Grafana Enterprise Stack vs VMware Aria Operations for Applications comparison

Why PeerSpot?

Grafana Labs and Broadcom are both solutions in the IT Infrastructure Monitoring category. Grafana Labs is ranked #17 with an average rating of 8.6, while Broadcom is ranked #13 with an average rating of 8.8. Grafana Labs holds a 0.7% mindshare in IM, compared to Broadcom’s 1.4% mindshare. Additionally, 92% of Grafana Labs users are willing to recommend the solution, compared to 93% of Broadcom users who would recommend it.

Grafana Enterprise Stack

Read 14 Grafana Enterprise Stack reviews

3,158 Views
3,126 Comparison Views

92% willing to recommend

VMware Aria Operations for ...

Read 14 VMware Aria Operations for Applications reviews

9,088 Views
4,817 Comparison Views

93% willing to recommend

Grafana Enterprise Stack

VMware Aria Operations for ...

Comparison Buyer's Guide

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Executive SummaryUpdated on Oct 9, 2024

VMware Aria Operations for Applications and Grafana Enterprise Stack compete in application performance monitoring and data visualization. Grafana Enterprise Stack appears to hold the upper hand due to its comprehensive visualization features and flexibility in handling diverse data sources.

Features: VMware Aria Operations for Applications provides deep insights, predictive analytics, and seamless integration with VMware environments. Grafana Enterprise Stack offers powerful dashboard capabilities, extensive plugin support, and broad platform compatibility.

Room for Improvement: VMware Aria Operations for Applications could expand support beyond VMware environments, improve user interface intuitiveness, and enhance integration with non-VMware tools. Grafana Enterprise Stack may need streamlined configuration processes, improved role-based access control, and enhanced support for newer data sources.

Ease of Deployment and Customer Service: VMware Aria Operations for Applications offers easy deployment within VMware ecosystems and access to VMware’s support network. Grafana Enterprise Stack, although possibly requiring more initial setup due to its open-source nature, benefits from detailed documentation and community engagement, with responsive customer service aiding deployment.

Pricing and ROI: VMware Aria Operations for Applications might involve higher setup costs but can deliver significant ROI in VMware environments due to its compatibility. Grafana Enterprise Stack provides flexible pricing models, generally lower initial costs, and high ROI potential for enterprises focusing on scalable visualization solutions, potentially reducing costs through its open-source foundation.

To learn more, read our detailed Grafana Enterprise Stack vs. VMware Aria Operations for Applications Report (Updated: November 2026).

Buyer's Guide

Grafana Enterprise Stack vs. VMware Aria Operations for Applications

November 2026

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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

Grafana Enterprise Stack

Ranking in IT Infrastructure Monitoring

17th

Average Rating

8.4

Reviews Sentiment

6.1

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

No ranking in other categories

VMware Aria Operations for ...

Ranking in IT Infrastructure Monitoring

13th

Average Rating

8.0

Reviews Sentiment

6.3

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability (18th), Container Monitoring (6th), Cloud Monitoring Software (13th)

Mindshare comparison

As of November 2026, in the IT Infrastructure Monitoring category, the mindshare of Grafana Enterprise Stack is 0.7%, down from 1.1% 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
Product	Mindshare (%)
VMware Aria Operations for Applications	1.4%
Grafana Enterprise Stack	0.7%
Other	97.9%

IT Infrastructure Monitoring

Featured Reviews

Rajan M

Test Lead at Calpine Group

Efficient monitoring and alerting enhance operational insights

With Grafana Enterprise Stack, we can identify issues that New Relic cannot help with. While New Relic requires purchase and supports frontend and backend components, Grafana Enterprise Stack helps identify where issues are occurring. When we need to deep dive into issues, we use New Relic to trace transactions and determine where maximum impact occurs, whether in core size, DB side, or frontend components that slow performance. We first evaluate with Grafana Enterprise Stack, then move to New Relic if we identify performance degradation, such as DB queries taking too much time. Grafana Enterprise Stack responds to queries within 6 to 12 hours. They contact users through email immediately when available. Similarly, New Relic follows the same pattern, responding immediately when requests are raised and resolving issues promptly.

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Ajay Shukla

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.

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

"Grafana's most valuable feature is its ability to provide a graphical representation of data collected from various sources."

"It is very easy to deploy and integrate with any application or infrastructure layer."

"It is truly reliable."

"The ability to graph actual, live, or on-the-fly activity is valuable; it is an added value to work with Grafana Enterprise Stack and to display results or logs, which are huge in nature, in graphical characters."

"The most valuable features for us are dashboards; we can dashboard anything that we can think of, we can dashboard and measure."

"Our productivity has improved with its use."

"The tool's most valuable feature is real-time monitoring. It helps in securing the application or the node by allowing us to monitor and manage resource consumption during peak times. For instance, from 10 AM to 2 PM, we may experience high memory utilization. It helps us to solve these issues."

