Try our new research platform with insights from 80,000+ expert users

Splunk Observability Cloud vs VMware Aria Operations for Applications comparison

Splunk and Broadcom are both solutions in the Cloud Monitoring Software category. Splunk is ranked #8 with an average rating of 8.4, while Broadcom is ranked #13 with an average rating of 8.8. Splunk holds a 2.3% mindshare in CMS, compared to Broadcom’s 2.0% mindshare. Additionally, 95% of Splunk users are willing to recommend the solution, compared to 93% of Broadcom users who would recommend it.
Splunk Observability Cloud
Read 71 Splunk Observability Cloud reviews
  • 5,846 Views
  • 1,578 Comparison Views
95% willing to recommend
VMware Aria Operations for ...
Read 14 VMware Aria Operations for Applications reviews
  • 2,707 Views
  • 1,083 Comparison Views
93% willing to recommend
 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Download the report
Executive SummaryUpdated on Sep 21, 2025

Splunk Observability Cloud and VMware Aria Operations compete in the monitoring and analytics solutions category. Splunk has the upper hand in data gathering and search efficiency, while VMware is stronger in integration and resource optimization.

Features: Splunk Observability Cloud offers robust data gathering capabilities, customizable dashboards, and agile deployment. The fast search indexing and efficient log analysis enhance operational visibility. VMware Aria Operations excels in advanced diagnostics, resource optimization, and seamless integration with various environments. Its real-time statistics are beneficial for application performance management.

Room for Improvement: Splunk users desire improved pricing models, better documentation, and more seamless third-party tool integration. Enhanced support for non-standard integrations is also needed. VMware needs better kernel-level monitoring, deeper application analysis, and easier third-party integration.

Ease of Deployment and Customer Service: Splunk offers flexibility with on-premises, public, and hybrid cloud deployment models, and provides proactive customer service. Some users, however, note room for improvements in support speed. VMware typically requires on-premises deployment and offers consistent support, though integration with non-VMware products can be complex.

Pricing and ROI: Splunk is often seen as expensive due to its data volume pricing, but users find its features justify the cost with improved operational efficiency and reduced downtimes. VMware's comprehensive license requirements make it costly, yet it offers a reasonable cost-to-benefit ratio, especially in resource management and analysis. Both platforms show notable ROI, yet perceptions of cost-effectiveness vary by organization size and needs.

DOWNLOAD THE COMPLETE REPORT
To learn more, read our detailed Splunk Observability Cloud vs. VMware Aria Operations for Applications Report (Updated: October 2025).
Buyer's Guide
Splunk Observability Cloud vs. VMware Aria Operations for Applications
October 2025
Download the complete report
Helped 872,837 peers since 2012

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

Splunk Observability Cloud
Ranking in Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability
8th
Ranking in IT Infrastructure Monitoring
7th
Ranking in Cloud Monitoring Software
8th
Average Rating
8.2
Reviews Sentiment
7.0
Number of Reviews
71
Ranking in other categories
Network Monitoring Software (6th), Container Management (6th), Digital Experience Monitoring (DEM) (2nd)
VMware Aria Operations for ...
Ranking in Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability
17th
Ranking in IT Infrastructure Monitoring
15th
Ranking in Cloud Monitoring Software
13th
Average Rating
8.0
Reviews Sentiment
6.3
Number of Reviews
14
Ranking in other categories
Container Monitoring (5th)
 

Mindshare comparison

As of November 2025, in the Cloud Monitoring Software category, the mindshare of Splunk Observability Cloud is 2.3%, up from 1.3% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of VMware Aria Operations for Applications is 2.0%, up from 1.4% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Cloud Monitoring Software Market Share Distribution
ProductMarket Share (%)
Splunk Observability Cloud2.3%
VMware Aria Operations for Applications2.0%
Other95.7%
Cloud Monitoring Software
 

Featured Reviews

Taiwo Ige - PeerSpot reviewer
Alerting improves incident response across teams and enables faster awareness before customer impact
Splunk Observability Cloud could be improved in terms of integrations with more technical add-ons, such as Zoom. Although they have one with Zoom, it's not available in the cloud, so having that feature would be beneficial. Essentially, Splunk should continue expanding to create easier ways to ingest logs from different products. The out-of-the-box customizable dashboards in Splunk Observability Cloud are very effective in showcasing IT performance to business leaders. However, there are aspects that could be improved, such as linking dashboards to one another. While IT leaders may not drill down, it's crucial to create levels of dashboards for technical users to find root causes, making it effective for stakeholders.
Read full review
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.
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

