We performed a comparison between IBM Turbonomic and VMware Aria Operations based on our users’ reviews in five categories. After reading all of the collected data, you can find our conclusion below.
IBM Turbonomic reviewers like its automation and orchestration components and say that it greatly reduces operational expenditures and saves them vast amounts of time by identifying misconfigurations very early on. Some users mention that they would like better generic reports.
VMware Aria Operations users praise its capacity planning feature and say that it is easy to use, is excellent for monitoring, and provides them with valuable insights. Several users say they would like more APIs and integration options.
Comparison Results: IBM Turbonomic comes out on top in this comparison. It is a reasonably priced solution that greatly reduces costs. On the other hand, VMware Aria Operations users say that it is an expensive solution.
"I like the analytics that help us optimize compatibility. Whereas Azure Advisor tells us what we have to do, Turbonomic has automation which actually does those things. That means we don't have to be present to get them done and simplifies our IT engineers' jobs."
"Turbonomic has helped optimize cloud operations and reduced our cloud costs significantly. Overall, we are at about 40 percent savings, and we spend about three million a year just in Azure. It reduces the size of the VMs, putting them into the right template for usage. People don't realize that you don't have to future-proof a virtual machine in Azure. You just need to build it for today. As the business or service grows, you can scale up or out. About 90 percent of all the costs that we've reduced has been from sizing machines appropriately."
"I like Turbonomic's built-in reporting. It provides a ton of information out of the box, so I don't have to build panels for the monthly summaries and other reports I need to present to management. We get better performance and bottleneck reporting from this than we do from our older EMC software."
"I only deal with the infrastructure side, so I really couldn't speak to more than load balancing as the most valuable feature for me. It provides specific actions that prevent resource starvation. It always keeps things in perfect balance."
"The feature for optimizing VMs is the most valuable because a number of the agencies have workloads or VMs that are not really being used. Turbonomic enables us to say, 'If you combine these, or if you decide to go with a reserve instance, you will save this much.'"
"With over 2500 ESX VMs, including 1500+ XenDesktop VDI desktops, hosted over two datacentres and 80+ vSphere hosts, firefighting has become something of the past."
"Rightsizing is valuable. Its recommendations are pretty good."
"My favorite part of the solution is the automation scheduling. Being able to choose when actions happen, and how they happen..."
"vROps was the only tool which we found which was capable at the time to create customized dashboards."
"We do not have any problems with the product. It solves our problems. We now know if something is on the console and if there really is a problem. Before this, we had a lot of false positives. It digs into the problems and then at the end it just drops it."
"It enables me to anticipate our system needs, to be able to know if a host is overloaded, to be able to move things off of it... vROps has really helped us focus in on where the trouble spots are, to be able to alleviate those problems before they even become problems, so it's great."
"The last two versions of it, we've gone with the integrated, high-availability built into the product, and that was a welcome change for us. It's even better now not having to have any kind of load-balancer in front of it..."
"This solution is most definitely scalable. We've already gone back to the drawing board and specifically designed it from the ground up, to be scalable with the size of our environment moving forward."
"It has enhanced our ability to troubleshoot and effectively manage our solutions to understand what clusters are having issues and diagnose those programs right away, so we can be proactive."
"The most valuable feature is the insight into real-time performance."
"I have found the backup extremely useful in my use cases."
"Remove the need for special in-house knowledge and development."
"There is room for improvement [with] upgrades. We have deployed the newer version, version 8 of Turbonomic. The problem is that there is no way to upgrade between major Turbonomic versions. You can upgrade minor versions without a problem, but when you go from version 6 to version 7, or version 7 to version 8, you basically have to deploy it new and let it start gathering data again. That is a problem because all of the data, all of the savings calculations that had been done on the old version, are gone. There's no way to keep track of your lifetime savings across versions."
"I would love to see Turbonomic analyze backup data. We have had people in the past put servers into daily full backups with seven-year retention and where the disk size is two terabytes. So, every single day, there is a two terabyte snapshot put into a Blob somewhere. I would love to see Turbonomic say, "Here are all your backups along with the age of them," to help us manage the savings by not having us spend so much on the storage in Azure. That would be huge."
"It sometimes does get false positives. Sometimes, it'll move something when it really wasn't a performance metric. I've seen it do that, but it's pretty much an automated tool for performance. We've only got about 500 virtual machines, so lots of times, I'm able to manage it physically, but it's definitely a nice tool for a larger enterprise that might be managing 2,000 or 3,000 virtual machines."
"I would like Turbonomic to add more services, especially in the cloud area. I have already told them this. They can add Azure NetApp Files. They can add Azure Blob storage. They have already added Azure App service, but they can do more."
"The one point is the reporting. We do have reports out of it, but they're not the level of graphical detail I would like."
"We don't use Turbonomic for FinOps and part of the reason is its cost reporting. The reporting could be much more robust and, if that were the case, I could pitch it for FinOps."
"Additional interfaces would be helpful."
"It's a very complex product. It has gotten better over the years, but they still have some work to do. It still requires a lot of time, and some training, to get accustomed to it."
"We are looking to optimize all the parts. For example, vCenter can be fully deployed automatically, which is not the case with vROps. We can click some next buttons to integrate vCenter and would like these type of features for vROps, if possible."
"There were early kinks in the some of the virtual appliances as we rolled them out."
"For the initial setup, there should be some sort of auto discovery of the environment. That should be enabled. It has the ability to discover a main node, but it could still be made easier, to reduce the initial configuration and setup time."
"One of the features I would like them to bring in is more application monitoring and more visibly into applications. Instead of the actual hardware and the environment, they need to go one step further and bring in application availability and application performance. I don't really care if the hardware's overloaded, as long as the application is performing correctly. That's all the users care about and that's all I really care about."
"The tool itself is not as scalable as we'd like it to be. We have seven or more data centers and we have collectors deployed throughout the whole environment, but we have capacity and performance issues with the tool. We'd like to expand the product so that we would have more capacity, but it has limitations."
"While the initial setup was somewhat straightforward, there is some complexity. Going forward, I would like there to be more clarity in the process. Because to complete the setup process, our team had to open up a case with the technical support, and they had to guide us through the process."
"In some respects, the UI is pretty stale. It has been that way from the beginning. Some easier ways to create custom dashboards for management, versus the tech guys, versus administrators, that would be helpful."
IBM Turbonomic is ranked 4th in Cloud Management with 204 reviews while VMware Aria Operations is ranked 2nd in Cloud Management with 360 reviews. IBM Turbonomic is rated 8.8, while VMware Aria Operations is rated 8.2. The top reviewer of IBM Turbonomic writes "The solution reduced our operational expenditures and is able to identify points before we even noticed them ". On the other hand, the top reviewer of VMware Aria Operations writes "It has good stability, but the report-generating feature needs improvement". IBM Turbonomic is most compared with Azure Cost Management, Cisco Intersight, VMware Aria Cost powered by CloudHealth, VMware vSphere and Cloudability, whereas VMware Aria Operations is most compared with VMware Aria Automation, VMware vSphere, Veeam ONE, Nutanix Prism and SolarWinds Virtualization Manager. See our IBM Turbonomic vs. VMware Aria Operations report.
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