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Splunk Observability Cloud vs VMware Aria Operations for Applications comparison

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Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive SummaryUpdated on Mar 29, 2026

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
5th
Ranking in IT Infrastructure Monitoring
3rd
Ranking in Cloud Monitoring Software
4th
Average Rating
8.2
Reviews Sentiment
6.7
Number of Reviews
107
Ranking in other categories
Network Monitoring Software (6th), Container Management (5th), Digital Experience Monitoring (DEM) (2nd)
VMware Aria Operations for ...
Ranking in Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability
18th
Ranking in IT Infrastructure Monitoring
14th
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 September 2026, in the Cloud Monitoring Software category, the mindshare of Splunk Observability Cloud is 3.5%, up from 2.1% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of VMware Aria Operations for Applications is 2.1%, up from 1.7% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Cloud Monitoring Software Mindshare Distribution
ProductMindshare (%)
Splunk Observability Cloud3.5%
VMware Aria Operations for Applications2.1%
Other94.4%
Cloud Monitoring Software
 

Featured Reviews

PK
Project Manager at AGRICULTURE SKILL COUNCIL OF INDIA (ASCI)
Unified observability has improved real-time governance and now drives data-led decisions
Log Observer Connect is embedded here, but we are facing some delays in centralized log collection and analysis, which can be further fastened. We are collecting all the data metrics and decision-making insights, but all these data-driven decisions coming from different applications are not connected somewhere. A consolidated form or correlation of these insights is not happening between each other due to which we feel we are missing something significant. Some generalized feedback includes that predictive alerts or alarms which can be integrated with AI-driven alarms and alerting features should be established so that there is AI-driven intelligence and anomaly detection happening with a complete systematic process in service delivery. Application dependencies are huge, and business and operational dashboards should be improved. Right now there are very interactive custom dashboards, and every now and then, the personalization of enhancements keeps happening. KPI monitoring, executive reporting, and analytics have definitely been introduced to a great extent. There are few things in cloud-native monitoring, such as integration with AWS and Azure, where we sometimes do face lags. Those things can definitely be improved upon. I have used Datadog and Dynatrace before using Splunk Observability Cloud. Datadog was definitely recommended by most of our peers because of its very strong comprehensive observability and very strong and unique dashboard systems. Dynatrace was also very good because they have offered a lot of AI-driven analysis methods and processes, which was helping our organization a lot. Since our organization has a very strong IT ecosystem for agriculture, very different kinds of customized things are required.
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

"Splunk Observability Cloud scales with the growing needs of my organization effectively."
"I like the fact that Splunk APM makes it easy to connect to the application database and run queries against the data."
"Splunk Observability Cloud is highly effective in improving digital resilience, as real-time visibility, proactive alerting, fast root cause analysis, distributed tracing, and AI-driven insights enable anomaly detection, which allows us to quickly understand failures, recover faster, maintain system availability, and handle failures in complex distributed environments by seeing how services interact and where breakdowns occur."
"Splunk Infrastructure Monitoring provided our customers with visibility into their overall infrastructure."
"The solution monitors attacks or unauthorized access to the information we want to protect."
"The best feature of this product is the latency and processing of all the telemetry that is being received, which gives full visibility at the right time."
"The value was visible to the relevant audience as soon as we started the implementation, where it took the people a lot of manual efforts and time to diagnose their systems, they were able to get automated insights as an available feature within Splunk Observability Cloud."
"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."
"The features I find most valuable is the querying and alerting capabilities."
"I gladly recommend VMware Aria Operations for Applications because it is cost effective and has commendable AI response capabilities."
"I find VMware Aria Operations for Applications to be very stable, and I would rate it a ten out of ten."
"This solution allows me to have true visibility for any metrics when it comes to my cloud, and private."
"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."
"We haven't had any issues with stability."
"Scalability for VMware Aria Operations for Applications is easy to implement and manage."
"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."
 

Cons

"Unfortunately, with our current setup, we just have to implement Log Observer in a couple of instances so that we can have that integration with Splunk Observability Cloud."
"A wide variety of logging makes log onboarding difficult."
"We were facing some challenges with the stability of Splunk Observability Cloud regarding the login page. It was not working several times and was not accepting SSO authentication."
"If it is a new deployment and you have a medium client with about 2,000 users or computers or servers, it will take about six months just to install and configure."
"Regarding how Splunk Observability Cloud can be improved, there are few opportunities for improvement, but perhaps one area of improvement is greater integration with partners and clearer ability to quickly gather the information I need to supercharge my AI workloads using Splunk Observability Cloud."
"In terms of additional features I would want to see in future releases, since Cisco acquired Splunk, more Cisco integration could be beneficial."
"Splunk isn't an ideal tool for application performance management due to the extensive setup required."
"The cardinality is pretty low."
"In the new version, I would love to see more prediction capabilities. It would be great if one could see the alerts get a little more enriched with information and become more human-friendly instead of the technical stuff that they put in there. I think those would be really awesome outcomes to get."
"So far, the solution's learning curve has been pretty high."
"The main problem I have is that the license cost is very high."
"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 documentation and integration with Kubernetes could be improved."
"I would like to see integration with Kubernetes cluster and APIs so that you can manage the entire stack."
"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."
"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 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'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."
"The solution's pricing is costly."
"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."
"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 Infrastructure Monitoring is an expensive solution."
"The pricing is reasonable."
"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."
"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
12%
Manufacturing Company
8%
Outsourcing Company
8%
Construction Company
8%
Financial Services Firm
11%
Manufacturing Company
10%
Comms Service Provider
8%
Outsourcing Company
7%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business37
Midsize Enterprise9
Large Enterprise72
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business4
Midsize Enterprise1
Large Enterprise10
 

Questions from the Community

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 advice do you have for others considering SignalFx?
We're a customer and end-user. Currently, in France, we cannot use the artificial intelligence option. While this option is enabled for the United States and many countries, it's not yet available ...
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

Splunk Infrastructure Monitoring, Splunk Real User Monitoring (RUM), Splunk Synthetic 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: September 2026.
913,806 professionals have used our research since 2012.