VMware Aria Operations for Applications vs vRealize Network Insight comparison

VMware Aria Operations for Applications vs. vRealize Network Insight

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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

VMware Aria Operations for ...

Ranking in IT Infrastructure Monitoring

29th

Average Rating

8.0

Reviews Sentiment

6.9

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability (27th), Container Monitoring (7th), Cloud Monitoring Software (22nd)

vRealize Network Insight

Ranking in IT Infrastructure Monitoring

23rd

Average Rating

8.6

Reviews Sentiment

7.6

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

Network Monitoring Software (23rd)

Mindshare comparison

As of April 2025, in the IT Infrastructure Monitoring category, the mindshare of VMware Aria Operations for Applications is 1.2%, down from 1.3% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of vRealize Network Insight is 0.5%, down from 0.6% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.

IT Infrastructure Monitoring

Featured Reviews

ToniLindberg

senior consultant at Virtual Consultants Sverige AB

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.

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NiteshKumar1

Principle consultant at Infosys

The tool's configuration is easy and artifacts are easily accessible through professional services and the web

The product is highly regarded, and many customers have been using it along with other VMware products like vSphere and VMware vCloud Usage Insight. However, recently, there's been a trend among customers, especially those using VMware for a considerable period, to explore the potential of migrating to the public cloud. The common concern among these customers is how the VMware products will perform in the public cloud environment. Migrating instances from VMware to different platforms is not easy, especially when dealing with many instances across multiple customers. Customers are keen to maintain the functionality of their existing VMware products but prefer to run them on the public cloud instead of on-premise servers. Our clients for vRealize Network Insight are enterprise businesses. I rate it a nine out of ten.

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Quotes from Members

We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use. Here are some excerpts of what they said:

Pros

"The features I find most valuable is the querying and alerting capabilities."

"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."

"The stability of Aria Operations for Applications has improved significantly over the years."

"The solution is great for virtualization and preparing the infrastructure in Tanzu to test products. It's very fast and has good visibility."

"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."

"I gladly recommend VMware Aria Operations for Applications because it is cost effective and has commendable AI response capabilities."

"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."

"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."

More VMware Aria Operations for Applications pros

"If we deploy NSX it shows us how the workflow will flow in the organization, what the roadblocks are, and what we need to do to overcome those hurdles. When we run this product, it gives us reports which describe problems with physical switches. We work with the network team to get them all resolved."

"The most valuable feture is NetFlow to help us understand how VMs communicate with each other over ports that are known and ports that are also unknown to us. Our company is a security company, so it's very important for us to know exactly which VMs are doing what at all times."

"It is user-friendly. It's pretty simple to deploy and to run. It gives you pretty easy-to-understand reports, very graphically intense, so you can visualize what's going on in your network."

"I like being able to see the flows coming in and out of the product. In terms of monitoring network flows, we use it to verify whether or not different servers/applications should be communicating with each other."

"The most valuable feature for us is that insight into what our network is really doing - it's a fairly complex network. Not having to go through thousands of lines of network configuration to find firewall ports that were open or closed, for various ports, was very valuable. It went out and found everything we need very quickly."

"The solution helps reduce time to value, increase performance, provide deep visibility, and easily manage networks."

"As a troubleshooting tool, it's a level-3 troubleshooting-skills tool and it's very easy to use and very easy to find the information that you need."

"It has really tightened down the security. That was something that we were lacking. It has also given us deep visibility into our network. We can really get down and see all of the traffic within the data center, between the VMs, between the applications, database servers, other application servers, web servers. We can identify everything that is communicating, and we can see it all on one product."

More vRealize Network Insight pros

Cons

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

"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."

"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."

"The initial setup should be easier and more seamless."

"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."

"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."

"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 return on investment is best suited for organizations that do not have the resources for a dedicated VM environment team. However, the cost of the product doesn't show significant benefits."

More VMware Aria Operations for Applications cons

"If it were more application-aware, more descriptive; if it were able to determine the application that is actually doing the communication, that would be easier. More application information: which user or account it's accessing, is it accessing this application, doing these calls, if it is accessing a script, what script is it accessing. Things like that would provide deeper analytics so I can track what's going on. It would not just be, "These people shouldn't be talking," but who is actually doing these calls."

