VMware Aria Operations for Applications vs vRealize Network Insight comparison

VMware Aria Operations for Applications vs. vRealize Network Insight

Download the complete report

Helped 881,515 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

VMware Aria Operations for ...

Ranking in IT Infrastructure Monitoring

17th

Average Rating

8.0

Reviews Sentiment

6.3

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability (20th), Container Monitoring (6th), Cloud Monitoring Software (15th)

vRealize Network Insight

Ranking in IT Infrastructure Monitoring

39th

Average Rating

8.6

Reviews Sentiment

6.0

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

Network Monitoring Software (36th)

Mindshare comparison

As of February 2026, in the IT Infrastructure Monitoring category, the mindshare of VMware Aria Operations for Applications is 1.6%, up from 1.2% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of vRealize Network Insight is 0.8%, up from 0.5% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.

IT Infrastructure Monitoring Market Share Distribution
Product	Market Share (%)
VMware Aria Operations for Applications	1.6%
vRealize Network Insight	0.8%
Other	97.6%

IT Infrastructure Monitoring

Featured Reviews

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

Shaijith KB

Senior System Specialist at General Directorate of Residence and Foreigners Affairs (GDRFA)

Comprehensive management and detailed reports benefit operations while improvements are needed in support and maintenance

We have Tanzu and OpenShift. We have OpenShift, Canonical, and the Tanzu one. The Tanzu platform from VMware is a Kubernetes platform. We haven't completely installed Tanzu yet; we installed the vROps part. vRealize Network Insight is beneficial because you can control the East-West traffic. vRealize has a component called NSX, which has East-West traffic controlling and micro-segmentation, that is one of the best options, and we have the layer extension, layer 2 extension possible through NSX. If you have anything accountable in any business, even in a candy business, having proper accountability on what you are selling and buying will save a lot. If you don't know what you're selling and buying, you will end up with a loss. My team does not use the flow analytics feature; we have a security and network monitoring team, which is a different SOC team. I am using it as an administrator internally. We perform different tasks including costing analysis, capacity management, and many other things. vRealize Network Insight has a concern about the maintenance part, as it requires a person to monitor it completely. It's not something you install and your report will be generated automatically. You have to work on this properly to get the insights. vRealize Network Automation, vRealize Operations, and vRealize Network Insight are completely related to the network. I cannot say much about these network aspects because I am on the operations side, but overall, the vRealize suite is good for reporting perspective or any ISO-related documentation; this is very helpful. The product is called vRealize Operations Manager, and now it is referred to as Aria or vAria. I am now a Senior System Specialist. We use different metrics because we have multiple departments, and we can monitor utilization and comparisons with the previous year. On a scale of one to ten, I rate this solution a seven.

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

"No issues with stability."

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

"It significantly improves application performance management by offering recommendations for resource allocation to avoid wastage or overcommitment."

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

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

"People are very pleased with the implementation."

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

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

More VMware Aria Operations for Applications pros

"We get proper reporting on different aspects such as utilization and health monitoring reports, including throughput details and network latency, and there are many things we can obtain from there."

"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."

"One of the most valuable features is the ability to look at the traffic flows, to look at NetFlow data."

"The most valuable feature for me is the different views that you can get when selecting an application or a VLAN. It shows you the traffic flows. It gives you a visual representation of something that, in text, just may not make as much sense."

"It has definitely helped us to meet compliance rules by assuring that all traffic is going to where it's supposed to go. It can be used to report that you are in compliance, as well as helping you get into compliance."

"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 is being able to easily see the path that the VM traffic is taking, what ports are in use."

"We can see everything going on in NSX and get a good picture of our environment."

More vRealize Network Insight pros

Cons

"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."

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

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

"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."

More VMware Aria Operations for Applications cons

"There is room for improvement when it comes to pricing because we pay here in Brazil, and all the costs are based on the dollar."

"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 only reason I would not give it a nine or a 10 is for cost reasons. It seems to be one of those things that really belongs as part of the product inherently and not as an add-on. That would be my only concern."

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

"I want to be able to monitor a network flow that is approximately two weeks back, but I haven't found an easy way to do this."

"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."

"It needs to be a little easier to use and to understand the information it's putting out. That would make it more helpful. If you're not a network person you need to understand things like network policies and concepts. If you gave it to a regular admin, it would be nice if it were easier for them to pick up what is going on, understand the flows and whether or not stuff should be talking to each other, as opposed to just port groups and IP addresses."

"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."

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."

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

"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."

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

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

"It has brought more money into our company."

"vRealize Network Insight is expensive."

"It reduces costs. It takes something that may be challenging and makes it more usable and visual by being able to bring in tools, seeing what their impact is, such as microsegmentation and application rationalization, and seeing it quickly."

"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."

"The solution has reduced the time that we spend on other products. For example, with NSX, we were able to quickly find things that we would normally spend days trying to figure out."

"It's a little expensive, but for what you're getting out of the product, you often see the trade-off. It depends on the type of licensing you have. It might be a little too pricey for some."

More vRealize Network Insight pricing and cost advice

See which vendors are best for you

Use our free recommendation engine to learn which IT Infrastructure Monitoring solutions are best for your needs.

See recommendations

881,515 professionals have used our research since 2012.

Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews

Financial Services Firm

12%

Manufacturing Company

11%

Computer Software Company

Government

Manufacturing Company

13%

Computer Software Company

12%

Government

Healthcare Company

Company Size

By reviewers

Large Enterprise

Midsize Enterprise

Small Business

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

By reviewers
Company Size	Count
Small Business	11
Midsize Enterprise	9
Large Enterprise	41

Questions from the Community

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...

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

In VMware you have to buy a separate license for it. We have VVF and VCF-type of licenses, and if you want to go with this NSX and sort of higher-end professional services, you need to go with VCF....

What needs improvement with vRealize Network Insight?

There is room for improvement as not all cases are getting resolved, and we often do not get L3 support directly, having to go through L1 and L2, resulting in delays that usually are a headache for...

What is your primary use case for vRealize Network Insight?

We have Tanzu, and we also work with multiple Kubernetes services such as Nutanix and Google. We are working on these Kubernetes services on the operations side. For Tanzu, we have several componen...

Grafana vs VMware Aria Operations for Applications

Comparisons

Compared 6% of the time

Zabbix vs VMware Aria Operations for Applications

Compared 5% of the time

Dynatrace vs VMware Aria Operations for Applications

Compared 5% of the time

Datadog vs VMware Aria Operations for Applications

Compared 5% of the time

PRTG Network Monitor vs VMware Aria Operations for Applications

Compared 4% of the time

More VMware Aria Operations for Applications Competitors

Kentik vs vRealize Network Insight

Compared 12% of the time

Alluvio AppResponse vs vRealize Network Insight

Compared 7% of the time

WhatsUp Gold vs vRealize Network Insight

Compared 7% of the time

Datadog vs vRealize Network Insight

Compared 6% of the time

Goliath Performance Monitor vs vRealize Network Insight

Compared 4% of the time

More vRealize Network Insight Competitors

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.

Broadcom

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.

Broadcom

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