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Densify vs VMware Aria Operations comparison

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Executive SummaryUpdated on Oct 13, 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

IBM Turbonomic
Sponsored
Ranking in Cloud Management
4th
Ranking in Virtualization Management Tools
2nd
Average Rating
8.8
Reviews Sentiment
7.4
Number of Reviews
205
Ranking in other categories
Cloud Migration (5th), IT Financial Management (1st), IT Operations Analytics (4th), Cloud Analytics (1st), Cloud Cost Management (1st), AIOps (5th)
Densify
Ranking in Cloud Management
32nd
Ranking in Virtualization Management Tools
9th
Average Rating
8.8
Reviews Sentiment
7.1
Number of Reviews
9
Ranking in other categories
Cloud Migration (13th), Cloud Analytics (2nd), Cloud Cost Management (11th)
VMware Aria Operations
Ranking in Cloud Management
2nd
Ranking in Virtualization Management Tools
1st
Average Rating
8.2
Reviews Sentiment
7.0
Number of Reviews
373
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
 

Mindshare comparison

As of February 2025, in the Virtualization Management Tools category, the mindshare of IBM Turbonomic is 12.1%, down from 16.0% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Densify is 2.4%, down from 4.4% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of VMware Aria Operations is 33.8%, down from 34.3% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Virtualization Management Tools
 