"The IT infrastructure industry is expected to evolve towards a hybrid cloud model in the next five to ten years. In this model, most of the customer's resources reside on-premise within a private cloud setup, such as VMware. Another segment operates within public cloud environments like Azure and AWS, and a portion remains in traditional data centers. There should be seamless interoperability between public and private clouds. AWS and VMware need to work together to make it possible. Whether users interact with on-premise infrastructure or configure resources in the public cloud, the user experience must be seamless."

"There could be some deeper analytics into packet inspection and trace flows. It could use some kind of machine learning to look at Layer 7 traffic for potential malware or corrupt packets."

"Since Broadcom acquired VMware, it has been experiencing challenges. Many sales processes are not well defined."

"While it's not exactly a feature, what normally happens when we are trying to look at the VM flow portion is - although Network Insight does have options to integrate a few physical switches into it - we can't really get an end-to-end flow of the network. We might be using a few switches that are not supported by Network Insight. That is where they can improve, in the support for more physical switches and network devices."

"It just needs to be more reliable and more accurate. At some point, there are some things where it does not match properly."

"I'd like to see better support for being able to search the hardware NetFlow data. It ingests fairly well, but you can't tell, in a lot of cases, what source the data came from. I'd like to see more support for picking specific sources. That way you could really make a compelling use case. There are also some difficulties where it can't exactly trace the path between source and destination but if you hit the reverse flow on the same search it shows the entire path."

"The UI, even though once you get to know it, it's easier, still it's hard to figure out by yourself. You have to go read, watch videos. It has a lot of data on it. So that is an issue."

More vRealize Network Insight cons

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."

"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 would rate the pricing as three out of five."

"vRealize Network Insight is expensive."

"We have spent less time investigating network flows, so it is absolutely cost-effective."

"It's an expensive product because we have a lot of nodes."

"Cost always has room for improvement, you could always make it cheaper. But I think it's a good value for what you pay for it."

"They should include the product in NSX because it's important to have it for deployment."

"The solution has helped us to reduce time, increase performance, reduce costs, and even easily manage networks. We are probably seeing 10 to 20 percent labor savings because we are able to be very specific and focused on what we want to do. It ends up saving the customer money and makes us be more efficient on our cost deliveries."

"It has brought more money into our company."

"I rate vRealize Network Insight's pricing a seven point five out of ten."

More vRealize Network Insight pricing and cost advice

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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews

Financial Services Firm

15%

Computer Software Company

14%

Manufacturing Company

10%

Government

Financial Services Firm

15%

Computer Software Company

14%

Manufacturing Company

10%

Government

Company Size

By reviewers

Large Enterprise

Midsize Enterprise

Small Business

Questions from the Community

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...

What do you like most about vRealize Network Insight?

The tool's ease of configuration and use and the availability of information and artifacts through professional services and the web are key factors that customers find valuable.

What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for vRealize Network Insight?

Broadcom is known for increasing product prices, making them expensive compared to what people used to pay. I liken the subscription model to not truly owning what you pay for.

What needs improvement with vRealize Network Insight?

Right now, I do not see a specific area for improvement. My main concern is understanding the intentions of Broadcom, which has acquired VMware. Broadcom should improve by going back to what was wo...

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Product Reports

VMware Aria Operations for Applications

Download VMware Aria Operations for Applications product report

VMware Aria Operations for Applications report

vRealize Network Insight

Download vRealize Network Insight product report

Also Known As

Tanzu Observability, Wavefront, Wavefront by VMware, VMware Tanzu Observability

Arkin

Overview

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.

VMware

VMware vRealize Network Insight delivers intelligent operations for software-defined networking and security. It helps customers build an optimized, highly-available and secure network infrastructure across multi-cloud environments. It accelerates micro-segmentation planning and deployment, enables visibility across virtual and physical networks and provides operational views to manage and scale VMware NSX deployments.

VMware

Sample Customers

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

NTTi3, VCIX-NV, VMware Networking and Security Business Unit, Illumio, CompuNet

VMware Aria Operations for Applications vs. vRealize Network Insight