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Splunk Observability Cloud vs VMware Aria Operations for Applications comparison

 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive SummaryUpdated on May 11, 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

Splunk Observability Cloud
Ranking in Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability
10th
Ranking in IT Infrastructure Monitoring
9th
Ranking in Cloud Monitoring Software
8th
Average Rating
8.4
Reviews Sentiment
7.2
Number of Reviews
52
Ranking in other categories
Container Management (8th)
VMware Aria Operations for ...
Ranking in Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability
27th
Ranking in IT Infrastructure Monitoring
29th
Ranking in Cloud Monitoring Software
21st
Average Rating
8.0
Reviews Sentiment
6.9
Number of Reviews
12
Ranking in other categories
Container Monitoring (6th)
 

Mindshare comparison

As of May 2025, in the Cloud Monitoring Software category, the mindshare of Splunk Observability Cloud is 1.1%, up from 0.8% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of VMware Aria Operations for Applications is 1.6%, up from 1.3% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Cloud Monitoring Software
 

Featured Reviews

Lakshmi Padaga - PeerSpot reviewer
Collaborates performance metrics with log data to pinpoint the exact cause of issues and offers error detection
Splunk APM is a robust tool with many capabilities. There are always areas for potential improvement to enhance its functionality and user experience. For Splunk APM, there could be simplified navigation, like streamlining the user interface to make navigation more intuitive for our users, especially those new to APM, which can enhance usability. We can provide more customization options for dashboards and visualizations to help users tailor the platform to their specific needs. There could be more integration capabilities with a wider range of third-party tools and platforms would also be beneficial. By focusing on these areas, Splunk APM can enhance its value proposition, improve user satisfaction, and better meet the evolving needs of organizations monitoring their application performance.
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

"Dashboards help the application support teams to have a quick look at how their systems are running. It helps other teams as well."
"It is a great resource for us because we have so many different data sources and to be able to aggregate that and put it through a concise dashboard or an alert really helps."
"It is very easy to monitor multiple cloud environments. It's like a single pane of glass for us. We can use it to monitor our on-prem and both of our cloud environments as opposed to having different tools for each environment. It makes it all come together in one tool."
"I find the monitoring console very helpful. With one click, I can see how we are performing, and at the same time, I can see what data is flowing."
"Splunk Infrastructure Monitoring provided our customers with visibility into their overall infrastructure."
"I have primarily used it to go back into the past and understand why something happened. It provides enough information to do research and figure things out."
"It is a good tool. It allows you to set alerts for application and infrastructure monitoring, and it allows you to create dashboards."
"The most valuable feature in this solution is the log searching."
"I find VMware Aria Operations for Applications to be very stable, and I would rate it a ten out of ten."
"The most valuable aspects of the solution are its ease of use and its ease of implementation."
"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."
"No 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."
"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."
 

Cons

"The implementation can be more user-friendly."
"There is a lot of room for improvement with the automation."
"They can get more integration with a few more products. They can also update some of the dashboards that are in there now."
"In the next release, I would like to see more integration with other solutions."
"The monitoring of workloads when using SignalFx could be improved."
"The solution's stability is an area that has room for improvement. It needs to provide constant stability to its users."
"There's no standard use case available where you can see the utilization of the number of use cases I have."
"They need more EDR functionalities."
"The documentation and integration with Kubernetes could be improved."
"The solution could be expensive, which might be a limiting factor."
"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 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 main problem I have is that the license cost is very high."
"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."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"The price of Splunk APM is less than some of its competitors."
"Licensing cost is the biggest argument I get from those divesting from Splunk. There are those within our organization who say we are going to go to other tools since Splunk is too expensive."
"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."
"Splunk APM is expensive."
"Splunk Observability Cloud is expensive."
"This is an expensive solution."
"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."
"It appears to be expensive compared to competitors."
"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."
"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."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Financial Services Firm
18%
Computer Software Company
15%
Retailer
8%
Government
7%
Financial Services Firm
15%
Computer Software Company
15%
Manufacturing Company
11%
Government
6%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
 

Questions from the Community

What do you like most about SignalFx?
The most valuable feature is dashboard creation.
What needs improvement with SignalFx?
There is room for improvement in the alerting system, which is complicated and has less documentation available. We sometimes encountered issues in setting up alerts. The custom detector could be m...
What is your primary use case for SignalFx?
The main purpose of using Splunk APM is to optimize our application. We use Splunk APM primarily to understand how the application works, how it uses resources, and its response time in connection ...
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.
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.
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...
 

Also Known As

Splunk Infrastructure Monitoring
Tanzu Observability, Wavefront, Wavefront by VMware, VMware Tanzu Observability
 

Overview

 

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
Find out what your peers are saying about Splunk Observability Cloud vs. VMware Aria Operations for Applications and other solutions. Updated: April 2025.
850,834 professionals have used our research since 2012.