Featured Reviews

Keldric Emery - PeerSpot reviewer
Saves time and costs while reducing performance degradation
It's been a very good solution. The reporting has been very, very valuable as, with a very large environment, it's very hard to get your hands on the environment. Turbonomic does that work for you and really shows you where some of the cost savings can be done. It also helps you with the reporting side. Me being able to see that this machine hasn't been used for a very long time, or seeing that a machine is overused and that it might need more RAM or CPU, et cetera, helps me understand my infrastructure. The cost savings are drastic in the cloud feature in Azure and in AWS. In some of those other areas, I'm able to see what we're using, what we're not using, and how we can change to better fit what we have. It gives us the ability for applications and teams to see the hardware and how it's being used versus how they've been told it's being used. The reporting really helps with that. It shows which application is really using how many resources or the least amount of resources. Some of the gaps between an infrastructure person like myself and an application are filled. It allows us to come to terms by seeing the raw data. This aspect is very important. In the past, it was me saying "I don't think that this application is using that many resources" or "I think this needs more resources." I now have concrete evidence as well as reporting and some different analytics that I can show. It gives me the evidence that I would need to show my application owners proof of what I'm talking about. In terms of the downtime, meantime, and resolution that Turbonomic has been able to show in reports, it has given me an idea of things before things happen. That is important as I would really like to see a machine that needs resources, and get resources to it before we have a problem where we have contention and aspects of that nature. It's been helpful in that regard. Turbonomic has helped us understand where performance risks exist. Turbonomic looks at my environment and at the servers and even at the different hosts and how they're handling traffic and the number of machines that are on them. I can analyze it and it can show me which server or which host needs resources, CPU, or RAM. Even in Azure, in the cloud, I'm able to see which resources are not being used to full capacity and understand where I could scale down some in order to save cost. It is very, very helpful in assessing performance risk by navigating underlying causes and actions. The reason why it's helpful is because if there's a machine that's overrunning the CPU, I can run reports every week to get an idea of machines that would need CPU, RAM, or additional resources. Those resources could be added by Turbonomic - not so much by me - on a scheduled basis. I personally don't have to do it. It actually gives me a little bit of my life back. It helps me to get resources added without me physically having to touch each and every resource myself. Turbonomic has helped to reduce performance degradation in the same way as it's able to see the resources and see what it needs and add them before a problem occurs. It follows the trends. It sees the trends of what's happening and it's able to add or take away those resources. For example, we discuss when we need to do certain disaster recovery tests. Over the years, Turbo will be able to see, for example, around this time of year that certain people ramp up certain resources in an environment, and then it will add the resources as required. Another time of year, it will realize these resources are not being used as much, and it takes those resources away. In this way, it saves money and time while letting us know where we are. We've saved a great deal of time using this product when I consider how I'd have to multiply myself and people like me who would have to add resources to devices or take resources away. We've saved hundreds of hours. Most of the time those hours would have to be after hours as well, which are more valuable to me as that's my personal time. Those saved hours are across months, not years. I would consider the number of resources that Turbonomic is adding and taking away and the placement (if I had to do it all myself) would end up being hundreds of hours monthly that would be added without the help of Turbonomic. It helps us to meet SLAs mainly due to the fact that we're able to keep the servers going and to keep the servers in an environment, to keep them to where (if we need to add resources) we can add them at any given time. It will keep our SLAs where they need to be. If we were to have downtime due to the fact that we had to add resources or take resources away and it was an emergency, then that would prevent us from meeting our SLAs. We also use it to monitor Azure and to monitor our machines in terms of the resources that are out there and the cost involved. In a lot of cases, it does a better job of giving us cost information than Azure itself does. We're able to see the cost per machine. We're able to see the unattached volume and storage that we are paying for. It gives us a great level of insight. Turbonomic gives us the time to be able to focus on innovation and ongoing modernization. Some of the tasks that it does are tasks that I would not necessarily have to do. It's very helpful in that I know that the resources are there where they need to be and it gives me an idea of what changes need to be made or what suggestions it's making. Even if I don't take them, I'm able to get a good idea of some best practices through Turbonomic. One of the ways that Turbonomic does to help bring new resources to market is that we are now able to see the resources (or at least monitor the resources) before they get out to the general public within our environment. We saw immediate value from the product in the test environment. We set it up in a small test environment and we started with just placement and we could tell that the placement was being handled more efficiently than what VMware was doing. There was value for us in placement alone. Then, after we left the placement, we began to look at the resources and there were resources. We immediately began to see a change in the environment. It has made the application and performance better, mainly due to the fact that we are able to give resources and take resources away based on what the need is. Our expenses, definitely, have been in a better place based on the savings that we've been able to make in the cloud and on-prem. Turbonomic has been very helpful in that regard. We've been able to see the savings easily based on the reports in Turbonomic. That, and just seeing the machines that are not being used to capacity allows us to set everything up so it runs a bit more efficiently.
Amit Kantia - PeerSpot reviewer
Its most valuable feature is the ability to capture attributes in the console, but it is not a stable solution