"Customer service and technical support respond very quickly."
"The data collection from our VMs, containers, databases, and backend components is valuable."
"The initial setup of Splunk Real User Monitoring (RUM) was easy."
"Splunk Infrastructure Monitoring reduces our mean time to resolve. We are more proactive than reactive."
"I like the fact that Splunk APM makes it easy to connect to the application database and run queries against the data."
"We haven't really experienced any glitches or bugs."
"Dashboards help the application support teams to have a quick look at how their systems are running. It helps other teams as well."
"The feature of Splunk Observability Cloud that I prefer most is the easy deployment on the cloud."
More Splunk Observability Cloud pros
"It significantly improves application performance management by offering recommendations for resource allocation to avoid wastage or overcommitment."
"No issues with stability."
"The features I find most valuable is the querying and alerting capabilities."
"This solution allows me to have true visibility for any metrics when it comes to my cloud, and private."
"I find VMware Aria Operations for Applications to be very stable, and I would rate it a ten out of ten."
"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."
"It has a familiar interface, which makes it easy to get started."
"The solution is great for virtualization and preparing the infrastructure in Tanzu to test products. It's very fast and has good visibility."
More VMware Aria Operations for Applications pros
 

Cons

"Support from Splunk is not very helpful because Splunk doesn't have a dedicated APM; they only have one APM engineer in Korea."
"The solution's machine learning deployment is hard and should be made user-friendly."
"The UI of Splunk Observability Cloud is one of the major issues; it's old and has been there for more than 10 years, acquired by other applications from other companies. It's time to reinvent how the UI is going to work with the AI modules and integrations, making it softer and cleaner."
"Integrating some third-party add-ons can be challenging, involving many implementation and configuration steps."
"The clustering part of indexes can be more refined."
"One thing I recently ran into was that the logs on the server most often get Gzipped after they have been rotated. We found that we were not monitoring some of the things, so we had to go back and pull them in. Right now, it pulls one at a time, untars it, or unzips it, so I cannot look at the entire history. There can be an improvement in that area."
"In future updates, I would like to see more predefined monitoring query solutions, which could be more effective."
"We currently lack log analysis capabilities in Splunk APM."
More Splunk Observability Cloud cons
"The initial setup should be easier and more seamless."
"The documentation and integration with Kubernetes could be improved."
"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."
"The solution could be expensive, which might be a limiting factor."
"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."
"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."
"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."
More VMware Aria Operations for Applications cons
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"I am not in that circle, but we are currently licensing based on our queries. That is working out for us. Previously, it was by volume of data, and now, we can store as much data as we want."
"The solution's pricing is competitive. I rate the solution's pricing a seven out of ten. The price of the solution could be cheaper."
"The pricing is based on several factors, including the scale of deployment."
"Splunk Infrastructure Monitoring is an expensive solution."
"It is expensive."
"It appears to be expensive compared to competitors."
"The pricing is reasonable."
"Splunk APM is expensive."
More Splunk Observability Cloud pricing and cost advice
"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."
"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."
report
See which vendors are best for you
Use our free recommendation engine to learn which Cloud Monitoring Software solutions are best for your needs.
See recommendations
872,837 professionals have used our research since 2012.
 

Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Financial Services Firm
15%
Computer Software Company
12%
Manufacturing Company
8%
Retailer
8%
Financial Services Firm
13%
Manufacturing Company
11%
Computer Software Company
9%
Government
8%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business20
Midsize Enterprise10
Large Enterprise43
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business4
Midsize Enterprise1
Large Enterprise10
 

Questions from the Community

What do you like most about SignalFx?
The most valuable feature is dashboard creation.
See all answers
What needs improvement with SignalFx?
Regarding dashboard customization, while Splunk has many dashboard building options, customers sometimes need to create specific dashboards, particularly for applicative metrics such as Java and pr...
See all answers
What is your primary use case for SignalFx?
The solution involves observability in general, such as Application Performance Monitoring, and generally addresses digital applications, web applications, sites, and mobile applications. I worked ...
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?
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...
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
 

