VMware Aria Operations for Applications vs WhatsUp Gold comparison

VMware Aria Operations for Applications vs. WhatsUp Gold

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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 Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability

17th

Ranking in IT Infrastructure Monitoring

15th

Ranking in Cloud Monitoring Software

13th

Average Rating

8.0

Reviews Sentiment

6.3

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

Container Monitoring (5th)

WhatsUp Gold

Ranking in Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability

29th

Ranking in IT Infrastructure Monitoring

30th

Ranking in Cloud Monitoring Software

23rd

Average Rating

7.8

Reviews Sentiment

6.2

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

Network Monitoring Software (32nd), Server Monitoring (16th), Configuration Management (17th), Log Management (28th), Network Traffic Analysis (NTA) (12th)

Mindshare comparison

As of October 2025, in the Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability category, the mindshare of VMware Aria Operations for Applications is 1.0%, up from 0.8% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of WhatsUp Gold is 0.6%, up from 0.4% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.

Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability Market Share Distribution
Product	Market Share (%)
VMware Aria Operations for Applications	1.0%
WhatsUp Gold	0.6%
Other	98.4%

Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability

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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Tom Condo

Supervisor Information Services Operations at Seminole County Public Schools

If CPU, memory, or disk space is over-utilized, it alerts us immediately via text or email if there is an issue

When it comes to the intuitiveness of the topology mapping feature, our network architect created a vision diagram of our entire network and then created the links tied into the WhatsUp active monitoring to different spots on our topology map. It's one of the more critical functions we do here. We have the map displayed in different places in our room and help desk. We get alerted via emails but we can also see it visually. It does what it says it's going to do. We find this feature very helpful. The interactive mapping interface for scrolling, zooming, and drilling down on an element to learn about a network issue is good. When we see a network there will sometimes be a spot that has one link. You can go into a particular part of the topology map, scroll in, and see exactly which module it is. All the information is provided. This feature really helps. You can see the correlation between that link and what failed. This feature is very helpful. The interface is fairly intuitive. Some of our users used SolarWinds and Nagios, and WhatsUp is easy in comparison. Once you get set up, the look, feel, and configuration are good. Our network architect had never used it before but he was able to create the Visio and map. It was very simple. He has no problems with it.

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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

"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."

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

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

"The most valuable aspects of the solution are its ease of use and its ease of implementation."

"I find VMware Aria Operations for Applications to be very stable, and I would rate it a ten out of ten."

"No issues with stability."

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

"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

"The threshold alerting is the most valuable feature."

"The interface in the last few years it has been a lot greater, they are much more user-friendly. I like the interface."

"The most valuable feature is the auto-discovery function."

"The most valuable features are network bandwidth monitoring and monitoring device health."

"The installation and configuration process are easy."

"The most valuable feature of WhatsUp Gold is NetFlow and the virtualized maps."

"This is a good, stable network monitoring solution for devices."

"It handles the basics of monitoring."

More WhatsUp Gold pros

Cons

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

"An area for improvement would be more in-depth reporting, such as analyzing disk IO during business hours compared to after hours."

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

"The documentation and integration with Kubernetes could be improved."

"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."

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

More VMware Aria Operations for Applications cons

"I would like to see better integration with switches so that you can see what is connected to each port, what the traffic is, and have a network map automatically generated."

"I would like to see them do an enhancement to the application monitoring. A lot of other products do better application monitoring so they should do some improvements to the application monitoring."

"Regional product team support is not very good."

"The tool should focus on increasing its market share, as it is the only area of concern where improvements are needed."

"I think there are a few bugs now. Although they give some resolution for this, we cannot share the network remotely because of our company policy."

"The interface needs some work."

"Setting up WhatsUp Gold is complicated and not easy because it requires managing SNMP and many complex settings in the devices it's monitoring, and fine-tuning it to fit our needs is also not very easy."

"The initial setup of WhatsUp Gold is a medium range of difficulty levels. However, if it is your first time it could be difficult."

More WhatsUp Gold cons

Pricing and Cost Advice

"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."

"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."

"It is per device, per year. The pricing is very clear. If you have a service agreement, you get all of your major upgrades and minor upgrades. It was under $10,000 to go all-in with all of the different add-ons for it."

"This is a well priced solution."

"The tool's price is reasonable. WhatsUp Gold is cheaper than SolarWinds."

"The pricing can be on the expensive side when considering competing products."

"I'm not sure, but it's expensive. We don't pay any additional fees."

"Pricing is reasonable compared to other products."

"The most valuable feature is the cost compared to other solutions."

"There is a license needed to use WhatsUp Gold."

More WhatsUp Gold pricing and cost advice

See which vendors are best for you

Use our free recommendation engine to learn which Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability solutions are best for your needs.

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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews

Financial Services Firm

14%

Manufacturing Company

12%

Computer Software Company

Government

Financial Services Firm

13%

Manufacturing Company

12%

Government

11%

Computer Software Company

10%

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	9
Midsize Enterprise	5
Large Enterprise	14

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?

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...

What do you like most about WhatsUp Gold?

The interactive mapping interface for scrolling, zooming, and drilling down on an element to learn about a network issue is good. When we see a network there will sometimes be a spot that has one l...

What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for WhatsUp Gold?

Clients find the licensing calculator confusing, but we simplify this for them by collecting relevant information first. The licensing is based on devices, providing better cost-effectiveness than ...

What needs improvement with WhatsUp Gold?

It would be great if WhatsUp Gold could add features that simplify management with AI, as it is currently too complicated to manage.

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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

WhatsUp Gold

Download WhatsUp Gold product report

Also Known As

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

No data available

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

Explore and manage your entire network infrastructure effortlessly with WhatsUp Gold's robust layer 2/3 discovery, creating a detailed interactive map from the edge to the cloud. Monitor devices, wireless controllers, servers, virtual machines, applications, and traffic flows across various environments. Real-time alerts ensure optimal performance, allowing you to meet or exceed SLAs. The platform offers customizable maps, dashboards, and alerts for easy network management. Quickly resolve issues with intuitive workflows, reducing Mean Time to Resolution (MTTR). WhatsUp Gold's integrated log management provides easy visibility and control of device log data, allowing monitoring, filtering, searching, and alerting on syslogs or Windows logs. Archive logs to comply with regulatory requirements and preserve historical data, all through a user-friendly interface. Streamline network monitoring and issue resolution with WhatsUp Gold, making network management efficient and hassle-free.

Progress Software

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

Artoni Trasporti, Austin Independent School District, Banca Marche, Burke County North Carolina, Cambridge University School of Clinical Medicine, Clayco, Community Integrated Care, Desca, Deutsche Bergbau, Flexi-Van, Gropper, Hamleys, Hammonds Furniture, Knowledge IT, Idras S.P.A., Sibeg, Swann Engineering, Trivium Lindenhof

VMware Aria Operations for Applications vs. WhatsUp Gold