Reviews

Adelina Craciun

Product Owner at Swisscom

Customization enables tailored monitoring and alerting across departments

The possibility to customize it has been quite useful. Whatever the other departments want to dream up, we implement. Whatever they want to monitor, the granularity of it, the changes in the threshold, and the anomalies that they want reported all require some development. So far, every single request has been fulfilled.

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ToniLindberg

senior consultant at Virtual Consultants Sverige AB

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.

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

"The tool's most valuable feature is centralized logging. Elastic Common Search helps us to search for the logs across the organization."

"The most valued feature of Elastic is its log analytics capabilities."

"I recommend Elastic Observability for its completeness of vision and wide ecosystem."

"Its diverse set of features available on the cloud is of significant importance."

"The most valuable feature of Elastic Observability is the text search."

"Good design and easy to use once implemented."

"For full stack observability, Elastic is the best tool compared with any other tool ."

"The Elastic User Interface framework lets us do custom development when needed. You need to have some Javascript knowledge. We need that knowledge to develop new custom tests."

More Elastic Observability pros

"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."

"I find VMware Aria Operations for Applications to be very stable, and I would rate it a ten out of ten."

"No issues with stability."

"It has a familiar interface, which makes it easy to get started."

"The stability of Aria Operations for Applications has improved significantly over the years."

"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."

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

More VMware Aria Operations for Applications pros

Cons

"More web features could be added to the product."

"Elastic Observability is difficult to use. There are only three options for customization but this can be difficult for our use case. We do not have other options to choose the metrics shown, such as CPU or memory usage."

"Elastic Observability needs to improve the retrieval of logs and metrics from all the instances."

"Improving code insight related to infrastructure and network, particularly focusing on aspects such as firewalls, switches, routers, and testing would be beneficial."

"The only challenging aspect for new users is often writing the query language."

"The price is the only issue in the solution. It can be made better and cheaper."

"In the future, Elastic APM needs a portfolio iTool. They can provide an easy way to develop the custom UI for Kibana."

"Simplifying the parsing of logs and manual efforts would also be beneficial."

More Elastic Observability cons

"I would like to see integration with Kubernetes cluster and APIs so that you can manage the entire stack."

"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 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."

"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."

"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 solution could be expensive, which might be a limiting factor."

More VMware Aria Operations for Applications cons

Pricing and Cost Advice

"So far, there are just the standard licensing fees. Several of the components are embedded in the license or are even open source. They're even free depending on what you use, which makes it even more appealing to someone that is discussing pricing of the solution."

"One needs to pay for the licenses, and it is an annual subscription model right now."

"The product’s pricing needs improvement."

"There are two types: cloud and SaaS. They charge based on data ingestion, ingest rate, hard retention, and warm retention. I believe it costs around $25,000 annually to ingest 30GB of data daily. That is the SaaS version. There is also a self-managed license where the customer manages their own infrastructure on-prem. In such cases, there are three license tiers that respectively cost $5,000 annually per node, $7,000 per node, and $12,500 per node."

"We will buy a premium license after POC."

"We have been using the open-source version."

"The product is not that cheap."

"The price of Elastic Observability is expensive."

More Elastic Observability pricing and cost advice

"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."

"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

Financial Services Firm

19%

Computer Software Company

15%

Manufacturing Company

Government

Financial Services Firm

15%

Computer Software Company

12%

Manufacturing Company

11%

Retailer

Company Size

By reviewers

Large Enterprise

Midsize Enterprise

Small Business

Questions from the Community

What do you like most about Elastic Observability?

Elastic Observability significantly improves incident response time by providing quick access to logs and data across various sources. For instance, searching for specific keywords in logs spanning...

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What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Elastic Observability?

Elastic Observability is cost-efficient and provides all features in the enterprise license without asset-based licensing. However, sizing and licensing information could be clearer.

See all answers

What needs improvement with Elastic Observability?

Of course, maintenance is necessary, as with any software, requiring updates with the latest features and security enhancements. It lacked some capabilities when handling on-prem devices, like netw...

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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.

See all answers

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.

See all answers

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...

See all answers

Comparisons

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Compared 14% of the time

Sentry vs Elastic Observability

Compared 14% of the time

Dynatrace vs Elastic Observability

Compared 12% of the time

Grafana vs Elastic Observability

Compared 9% of the time

Zabbix vs Elastic Observability

Compared 8% of the time

More Elastic Observability Competitors

Grafana vs VMware Aria Operations for Applications

Compared 12% of the time

Dynatrace vs VMware Aria Operations for Applications

Compared 10% of the time

Zabbix vs VMware Aria Operations for Applications

Compared 7% of the time

Prometheus Group vs VMware Aria Operations for Applications

Compared 6% of the time

Veeam Data Platform vs VMware Aria Operations for Applications

Compared 6% of the time

More VMware Aria Operations for Applications Competitors

Product Reports

Buyer's Guide

Elastic Observability

June 2025

Download Elastic Observability product report

Buyer's Guide

VMware Aria Operations for Applications

May 2025

VMware Aria Operations for Applications report

Download VMware Aria Operations for Applications product report

Also Known As

No data available

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

Overview

Elastic Observability is primarily used for monitoring login events, application performance, and infrastructure, supporting significant data volumes through features like log aggregation, centralized logging, and system metric analysis.

Elastic Observability employs Elastic APM for performance and latency analysis, significantly aiding business KPIs and technical stability. It is popular among users for system and server monitoring, capacity planning, cyber security, and managing data pipelines. With the integration of Kibana, it offers robust visualization, reporting, and incident response capabilities through rapid log searches while supporting machine learning and hybrid cloud environments.

What are Elastic Observability's key features?

Economic licensing: Offers cost-effective plans.
Extensive metrics tracking: Helps in comprehensive system monitoring.
Comprehensive logging: Centralizes log data efficiently.
Performance Monitoring: Provides robust APM capabilities.
Integration: Seamlessly integrates with other solutions.
Kibana visualization: Facilitates data visualization and reporting.
Machine learning support: Enables advanced data analysis.
Flexible deployment: Supports various deployment environments.
Rapid log searches: Enhances quick incident response.
Accessibility: Offers extensive online documentation and connector support.

What benefits or ROI should users look for in Elastic Observability reviews?

Stability: Look for consistent performance and reliability.
Compliance: Effective monitoring aids in regulation adherence.
System Security: Enhanced system monitoring and alert management.
Cost-Effectiveness: Evaluate the economic pricing models.
Scalability: Adequate scalability options for growing needs.

Companies in technology, finance, healthcare, and other industries implement Elastic Observability for tailored monitoring solutions. They find its integration with existing systems useful for maintaining operation efficiency and security, particularly valuing the visualization capabilities through Kibana to monitor KPIs and improve incident response times.

Elastic

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.

VMware

Sample Customers

PSCU, Entel, VITAS, Mimecast, Barrett Steel, Butterfield Bank

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

Buyer's Guide

Elastic Observability vs. VMware Aria Operations for Applications

June 2025

Free Report: Elastic Observability vs. VMware Aria Operations for Applications

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