Comparisons

Sentry vs Splunk Observability Cloud Logo
Sentry vs Splunk Observability Cloud
Compared 5% of the time
Observe vs Splunk Observability Cloud Logo
Observe vs Splunk Observability Cloud
Compared 4% of the time
Cribl vs Splunk Observability Cloud Logo
Cribl vs Splunk Observability Cloud
Compared 4% of the time
SigNoz vs Splunk Observability Cloud Logo
SigNoz vs Splunk Observability Cloud
Compared 4% of the time
Honeycomb Enterprise vs Splunk Observability Cloud Logo
Honeycomb Enterprise vs Splunk Observability Cloud
Compared 3% of the time
More Splunk Observability Cloud Competitors
Grafana vs VMware Aria Operations for Applications Logo
Grafana vs VMware Aria Operations for Applications
Compared 10% of the time
Zabbix vs VMware Aria Operations for Applications Logo
Zabbix vs VMware Aria Operations for Applications
Compared 8% of the time
Dynatrace vs VMware Aria Operations for Applications Logo
Dynatrace vs VMware Aria Operations for Applications
Compared 8% of the time
Datadog vs VMware Aria Operations for Applications Logo
Datadog vs VMware Aria Operations for Applications
Compared 5% of the time
LogicMonitor vs VMware Aria Operations for Applications Logo
LogicMonitor vs VMware Aria Operations for Applications
Compared 3% of the time
More VMware Aria Operations for Applications Competitors
 

Product Reports

Buyer's Guide
Splunk Observability Cloud
October 2025
Splunk Observability Cloud reportDownload Splunk Observability Cloud product report
Buyer's Guide
VMware Aria Operations for Applications
October 2025
VMware Aria Operations for Applications reportDownload VMware Aria Operations for Applications product report
 

Also Known As

Splunk Infrastructure Monitoring, Splunk Real User Monitoring (RUM), Splunk Synthetic Monitoring
Tanzu Observability, Wavefront, Wavefront by VMware, VMware Tanzu Observability
 

Overview

Splunk Observability Cloud offers sophisticated log searching, data integration, and customizable dashboards. With rapid deployment and ease of use, this cloud service enhances monitoring capabilities across IT infrastructures for comprehensive end-to-end visibility.

Focused on enhancing performance management and security, Splunk Observability Cloud supports environments through its data visualization and analysis tools. Users appreciate its robust application performance monitoring and troubleshooting insights. However, improvements in integrations, interface customization, scalability, and automation are needed. Users find value in its capabilities for infrastructure and network monitoring, as well as log analytics, albeit cost considerations and better documentation are desired. Enhancements in real-time monitoring and network protection are also noted as areas for development.

What are the key features?
  • Log Searching: Efficiently search and analyze logs from various sources.
  • Data Integration: Seamlessly integrate with multiple environments.
  • Dashboard Customization: Tailor dashboards to specific monitoring needs.
  • Monitoring Capabilities: Provides comprehensive insights into application performance.
  • Security Features: Analyze and address security threats across systems.
  • Visualization Tools: Enhance data analysis and system performance optimization.
Why consider this for ROI?
  • Comprehensive Visibility: Gain complete insights into IT infrastructure.
  • Performance Optimization: Improve overall system performance and efficiency.
  • Rapid Deployment: Quick setup to meet organization demands swiftly.
  • Enhanced Security: Strengthen security measures through detailed analytics.

In industries, Splunk Observability Cloud is implemented for security management by analyzing logs from detection systems, offering real-time alerts and troubleshooting for cloud-native applications. It is leveraged for machine data analysis, improving infrastructure visibility and supporting network and application performance management efforts.

Splunk

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

Sunrun, Yelp, Onshape, Tapjoy, Symphony Commerce, Chairish, Clever, Grovo, Bazaar Voice, Zenefits, Avalara
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
Splunk Observability Cloud vs. VMware Aria Operations for Applications
October 2025
Free Report: Splunk Observability Cloud vs. VMware Aria Operations for Applications
Find out what your peers are saying about Splunk Observability Cloud vs. VMware Aria Operations for Applications and other solutions. Updated: October 2025.
DOWNLOAD NOW
872,837 professionals have used our research since 2012.
See our Splunk Observability Cloud vs. VMware Aria Operations for Applications report.

We monitor all Cloud Monitoring Software reviews to prevent fraudulent reviews and keep review quality high. We do not post reviews by company employees or direct competitors. We validate each review for authenticity via cross-reference with LinkedIn, and personal follow-up with the reviewer when necessary.