I recommend others to use Densify. They can not only use it for reporting but for automation as well. They can implement the policies on the console easily during the build-out procedure. Stability is the primary concern to us as it is causing lots of problems. We can only make significant decisions if Densify allows us, and it takes lots of time. Thus, I rate the tool as a six out of ten.
Gaurav Amar - PeerSpot reviewer
Enabled us to cut the cost of resources and manage our infrastructure with a smaller team
There's a feature known as Smart Alerts in vRealize Operations, which I have found to be useful if there's anything going wrong in the infrastructure. What usually happens is that you get so many alerts that you become confused. Smart Alerts give you visibility into your infrastructure and also recommend how to fix the situation. That's a feature which I'm really a fan of. Control, from the compliance perspective, is also helpful because we are a PCI DSS-certified company. It keeps us in compliance so that all of our servers and other things are not breaching any of the baseline protocols and baseline policies which we have laid down for the company. That's another thing which I like about the VMware vROps.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"The tool provides the ability to look at the consumption utilization over a period of time and determine if we need to change that resource allocation based on the actual workload consumption, as opposed to how IT has configured it. Therefore, we have come to realize that a lot of our workloads are overprovisioned, and we are spending more money in the public cloud than we need to."
"On-premises, one advantage I find particularly appealing is the ability to create policies for automatic CPU and memory scaling based on demand."
"We have seen a 30% performance improvement overall."
"I have the ability to automate things similar to the Orchestrator stuff. I do have the ability to have it do some balancing, and if it sees some different performance metrics that I've set not being met, it'll actually move some of my virtual machines from, let's say, one host to another. It is sort of an automation tool that helps me. Basically, I specify the metric, and if I get a certain host or something being over-utilized, it'll automatically move the virtual machines around for me. It basically has to snap into my vCenter and then it can make adjustments and move my virtual machines around. It also has some very nice reporting tools built around virtual machines. It tells you how much storage, memory, or CPU is being used monthly, and then it gives you a very nice way to be able to send out billing structure to your end users who use servers within your environment."
"Turbonomic helps us right-size virtual machines to utilize the available infrastructure components available and suggest where resources should exist. We also use the predictive tool to forecast what will happen when we add additional compute-demanding virtual machines or something to the environment. It shows us how that would impact existing resources. All of that frees up time that would otherwise be spent on manual calculation."
"The proactive monitoring of all our open enrollment applications has improved our organization. We have used it to size applications that we are moving to the cloud. Therefore, when we move them out there, we have them appropriately sized. We use it for reporting to current application owners, showing them where they are wasting money. There are easy things to find for an application, e.g., they decommissioned the server, but they never took care of the storage. Without a tool like this, that storage would just sit there forever, with us getting billed for it."
"It helps us get a consolidated view of all customer spending into a single dashboard, allowing us to identify opportunities to improve their current spending."
"Rightsizing is valuable. Its recommendations are pretty good."
"The Densify Control Console, and Environment Status."
"The Control Console is an incredible way to give a quick view of current capacity utilization allowing technical people to drill down quickly and allowing business/management people to get a quick overview of the environment."
"Densify's ability to aggregate multiple on-premise vCenters and multiple cloud accounts, gives it a level of visibility not found in many places."
"I would say that the initial thing is that it provides us with a technological basis to expand capacity management beyond Excel."
"One would be the automatic rebalancing of the environment. That was one feature which helped. With that, we could improve our efficiency of our VMware infrastructure."
"The solution's tech support is excellent."
"The tool will come back and tell us that we can operate with 1,000 minutes as an example, save 90% on the contractual rate and not run into any issues."
"The Control Console provides a very easy to read dashboard of "too little/just right/too much" resources both for current data and on a historical or predictive basis."
"The main point of installing, deploying, and troubleshooting with vRealize Operations is to provide visual dashboards to ensure that the entire workload is functioning properly."
"It gives me metrics that I can share with the rest of my team. I can say, "Look, this server is performing poorly." Even down into the Windows Servers, which are my primary bread and butter, it gives me visibility into situations such as when they're running out of storage and I need to expand the drives. It gives that top-level visibility to get in and fix a lot of problems."
"The dashboards are great. You can quickly see things at a glance without having to dig through a lot of data."
"The scalability options are quite good with VMware vRealize Operations (vROps), and all of the features are useful and relevant to us."
"I'd like to see the streamlining of more wizards, more tasks that are canned. And it would also be good to see some more features around building the Blueprints, just to make it a little easier."
"Some of the forecasting features give us a picture of, let's say, in six months I know that my storage will be full, or I'll be out of resources. It gives us a little bit of forecasting."
"The tool helped the organization in all monitoring tasks when being delivered as a service for customers helps them to generate early alarm templates, being a cloud service provider is delivered as part of the IaaS to generate memory consumptions processing and storage additionally can be configured parameters such as networking and services that are configured on virtual machines."
"One of the most valuable features is that it gives us granular insight into how the infrastructure is operating and running, down to the storage level, the hypervisor level, even the hardware level. It really gives us a deep dive into what is going on and lets us see. Instead of our having to figure it out, it figures it out for us. It is also user-friendly and intuitive."
 

