No more typing reviews! Try our Samantha, our new voice AI agent.

VMware Aria Operations for Applications vs Zabbix comparison

Why PeerSpot?
 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive SummaryUpdated on Jul 24, 2024

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
18th
Ranking in IT Infrastructure Monitoring
13th
Ranking in Cloud Monitoring Software
13th
Average Rating
8.0
Reviews Sentiment
6.3
Number of Reviews
14
Ranking in other categories
Container Monitoring (6th)
Zabbix
Ranking in Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability
11th
Ranking in IT Infrastructure Monitoring
1st
Ranking in Cloud Monitoring Software
4th
Average Rating
8.4
Reviews Sentiment
7.0
Number of Reviews
110
Ranking in other categories
Network Monitoring Software (1st), Server Monitoring (1st)
 

Mindshare comparison

As of November 2026, in the Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability category, the mindshare of VMware Aria Operations for Applications is 1.3%, up from 1.1% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Zabbix is 2.3%, down from 3.1% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability Mindshare Distribution
ProductMindshare (%)
Zabbix2.3%
VMware Aria Operations for Applications1.3%
Other96.4%
Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability
 

Featured Reviews

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.
PJ
Developer at a financial services firm with 501-1,000 employees
Unified monitoring has reduced outages and enables proactive fixes with automated remediation
My favorite best feature is the ability to manage complex hybrid environments from a single dashboard. Zabbix natively supports monitoring everything from Linux servers and Windows servers to network devices and cloud infrastructure. The view I rely on the most on a day-to-day basis is a custom dashboard combining the problem widget and graph widget. The problem widget gives me an immediate filtered snapshot of the active alerts across all our servers. I pair that with the graph widget, which allows me to track performance metrics and compare values over time, such as monitoring storage and capacity trends on our Synology appliance. Having all of this in a single pane of glass saves me from constantly digging through logs. I also rely heavily on custom dashboards that combine the problem widget and the top host widget. The problem widget gives me an immediate filtered list of any active alerts across the entire environment. I pair that with the top host widget, which instantly shows me which servers are consuming the highest resources. Having all of these related metrics side-by-side in a single view allows me to spot the issue and identify the exact server causing it without having to dig through separate tools. Zabbix has built-in machine learning for continuous anomaly detection and proactive trend prediction. It establishes a baseline by analyzing historical data, allowing it to forecast impending issues, such as predicting exactly when a system will run out of resources before critical thresholds are breached. From a governance and security perspective, it delivers enterprise-grade security by supporting full data encryption and integration with external secret vaults to protect sensitive credentials. From a governance perspective, it features detailed configuration change tracking and role-based user permissions, which allows administrators to secure different teams or tenants within a single environment. Regarding accuracy, Zabbix's proactive alerts are highly accurate and trustworthy, provided they are fed enough historical data to establish a solid baseline. Regarding reliability and output, the prediction outputs are extremely reliable because Zabbix relies on transparent statistical mathematics, such as standard deviation and weighted moving averages, rather than a closed black box AI model. The straightforward statistical approach allows administrators to forecast value reliability and predict exactly how much time they have before a system reaches a critical problem threshold.

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."
"The most valuable aspects of the solution are its ease of use and its ease of implementation."
"People are very pleased with the implementation."
"I find VMware Aria Operations for Applications to be very stable, and I would rate it a ten out of ten."
"It significantly improves application performance management by offering recommendations for resource allocation to avoid wastage or overcommitment."
"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."
"Scalability for VMware Aria Operations for Applications is easy to implement and manage."
"It monitors almost everything."
"We use Zabbix to monitor our organization's IT infrastructure and workstations. We don't use Microsoft Intune since it's expensive. The tool's real-time alerting system has proved crucial for us, particularly when a new device joins a network that is not one of our own devices. It notifies us about the presence of this new device, allowing us to investigate further. Additionally, it alerts us about disk usage, memory usage, and the software installed on the machine."
"Setup was straightforward. Initial deployment took two or three months."
"One of the real benefits is the API; you can do anything with an API, it makes life much easier."
"ZABBIX is an all-in-one monitoring solution and we don't need any other monitoring tool since we use ZABBIX."
"We delivered a project for telemetry but not just for IT, monitoring different parameters for radio communication sites and collecting information about alarms and analog values, and we use this system in mission critical applications for radio communications, police, firemen's, health, etcetera."
"I'm supervising all the IT departments, and Zabbix seems quite good for them. It provides graphics and information in real time. We get alerts about crashes on the system, enabling us to quickly repair issues. We can easily find devices with problems."
"The solution is open-source, easy to manage, and user-friendly making it easy for anyone to use."
 

