Splunk Observability Cloud vs VMware Aria Operations for Applications comparison

Splunk Observability Cloud vs. VMware Aria Operations for Applications

Download the complete report

Helped 893,221 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

7th

Ranking in IT Infrastructure Monitoring

7th

Ranking in Cloud Monitoring Software

6th

Average Rating

8.2

Reviews Sentiment

6.8

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

Network Monitoring Software (7th), Container Management (5th), Digital Experience Monitoring (DEM) (2nd)

VMware Aria Operations for ...

Ranking in Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability

16th

Ranking in IT Infrastructure Monitoring

16th

Ranking in Cloud Monitoring Software

12th

Average Rating

8.0

Reviews Sentiment

6.3

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

Container Monitoring (6th)

Mindshare comparison

As of May 2026, in the Cloud Monitoring Software category, the mindshare of Splunk Observability Cloud is 2.5%, up from 1.4% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of VMware Aria Operations for Applications is 2.3%, up from 1.4% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.

Cloud Monitoring Software Mindshare Distribution
Product	Mindshare (%)
Splunk Observability Cloud	2.5%
VMware Aria Operations for Applications	2.3%
Other	95.2%

Cloud Monitoring Software

Featured Reviews

Taiwo Ige

IT Operations Engineer at ABC Supply Co. Inc.

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

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

"The solution's service map feature allows us to have a holistic overview and to see quickly where the issues are."

"The features are pretty much ready out of the box."

"Splunk Infrastructure Monitoring gives us complete visibility without the need for storage."

"We utilize the APM and auto-detectors, as the core metrics and core alerts are available for us, which are the features of Splunk Observability Cloud that I appreciate the most."

"Dashboards help the application support teams to have a quick look at how their systems are running. It helps other teams as well."

"Splunk Real User Monitoring (RUM) has one great advantage in that if they have SAP users, they can monitor their SAP applications."

"The tool's stability is great."

"I have definitely seen a return on investment with Splunk Observability Cloud, particularly through how fast it has grown and how comfortable other teams are in relying on its outputs for monitoring and observability."

More Splunk Observability Cloud pros

"This solution allows me to have true visibility for any metrics when it comes to my cloud, and private."

"Scalability for VMware Aria Operations for Applications is easy to implement and manage."

"Using Wavefront, we have been able to reduce the complexity of our pipeline."

"No issues with stability."

"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."

"People are very pleased with the implementation."

"Wavefront's monitoring tools and visibility into public cloud platforms are competing with the best out there."

"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."

More VMware Aria Operations for Applications pros

Cons

"Splunk would be better if some tools were integrated to be able to take action on security or network concerns."

"In Splunk Observability Cloud, I notice room for improvement in synthetic monitoring. It does not provide output based on server names."

"To improve Splunk Observability Cloud, we need more applications to be included in the observability so that more applications can have agents to monitor them and bring that information to the cloud."

"The security could be better."

"In the next release, I would like to see more integration with other solutions."

"The solution's stability is an area that has room for improvement. It needs to provide constant stability to its users."

"Splunk Infrastructure Monitoring's data analytics can be improved by including suggestions for various types of continuous monitoring."

"Splunk Observability Cloud could be improved with better integration with AppDynamics, as we know that's coming, however, it is an issue we've had between the OpenTelemetry and the AppDynamics collector."

More Splunk Observability Cloud cons

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

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

"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."

"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."

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

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

"The implementation is a long process that should be improved."

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

More VMware Aria Operations for Applications cons

Pricing and Cost Advice

"I would rate the price of Splunk Infrastructure Monitoring as an eight out of ten, with ten being the most expensive."

"Splunk's infrastructure monitoring costs can be high because our billing is based on data volume measured in terabytes, rather than the number of devices being monitored."

"This is an expensive solution."

"Splunk has been fairly expensive, but it has been predictable."

"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."

"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."

"Splunk APM is expensive."

"It is expensive."

More Splunk Observability Cloud 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."

"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."

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

893,221 professionals have used our research since 2012.

Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews

Financial Services Firm

13%

Manufacturing Company

Computer Software Company

Retailer

Financial Services Firm

13%

Manufacturing Company

11%

Government

Computer Software Company

Company Size

By reviewers

Large Enterprise

Midsize Enterprise

Small Business

By reviewers
Company Size	Count
Small Business	30
Midsize Enterprise	10
Large Enterprise	53

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

Questions from the Community

What do you like most about SignalFx?

The most valuable feature is dashboard creation.

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...

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 ...

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?

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...

Avantra vs Splunk Observability Cloud

Comparisons

Compared 3% of the time

Kentik vs Splunk Observability Cloud

Compared 2% of the time

Datadog vs Splunk Observability Cloud

Compared 2% of the time

Grafana vs Splunk Observability Cloud

Compared 2% of the time

Observe vs Splunk Observability Cloud

Compared 2% of the time

More Splunk Observability Cloud Competitors

Datadog vs VMware Aria Operations for Applications

Compared 6% of the time

LogicMonitor vs VMware Aria Operations for Applications

Compared 5% of the time

Dynatrace vs VMware Aria Operations for Applications

Compared 4% of the time

Nagios XI vs VMware Aria Operations for Applications

Compared 4% of the time

PRTG Network Monitor vs VMware Aria Operations for Applications

Compared 3% of the time

More VMware Aria Operations for Applications Competitors

Product Reports

Splunk Observability Cloud

Download Splunk Observability Cloud product report

VMware Aria Operations for Applications

Download VMware Aria Operations for Applications product report

VMware Aria Operations for Applications 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

Splunk Observability Cloud vs. VMware Aria Operations for Applications