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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
32nd
Average Rating
8.4
Reviews Sentiment
7.9
Number of Reviews
38
Ranking in other categories
Mobile APM (4th), Digital Experience Monitoring (DEM) (6th)
VMware Aria Operations for ...
Ranking in Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability
17th
Average Rating
8.0
Reviews Sentiment
6.3
Number of Reviews
14
Ranking in other categories
IT Infrastructure Monitoring (15th), Container Monitoring (5th), Cloud Monitoring Software (13th)
 

Mindshare comparison

As of October 2025, in the Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability category, the mindshare of Alluvio Aternity is 0.5%, up from 0.5% 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

"DEM-Q (Digital Experience Management Quadrant) is very useful. This is where they stand out with their dashboard, because it gives us a picture of how our company is doing compared to the other businesses out there."
"Aternity easily provides visibility of all the endpoint machines to my clients."
"It is useful for working out whether there are any issues in the network or between the endpoints. It is also useful for working out any performance issues. It has been useful for a lot of stuff around Teams. Our customers like to know what's happening with Teams when they call in. It is helpful for easily profiling users. It records all the applications that are being used for each user, and you can see what users are doing. It is very good in terms of performance. You don't have to wait forever to try and get reports or results. It is quite quick to get everything that you need out of the software."
"The application response time. That's what our business has been having a problem with."
"The most valuable feature for us is trend analysis, particularly with device-help type of events and computer help events, such as blue screens, application errors, and application crashes."
"The dashboards of this platform are the most valuable, especially the Desktop Health dashboard."
"The detailed level of information you are able to get on the complete environment all of the way down to a specific machine."
"As a financial institution, we have a lot of applications that are either written internally or bought from a vendor and customized for us. Having a tool that lets us monitor specific transactions in those applications allows us to focus on the transactions that are important to the business."
"The stability of Aria Operations for Applications has improved significantly over the years."
"The most valuable aspects of the solution are its ease of use and its ease of implementation."
"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."
"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."
"The features I find most valuable is the querying and alerting capabilities."
"I find VMware Aria Operations for Applications to be very stable, and I would rate it a ten out of ten."
"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."
 

Cons

"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 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."
"They've additionally added some great color coding, but they need to explain better and drive down further on the meanings of this workflow."
"I would say the reporting capabilities of this product could use room for improvement."
"When they moved from Version 8 to Version 9, the customers lost so much control of what they could do with the product."
"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 only thing I can say which has been frustrating are the Tableau workspace/dashboard options out-of-the-box, at least prior to version 8."
"The solution's downloadable reports could be improved."
"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 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 implementation is a long process that should be improved."
"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."
"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."
"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."
"The documentation and integration with Kubernetes could be improved."
 

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."
"Its licensing cost is very low. That's one of the reasons why we have kept it for so long. We get more than a 70% discount on the maintenance licenses. Its cost is very low for us, but if you buy it new, it would be much more expensive at the retail price."
"The pricing for the users and agents is reasonable compared to other solutions and vendors."
"I thought the price for Alluvio Aternity was reasonable, but we had difficulty selling it in our market due to the minimum number of agents required for deployment, which I believe was around 500."
"It's not a cheap product. There are no two ways about that. If you compare it with a couple of the other solutions operating in the space, it might be on the slightly more expensive side, but it is one of those tools where, once you've got it, you understand the true value. You will get that money back."
"Regarding cost, compared to other solutions, Aternity is pretty low. It's definitely lower-cost than others that we looked at, like Nexthink."
"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."
"If the scale of your monitoring will be to go everywhere in an organization, a site license is key."
"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."
"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."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Financial Services Firm
24%
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

What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Aternity?
The solution's price is pretty comparable to the industry.
What needs improvement with Aternity?
Technology changes every six months, and improvements are necessary. The integration of AI agents could enhance these tools further, replacing traditional agents and plugins.
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.
869,883 professionals have used our research since 2012.