Cons

"The reporting needs to be improved. It's important for us to know and be able to look back on what happened and why certain decisions were made, and we want to use a custom report for this."
"The old interface was not the clearest UI in some areas, and could be quite intimidating when first using the tool."
"I like the detail I get in the old user interface and will miss some of that in the new interface when we perform our planned upgrade soon."
"They could add a few more reports. They could also be a bit more granular. While they have reports, sometimes it is hard to figure out what you are looking for just by looking at the date."
"Additional interfaces would be helpful."
"After running this solution in production for a year, we may want a more granular approach to how we utilize the product because we are planning to use some of its metrics to feed into our financial system."
"While the product is fairly intuitive and easy to use once you learn it, it can be quite daunting until you have undergone a bit of training."
"Enhanced executive reporting standard with the tool beyond the reports that can be created today. Something that can easily be used with upper management on a monthly or quarterly basis to show the impact to our environment."
"It seems that the mechanism for integration is, it goes so far but I think there could be some standard integration to normal remedy service now etc. I think that should be out of the box."
"The solution's stability is the primary concern for me."
"Some parts of the interface are rather complex and require a bit of time to navigate, but this has never stopped us as a Densify advisor is readily available to help with our "how to" queries."
"Initially we talked about some custom reporting, wherein our customer expected certain reports on a few areas, like how the storage is allocated, how the network performance is doing, and how the network utilization is happening for a virtual machine."
"A closer integration to the service management processes."
"In terms of integration, the tool has great data. However, it's not always meaningful because the true business attributes of how most Fortune 500 companies operate are not maintaining in one tool, they're in a school of many tools."
"Unfortunately the tools and mechanisms which really came to maturity in the cloud, and were not mainstream on-premise, are still not implemented."
"Normalization of CPU utilization is required. At present, the data is available based on entitlement level."
"User-friendly? It could probably use a little work there. It is something of a beast. There's a lot that it can do and getting in there and getting everything working the way you want it to can be challenging."
"The automation piece could be done simpler."
"vROps is, by its nature, a very complex product."
"Monitoring is useful but if the solution can't automate or function without my input, it's a waste of my time. That's where I found out there are some issues with this product, there are elements that are not as intuitive as they could or should be."
"It's mostly user-friendly and intuitive. They're improving their dashboards which makes it a lot easier. Sometimes, drilling down and trying to find the exact thing you're looking for can prove challenging at first, but it's getting better."
"A lot of feedback that we're getting from some of our engineers who are actually using Operations today is that the graphics are very low-key. When it comes to red, yellow, green, yes, "Skittles Theory," but when it actually comes down to what's optimized and what's not optimized, it's very rudimentary. If they could actually make nicer pie charts or graphics involved in it, it would make it a lot easier to read the data on a higher level, rather than actually having to dive down and know specifically what you're looking at."
"It does the functions that we need it to. Although we do have some issues from time to time. We're looking for more maturity out of the product but it's getting better with every release."
"In terms of user-friendliness, there are a lot of areas that take a lot of time to research and figure out what the information is actually telling me, so that I know how to better use the product and troubleshoot issues that I see. It would be nice if they could fine-tune the user-interface a little bit."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"The product is fairly priced right now. Given its capabilities, it is excellently priced. We think that the product will become self-funding because we will be able to maximize our resources, which will help us from a capacity perspective. That should save us money in the long run."
"What I can advise is to trial the product, taking advantage of the Turbonomic pre-sales implemention support and kickstart training."
"It is an endpoint type license, which is fine. It is not overly expensive."
"We felt the pricing was very fair for the product. It is in no way prohibitive for larger deployments, unlike other similar product on the market."
"Licensing is per socket, so load up on the cores rather than a lot of lower core CPUs."
"When we have expanded our licensing, it has always been easy to make an ROI-based decision. So, it's reasonably priced. We would like to have it cheaper, but we get more benefit from it than we pay for it. At the end of the day, that's all you can hope for."
"I don't know the current prices, but I like how the licensing is based on the number of instances instead of sockets, clusters, or cores. We have some VMs that are so heavy I can only fit four on one server. It's not cost-effective if we have to pay more for those. When I move around a VM SQL box with 30 cores and a half-terabyte of RAM, I'm not paying for an entire socket and cores where people assume you have at least 10 or 20 VMs on that socket for that pricing."
"If you're a super-small business, it may be a little bit pricey for you... But in large, enterprise companies where money is, maybe, less of an issue, Turbonomic is not that expensive. I can't imagine why any big company would not buy it, for what it does."
"Densify has licensing setup so you can collect data without licensing. It gives you the ability to collect on everything, then choose later what you would like to license."
"Cost is always involved, but then I feel that this solution is better than other products that we have."
"Setup cost is negligible, as it scales fairly well."
"There was some sticker shock, as this is not just another software product to spit out graphs."
"If one is low price and ten is high price, I rate the product price a ten."
"I would like to see a free offering. Cost is always a factor in any sort of line. Obviously, the value added is there and it's worth it."
"Pricing is good for us. We're non-profit so we get a break on that."
"vROps is a bit expensive and that's a reason that small clients say, 'No, I don't think we need this.' From a pricing perspective, it is quite steep. But 'expensive' is relative, depending on what you need. Others might say, 'It is expensive, but I think we can use it to better our environment.'"
"The pricing: It's expensive."
"I have reduced the time to troubleshoot for my customers."
"The price of the solution is expensive."
"It has reduced time to troubleshoot issues. With our customized dashboards, we can target issues and attribute them to the correct team."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Financial Services Firm
15%
Computer Software Company
13%
Manufacturing Company
10%
Insurance Company
7%
Manufacturing Company
27%
Financial Services Firm
15%
Computer Software Company
15%
Retailer
7%
Financial Services Firm
16%
Computer Software Company
16%
Government
9%
Manufacturing Company
8%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
 

