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VMware Aria Operations for Applications vs Zabbix comparison

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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
14th
Ranking in Cloud Monitoring Software
13th
Average Rating
8.0
Reviews Sentiment
6.3
Number of Reviews
14
Ranking in other categories
Container Monitoring (5th)
Zabbix
Ranking in Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability
11th
Ranking in IT Infrastructure Monitoring
2nd
Ranking in Cloud Monitoring Software
3rd
Average Rating
8.4
Reviews Sentiment
7.0
Number of Reviews
109
Ranking in other categories
Network Monitoring Software (1st), Server Monitoring (1st)
 

Mindshare comparison

As of September 2026, in the Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability category, the mindshare of VMware Aria Operations for Applications is 1.3%, up from 1.0% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Zabbix is 2.2%, down from 3.3% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability Mindshare Distribution
ProductMindshare (%)
Zabbix2.2%
VMware Aria Operations for Applications1.3%
Other96.5%
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.
KamranBhatti - PeerSpot reviewer
Network Engineer at a computer software company with 11-50 employees
Helps reduce response time but has room to improve customization complexity
We are not working on simple standalone solutions like Kaspersky DDoS Protection or Hybrid Cloud Security. Once you understand Zabbix, then it is easy to customize those web pages and graphs for our customer use. It is fully automated to your requirements. Zabbix is working fine with no issues, and I am satisfied with it. We have combined Zabbix and SolarWinds. The integration works fine, and it is easy to integrate Zabbix with the IT environment. We were trying to purchase MDR (Managed Detection and Response), but we are not working on that. I don't have real experience with MDR. We are using Falcon software for that. We are working with Falcon Complete, not with Sandbox. We are not using Kaspersky for business or cloud protection. For that, we are using Zabbix CrowdStrike Falcon Complete solution. I have given this review an overall rating of 8.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"The most valuable aspects of the solution are its ease of use and its ease of implementation."
"I gladly recommend VMware Aria Operations for Applications because it is cost effective and has commendable AI response capabilities."
"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."
"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."
"This solution will give you a single pane of glass for everything, and centralized monitoring."
"This solution allows me to have true visibility for any metrics when it comes to my cloud, and private."
"I find VMware Aria Operations for Applications to be very stable, and I would rate it a ten out of ten."
"It has a familiar interface, which makes it easy to get started."
"We value the auto-host discovery, template import, bulk import/export features. Newer versions also add nice features, such as multi-IP per host."
"Setup was straightforward. Initial deployment took two or three months."
"The product is very stable."
"Zabbix is a cost-effective solution. We're a small organization with a few dozen devices to monitor, and it was available for free. We can see what we need. We haven't done an in-depth analysis on it, but we're currently okay with the product."
"The most valuable features in Zabbix are those that help us overcome bottlenecks in CPU usage, as well as reduce memory delay. I know that we have only reached the tip of the iceberg of what Zabbix's features can do for us, and we have not used all of them yet."
"We are now more pro-active before an issue appears to our customer because all the layers are now converged by Zabbix monitoring."
"Overall, I think that Zabbix is an awesome tool and I would use it again, rather than another one."
"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."
 

Cons

"An area for improvement would be more in-depth reporting, such as analyzing disk IO during business hours compared to after hours."
"The support from VMware is not very helpful. This is because you always receive many questions from the support service but few actual solutions."
"The implementation is a long process that should be improved."
"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."
"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."
"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."
"So far, the solution's learning curve has been pretty high."
"Its UI needs to be improved a little bit more so that an end-user is also able to handle it. I can handle it, but others should also be able to handle it in a better way. It becomes complex when we are growing and need to add proxies. We need more scalability features and documentation for different use cases. A lot of articles are available, but they need to be in proper documentation. For example, when you have thousands of servers that have to be monitored in different regions of the world, there should be some kind of documentation to describe how you can create proxies and add them. Sometimes, when you are using the database, it can get overloaded. When the network is growing, the number of transactions becomes very high, and the database gets overloaded. There should be information about how to reduce the load on the MySQL database, which is what Zabbix is using. The market is growing a lot, and it should be enhanced for a lot more things. We are currently bringing enhancements at our end for different use cases. For example, when dockerization is going on, how can we check the logs inside the Dockers. We should also be able to monitor and check the number of logins and add features such as SSO login and two-factor authentication as a protocol. These are the security features and concerns that we have to deal with. Currently, we are developing modules to add features to Zabbix, but they should also work on these features."
"In an upcoming release, there should be automated reports which we are currently doing manually."
"The low discovery functionality is still very young so this feature has a lot of room for improvement."
"I had problems using Zabbix when working with SUSE Enterprise; many companies use SUSE."
"The GUI could be more intuitive. Also, we'd like streaming telemetry. Zabbix might have this feature, but I haven't seen it yet. It took us a long time to get started because the documentation isn't very descriptive. We had to go through various sources like YouTube and forums to get this solution working."
"Even though it’s such a powerful monitoring system, it would be more helpful if it had a flexible UI."
"When we have a problem, we have to do a lot of research to solve it."
"The only issue we have had with Zabbix is when we decided to make an update or upgrade."
 

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."
"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."
"The solution is free. However, many open-sourced tools start out free but eventually start charging."
"There is a license required for this solution and we pay annually for our license."
"I was using the free, Community Edition."
"It's free software released under the GNU/GPL license."
"The tool's licensing costs are yearly."
"It's an open-source solution that can be used free of charge."
"If you have 20,000 hosts, the support costs around €95,000 for a year."
"Zabbix and Grafana are both open source products, we only needed to go to their website and download the application and we began to use them. The solutions are free."
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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
Financial Services Firm
12%
Manufacturing Company
11%
Comms Service Provider
7%
Construction Company
7%
Comms Service Provider
11%
Financial Services Firm
10%
Computer Software Company
9%
Manufacturing Company
7%
 

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 Business56
Midsize Enterprise23
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?
I am using only Area Operations, but I don't prefer it. I installed Zabbix for the 3000 devices. Area Operations is not good.
What is your primary use case for Zabbix?
I am still working with VMware and Area Operations, but I installed Zabbix now. I think Zabbix is better than VMware Area Operations. It's really good. I'm working with both Zabbix and VMware now.
 

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: August 2026.
911,952 professionals have used our research since 2012.