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Alluvio Aternity vs VMware Aria Operations for Applications comparison

 

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

Alluvio Aternity
Ranking in Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability
31st
Average Rating
8.4
Reviews Sentiment
7.9
Number of Reviews
38
Ranking in other categories
Mobile APM (4th), Digital Experience Monitoring (DEM) (7th)
VMware Aria Operations for ...
Ranking in Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability
18th
Average Rating
8.0
Reviews Sentiment
6.3
Number of Reviews
14
Ranking in other categories
IT Infrastructure Monitoring (17th), Container Monitoring (5th), Cloud Monitoring Software (14th)
 

Mindshare comparison

As of September 2025, in the Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability category, the mindshare of Alluvio Aternity is 0.5%, up from 0.4% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of VMware Aria Operations for Applications is 1.0%, up from 0.8% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability Market Share Distribution
ProductMarket Share (%)
VMware Aria Operations for Applications1.0%
Alluvio Aternity0.5%
Other98.5%
Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability
 

Featured Reviews

Caillin Peacock - PeerSpot reviewer
Enables us to be a lot more agile and proactive in troubleshooting endpoint issues thanks to accurate UX scoring
There are many valuable features. If I had to single out one, it would be the UXI score. That's a proprietary Aternity score that tells you how good or bad the experience is for a user on that particular machine, for a particular app. It neatly encapsulates the pain of the user in a single score. It's very easy to find issues and then drill down further into those issues, based on that score. A lot of tools will do a similar thing, but they will do it indirectly and it's not always relevant. The Aternity score is on the money pretty much every time. The Digital Experience Index (DXI) feature is also very valuable. We've incorporated it into the KPIs for our endpoint team. We can use that as a benchmark to improve our goals and our environment, and for ongoing life cycle improvement.
ToniLindberg - PeerSpot reviewer
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.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"The two most valuable features for us are its abilities to validate the customer experience and to measure performance before and after upgrades."
"Desktop monitoring, and being able to understand the performance of applications that runs on the desktop."
"There are also built-in activities that let you measure things like preview mail, open address book, and send mail. Those are the activities that we are able to get measurements on, and those are things we have not seen in other software monitoring tools."
"The most valuable thing that you get from Aternity is very broad visibility. You get visibility of your network, of your endpoints, of your software usage, your application performance, capacity, in one pane of glass. We had 20 to 30 IT tools, including application performance monitoring, network monitoring, security, endpoint detection, network protection, capacity management, service management — every kind of monitoring you can imagine. But Aternity was always the first place that I turned for anything, because you can see everything in it."
"Aternity easily provides visibility of all the endpoint machines to my clients."
"Aternity's Digital Experience Management Quadrant (DEM-Q) has been a game changer for us. While knowing your own metrics is nice, if you don't know how you compare to others or what the numbers should be, then it doesn't tell you much. This solution puts that into context (if we are doing better than others or worse), which helps us prioritize where we want to focus and do improvements versus that's just how slow it's supposed to be. It's also great in communicating what we are doing and why we're doing it to our IT leadership teams, by saying, while we're pretty far behind others in certain categories, the time and changes for our prioritizations are justified."
"It is a tool that helps me check users' computers really quickly without having a help desk administrator logging in and doing analysis. Anyone who has access to Aternity, including our support team, can log onto Aternity and do a quick, basic analysis."
"The data collected by the agents on each end point is the most valuable feature for us."
"The features I find most valuable is the querying and alerting 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."
"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."
"It has a familiar interface, which makes it easy to get started."
"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."
"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."
"People are very pleased with the implementation."
 

Cons

"When it comes to what is called creating signatures, it's not easy for a non-coding person for desktop applications. You need to run the recording and you need to have some exposure and knowledge. That is an area where they can improve. For web applications, they have the Web Activity Creator and that's an awesome and easy tool. Anybody can use it and capture the signatures. With the desktop applications it's a little more cumbersome and difficult."
"Some of the dashboarding and reporting on the analytics side could be improved. I think they realize it. Obviously, some of the desktop monitoring metrics always can be improved."
"Its user interface and features should be improved. They don't support new versions of certain Linux editions. That is one of the reasons why we have to move to another solution."
"In terms of a new feature, it would be good if we could restrict a user to a specific application or server. We have several customers, and we have to set up one or two servers for each customer. We have to set up one server for production and one for the test environment. Each user at the customer level can see all applications and the data of all applications, which is not really useful and good. We should be able to restrict user access at the application level or server level."
"Signature development process requires deep technical expertise in the application and in the use of their studio tools that help you create it."
"When it comes to a lot of the features that I would want, they will tell you they are in their SaaS version, which we don't use... They put all the new features on the SaaS solution and that's where you get the latest and greatest stuff... Why not have those features available for on-prem users?"
"They've additionally added some great color coding, but they need to explain better and drive down further on the meanings of this workflow."
"The other place for improvement, as an on-prem, non-SaaS customer, is that the system administration and management in Aternity are very difficult. They've even told me that most of their support calls come in due to configuration and system administration on their on-prem. Their on-prem solution is not easy to use."
"The implementation is a long process that should be improved."
"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 documentation and integration with Kubernetes could be improved."
"The initial setup should be easier and more seamless."
"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."
"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."
"I would like to see integration with Kubernetes cluster and APIs so that you can manage the entire stack."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"It is definitely a premium solution; it is not an inexpensive product. We have to ensure that we are getting the most out of it in order to justify the cost. However, it is not cheap, especially when you want to install it on all your endpoints."
"The pricing is fair."
"Our management squeezed Aternity pretty hard on the pricing, in my opinion a little too much. I advise negotiating for sure, but I do think it left kind of a sour taste in Aternity’s mouth that we were being so pushy despite the fact that we were only purchasing a small number of licenses."
"The solution's price is pretty comparable to the industry."
"You have to purchase it for 12 months, which is an issue because a lot of our customers are on a per-user-per-month type billing. There are a few additional costs. A lot of customers only get the essential licenses, and then they get what they call the application add-ons on top. They have to pay depending on how many customers and applications they want to monitor."
"It’s a little on the costly side, but if you license intelligently, accounting for your various hosts connecting in through VDI or terminal servers, you can make it well worth your money."
"If the scale of your monitoring will be to go everywhere in an organization, a site license is key."
"The pricing is reasonable for the value that it gives because it does allow you to measure the cost ramifications of direct productivity loss for spends in both your infrastructure and on endpoints."
"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."
"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."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Financial Services Firm
25%
Government
10%
Manufacturing Company
10%
Computer Software Company
7%
Financial Services Firm
14%
Manufacturing Company
12%
Computer Software Company
9%
Government
7%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business1
Midsize Enterprise4
Large Enterprise32
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business4
Midsize Enterprise1
Large Enterprise10
 

Questions from the Community

APM tools for a Managed Service Provider - Dynatrace vs. AppDynamics vs. Aternity vs. Ruxit
Hi Avi! It's great to see your thorough approach to selecting an APM package for your MSP company. Considering your focus on SMBs and enterprises in Israel, Dynatrace seems like a solid choice with...
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Aternity?
The solution's price is pretty comparable to the industry.
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...
 

Also Known As

Aternity, Workforce APM, Aternity Frontline, Riverbed SteelCenter Aternity
Tanzu Observability, Wavefront, Wavefront by VMware, VMware Tanzu Observability
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

Maersk, SwissRe, Travis Perkins, Michelin, National Instruments, Simmons & Simmons, Lighthouse Guild
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
Find out what your peers are saying about Alluvio Aternity vs. VMware Aria Operations for Applications and other solutions. Updated: September 2025.
867,370 professionals have used our research since 2012.