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Splunk ITSI (IT Service Intelligence) vs VMware Aria Operations for Applications comparison

 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive SummaryUpdated on Jul 24, 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

Splunk ITSI (IT Service Int...
Ranking in Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability
10th
Average Rating
8.4
Reviews Sentiment
6.6
Number of Reviews
64
Ranking in other categories
IT Alerting and Incident Management (4th)
VMware Aria Operations for ...
Ranking in Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability
18th
Average Rating
8.0
Reviews Sentiment
6.3
Number of Reviews
14
Ranking in other categories
IT Infrastructure Monitoring (14th), Container Monitoring (6th), Cloud Monitoring Software (13th)
 

Mindshare comparison

As of August 2026, in the Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability category, the mindshare of Splunk ITSI (IT Service Intelligence) is 0.8%, up from 0.8% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of VMware Aria Operations for Applications is 1.4%, up from 0.9% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability Mindshare Distribution
ProductMindshare (%)
Splunk ITSI (IT Service Intelligence)0.8%
VMware Aria Operations for Applications1.4%
Other97.8%
Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability
 

Featured Reviews

DS
Senior Consultant at a consultancy with 10,001+ employees
Service health has been monitored and visual insights support proactive telecom operations
The installation process is the first aspect I dislike about Splunk ITSI (IT Service Intelligence). If you do not configure it correctly, you will encounter issues in the search head. Because we use a distributed environment where each component has its own specific roles, installation is critical and requires careful attention. Splunk ITSI (IT Service Intelligence) is built with many applications. It is a compressed file, and when you extract the Splunk ITSI (IT Service Intelligence) app, you receive approximately 19 apps. Some applications, add-ons, and packages must be installed on specific components. If you do not configure an application correctly, it will not work. Sometimes we encounter issues during installation because of this complexity. I believe the installation process should be more uniform, meaning it could be deployed across all components to avoid post-installation issues. Sometimes after installation, you receive errors, and users cannot access Splunk ITSI (IT Service Intelligence). We have experienced this type of issue due to installation errors. I believe there is currently room for improvement regarding scalability. When we create Glass Tables containing many searches, the Glass Tables sometimes fail due to memory constraints, and we receive error pages. Splunk ITSI (IT Service Intelligence) should have a lightweight version to address these concerns. I would rate current scalability as medium.
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

"The data I got from Splunk ITSI (IT Service Intelligence) and the information provided by it is what I like most about the dashboarding and predictive features, and Splunk ITSI (IT Service Intelligence) made it easier for me to get data and to work on that, which has positively impacted my organization."
"Real-time indexing in Splunk ITSI (IT Service Intelligence) has helped me by requiring me to take actions as soon as possible before the customer even notices the issue."
"The search function is the most valuable. It includes regular expressions and wild card searches. We'll write searches using field and case-sensitive services and use all of these search types to write an alert condition. Splunk ITSI has another feature called Glass Table that offers a visual representation."
"Overall, it's a very stable product."
"One particularly useful feature of Splunk ITSI is the ability to create custom services."
"The most valuable features are the agility, being able to ingest many data sources with no limitation on capacity."
"Our mean time to detect is down to five minutes."
"The glass tables are very helpful."
"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 significantly improves application performance management by offering recommendations for resource allocation to avoid wastage or overcommitment."
"I find VMware Aria Operations for Applications to be very stable, and I would rate it a ten out of ten."
"Wavefront gives us the complexity we need, instead of spending time coming up with a nice dashboard from some other means, or just creating and coding our own app."
"This solution will give you a single pane of glass for everything, and centralized monitoring."
"VMware comes with a support team, and if you have trouble, you can easily create a ticket, and VMware will help you. Therefore, the best aspect is the support."
"The solution provides single-console management for multiple VMware environments and cloud integrations, whether hybrid, private, or public cloud."
"Tanzu itself, integrated with multiple solutions, bestows support and security upon a container platform, especially when it comes to managing open-source container platforms such as Kubernetes."
 

Cons

"Scalability is a bit challenging, mainly if high loads are encountered. I faced several issues with high thread usage, so I would rate it around seven to eight, particularly considering that scalability is crucial yet can be premium in cost."
"ITSI is an almost perfect tool, but there is room for improvement in a few features like the deep dive and multi-KPI alerts. We're using most of the features like service API, coding searches, and aggregation, but our team members hardly use multi-KPI and deep dive. We don't use the multi-KPI or deep dive because everything is available in the service KPI. I don't think this feature is necessary."
"If they can somehow integrate it with AI in the near future, it will definitely be a game changer."
"The license cost is expensive."
"There are areas in Splunk ITSI that have room for improvement, such as the episodes, the speed, or the accuracy."
"If the product had some prebuilt machine learning features, it would add value to our use cases."
"From my perspective (since I don't have administrator or developer access to Splunk ITSI), we could have a better user interface."
"We also faced challenges relating to UI development — being able to get the UI the way we wanted it to look performance-wise. Some of the customization levels of the UI just weren't there."
"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."
"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."
"So far, the solution's learning curve has been pretty high."
"The solution could be expensive, which might be a limiting factor."
"The support from VMware is not very helpful. This is because you always receive many questions from the support service but few actual solutions."
"The initial setup should be easier and more seamless."
"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."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"Splunk ITSI is a premium application and comes with a premium price tag."
"Splunk ITSI is expensive."
"Its pricing has been changed as per the market. You get a good support service with it as well. They have 24/7 customer support. There is a portal, and if you are having issues, they are available in order to resolve them. So, its pricing isn't too much."
"Splunk ITSI is an expensive tool, and we need to purchase the utility license."
"I wouldn't say there's been an issue with the solution's pricing because we went through the AWS marketplace and negotiated directly with Splunk."
"Pricing was pretty good, and it is possible to just add on the features we want."
"The cost of the modules is a bit high for non-global companies, making it difficult for them to afford Splunk ITSI."
"Splunk ITSI is expensive; however, with the appropriate use case, it justifies the cost."
"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."
"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."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Financial Services Firm
16%
Manufacturing Company
10%
Outsourcing Company
9%
Construction Company
7%
Financial Services Firm
12%
Manufacturing Company
12%
Construction Company
7%
Comms Service Provider
6%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business17
Midsize Enterprise8
Large Enterprise46
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business4
Midsize Enterprise1
Large Enterprise10
 

Questions from the Community

What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Splunk ITSI (IT Service Intelligence)?
From a pricing perspective, it is not that bad because we get it from a distributor and do not purchase it directly from Splunk. We get it from a distributor who gives the pricing to a partner and ...
What needs improvement with Splunk ITSI (IT Service Intelligence)?
In terms of improvements for Splunk ITSI (IT Service Intelligence), I would suggest adding more out-of-the-box plugins and adapters, especially as there is a high demand for observability and dashb...
What is your primary use case for Splunk ITSI (IT Service Intelligence)?
I use Splunk ITSI (IT Service Intelligence) as a manager of the managers, a tool sitting on top of all the other observability tools. It gets the alerts feed from all the sources such as Splunk Ent...
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

No data available
Tanzu Observability, Wavefront, Wavefront by VMware, VMware Tanzu Observability
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

TransUnion, Cox Automotive, Carnival Cruises, Leidos, Econocom, National Ignition Factory, Entrust Datacard, Molina Healthcare, United States Census Bureau
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 ITSI (IT Service Intelligence) vs. VMware Aria Operations for Applications and other solutions. Updated: August 2026.
908,877 professionals have used our research since 2012.