Questions from the Community

What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Turbonomic?
It offers different scenarios. It provides more capabilities than many other tools available. Typically, its price is...
What needs improvement with Turbonomic?
The implementation could be enhanced.
What is your primary use case for Turbonomic?
We use IBM Turbonomic to automate our cloud operations, including monitoring, consolidating dashboards, and reporting...
What do you like most about Densify?
The solution's tech support is excellent.
What needs improvement with Densify?
Densify is not a stable tool. Every time the support gets investigated, it takes much time to get refreshed.
What is your primary use case for Densify?
We are using Densify to produce reports and to get recommendations that can contribute to the area of our expertise.
What's the difference between VMware vRA (automation) and vROps (operations)?
vROP is a virtualization management solution from VMWare. It is efficient and easy to manage. You can find anything y...
Is VMware Aria Operations a user friendly solution?
In terms of user-friendliness, VMware Aria Operations is one of the best solutions out there. It is not overly compl...
What is the most useful new feature of VMware Aria Operations?
For me, the alerts features are the most unique part of this product, no matter the current name it uses. When they i...
 

Also Known As

Turbonomic, VMTurbo Operations Manager
No data available
VMware vRealize Operations (vROps), vCenter Operations Manager (VCOPS)
 

Interactive Demo

Demo not available
Demo not available
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

IBM, J.B. Hunt, BBC, The Capita Group, SulAmérica, Rabobank, PROS, ThinkON, O.C. Tanner Co.
AIG, Bank of America, Cigna, Citi
Science Applications International Corporation, Tribune Media, Heartland Payment Systems, Telkom Indonesia, Columbia Sportswear, iGATE, CSS Corp, Angel Broking, Adira Finance, Hipskind, Beiersdorf Shared Services, Innovate Mas Indonesia, Adobe, Cleveland Clinic Abu Dhabi , Join Experience S.A, Borusan Holdings, Department of Transport - Abu Dhabi
Find out what your peers are saying about Densify vs. VMware Aria Operations and other solutions. Updated: February 2025.
838,640 professionals have used our research since 2012.