"Grafana Enterprise Stack is a powerful open-source platform with robust capabilities in data visualizations, dashboard creations, and alerting."

More Grafana Enterprise Stack 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."

"The solution provides single-console management for multiple VMware environments and cloud integrations, whether hybrid, private, or public cloud."

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

"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."

"This solution will give you a single pane of glass for everything, and centralized monitoring."

"We haven't had any issues with stability."

"People are very pleased with the implementation."

"It significantly improves application performance management by offering recommendations for resource allocation to avoid wastage or overcommitment."

More VMware Aria Operations for Applications pros

Cons

"They could use more small tutorials to explain a bit about how Grafana works."

"Productivity has been improved with the use of Grafana Enterprise Stack, but cost savings or return on investment specifics are not clear."

"In terms of what Grafana provides, it just provides the charting tools. Everything else is third-party."

"The connection between metrics, logs, and traces could be improved."

"The layout is good, but I think it needs some enhancement based on my experience."

"I believe there are some areas for improvement in the product. Something that could be better is the time series functionality."

"The connection between metrics, logs, and traces could be improved. Currently, one needs to ingest labels and timestamps for them to be connected, however, drilling down sometimes takes time."

"Integrating AI capabilities for automated self-healing and reduced manual interventions would be valuable."

More Grafana Enterprise Stack cons

"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."

"The main problem I have is that the license cost is very high."

"They just need more capability. A few areas still need more enhancements in the technology capability space."

"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."

"However, it is still not a very mature product."

"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."

"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."

More VMware Aria Operations for Applications cons

Pricing and Cost Advice

"I use the tool's free 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."

"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."

"Different locations require different setups. In your terms, around 300 to around 400K USD."

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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews

Energy/Utilities Company

13%

Manufacturing Company

12%

Financial Services Firm

11%

Comms Service Provider

Manufacturing Company

10%

Financial Services Firm

Comms Service Provider

Outsourcing Company

Company Size

By reviewers

Large Enterprise

Midsize Enterprise

Small Business

By reviewers
Company Size	Count
Small Business	6
Midsize Enterprise	1
Large Enterprise	7

By reviewers
Company Size	Count
Small Business	4
Midsize Enterprise	1
Large Enterprise	10

Questions from the Community

What needs improvement with Grafana Enterprise Stack?

I am trying to think about its advanced alerting features; we do not use it too much for that. We do get it to report through to our help desk system and if a threshold gets broken, then a ticket i...

See all answers

What is your primary use case for Grafana Enterprise Stack?

I have switched to a different suite, focusing on customer edge solutions that are mostly Fortinet. To manage it, I use Grafana Enterprise Stack and a whole bunch of tools that we wrote ourselves. ...

See all answers

What advice do you have for others considering Grafana Enterprise Stack?

We use Grafana Enterprise Stack in all of our clients. I rate this product an eight out of ten.

See all answers

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...

See all answers

What needs improvement with VMware Tanzu Observability by Wavefront?

See all answers

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...

See all answers

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Compared 3% of the time

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Compared 5% of the time

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Compared 4% of the time

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Compared 4% of the time

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Compared 4% of the time

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Compared 3% of the time

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Product Reports

Buyer's Guide

Grafana Enterprise Stack

October 2026

Download Grafana Enterprise Stack product report

Buyer's Guide

VMware Aria Operations for Applications

October 2026

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

Grafana Enterprise Stack is a powerful tool for real-time data monitoring and visualization. With its flexible and scalable features, it is widely used for creating dashboards, analyzing metrics, and gaining insights into infrastructure, databases, and applications.

Its valuable features include powerful visualization capabilities, extensive data source integrations, customizable dashboards, a user-friendly interface, and a robust alerting system. Users appreciate its flexibility, scalability, and ability to integrate with different data sources, making it suitable for a wide range of industries and use cases.

Grafana Labs

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.

Broadcom

Sample Customers

1. Uber 2. PayPal 3. eBay 4. Sony 5. Red Hat 6. IBM 7. Cisco 8. Adobe 9. Expedia 10. Booking.com 11. Airbnb 12. LinkedIn 13. Twitter 14. Netflix 15. Spotify 16. Pinterest 17. Slack 18. GitLab 19. Docker 20. Atlassian 21. Salesforce 22. Microsoft 23. Google 24. Amazon 25. Facebook 26. Apple 27. Intel 28. Oracle 29. SAP 30. VMware 31. HP 32. Dell

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

Grafana Enterprise Stack vs. VMware Aria Operations for Applications

November 2026

Free Report: Grafana Enterprise Stack vs. VMware Aria Operations for Applications

Find out what your peers are saying about Grafana Enterprise Stack vs. VMware Aria Operations for Applications and other solutions. Updated: November 2026.

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