Cons

"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."
"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."
"The solution could be expensive, which might be a limiting factor."
"They just need more capability. A few areas still need more enhancements in the technology capability space."
"The implementation is a long process that should be improved."
"So far, the solution's learning curve has been pretty high."
"The main problem I have is that the license cost is very high."
"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."
"Zabbix is not easy to configure, and upgrading is also an issue."
"Implementing Zabbix is difficult. I've deployed many solutions over the years, and Zabbix is the hardest to implement. You have to do some development to get it to work with IBM, Micro Focus, or HP products."
"The product could be more secure and more stable."
"There is a bit of a learning curve during installation."
"In an upcoming release, there should be automated reports which we are currently doing manually."
"Overall, setting up Zabbix is a challenge."
"It becomes complex when we are growing and need to add proxies. We need more scalability features and documentation for different use cases."
"They should open an SSH session from the web interface."
 

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."
"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."
"Different locations require different setups. In your terms, around 300 to around 400K USD."
"This is an open-source solution that can be used free of charge."
"It is freeware. We still use the free version of Zabbix."
"I was using the free, Community Edition."
"Zabbix is an open-source tool, and it's free to use."
"This solution is open-source and free to use."
"We were searching for an open source solution and Zabbix fit the bill because it is free and open source under the GPL license."
"There is no license but we need to pay for support."
"There is a license required for this solution and we pay annually for our license."
report
Use our free recommendation engine to learn which Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability solutions are best for your needs.
919,919 professionals have used our research since 2012.
 

Comparison Review

it_user174738 - PeerSpot reviewer
IT Developer at a tech services company with 51-200 employees
May 31, 2015
Nagios vs. Zabbix vs. PRTG vs. Spiceworks vs. Solarwinds Network Performance Monitor
I have researched a quite a few network monitoring tools which can be used for various monitoring purposes of not only the servers, but the intermediate routers as well. There are majorly three types of these softwares. Ones which are completely open-source, you can do almost anything you want…
 

Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Manufacturing Company
10%
Financial Services Firm
9%
Outsourcing Company
8%
Comms Service Provider
8%
Comms Service Provider
12%
Financial Services Firm
10%
Computer Software Company
9%
Manufacturing Company
8%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business4
Midsize Enterprise1
Large Enterprise10
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business57
Midsize Enterprise24
Large Enterprise35
 

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 is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Zabbix?
I think Zabbix is economical, whereas SolarWinds is expensive. SolarWinds has a lot of secure features, but Zabbix is providing everything free of cost. Zabbix is economical, and you can install it...
What needs improvement with Zabbix?
The initial configuration has a steep learning curve because Zabbix is so flexible and customizable. Setting up the right templates, pre-shows, and scripts requires a lot of deep Linux and system k...
What is your primary use case for Zabbix?
On a day-to-day basis, I use Zabbix to monitor our entire infrastructure stack, including our Linux servers, Active Directory, domain controller, and Synology NAS storage array. A specific problem ...
 

Also Known As

Tanzu Observability, Wavefront, Wavefront by VMware, VMware Tanzu Observability
No data available
 

Overview

 

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
1. IBM 2. Dell 3. Cisco 4. HP 5. Oracle 6. Microsoft 7. Amazon 8. Google 9. Facebook 10. Twitter 11. LinkedIn 12. Netflix 13. Adobe 14. VMware 15. Salesforce 16. SAP 17. Intel 18. AT&T 19. Verizon 20. T-Mobile 21. Vodafone 22. Ericsson 23. Nokia 24. Siemens 25. General Electric 26. Honeywell 27. Philips 28. Sony 29. Samsung 30. LG 31. Panasonic 32. Toshiba
Find out what your peers are saying about VMware Aria Operations for Applications vs. Zabbix and other solutions. Updated: October 2026.
919,919 professionals have used our research since 2012.