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Quest Foglight for Virtualization 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 Virtualization Management Tools
2nd
Average Rating
8.8
Reviews Sentiment
7.4
Number of Reviews
205
Ranking in other categories
Cloud Migration (5th), Cloud Management (4th), IT Financial Management (1st), IT Operations Analytics (4th), Cloud Analytics (1st), Cloud Cost Management (1st), AIOps (5th)
Quest Foglight for Virtuali...
Ranking in Virtualization Management Tools
8th
Average Rating
9.0
Reviews Sentiment
6.6
Number of Reviews
2
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
VMware Aria Operations
Ranking in Virtualization Management Tools
1st
Average Rating
8.2
Reviews Sentiment
7.0
Number of Reviews
373
Ranking in other categories
Cloud Management (2nd)
 

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 Quest Foglight for Virtualization is 0.7%, down from 1.5% 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.
Waleed Masad - PeerSpot reviewer
Easy-to-setup product with efficient data migration features
Many customers consider Quest Foglight for Virtualization a critical tool for migrations or new projects. In particular, one noteworthy case involved a bank that made Foglight integration a prerequisite. Some customers now rely 100% entirely on Foglight for their daily operations The product is…
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

"It has automated a lot of things. We have saved 30 to 35 percent in human resource time and cost, which is pretty substantial. We don't have a big workforce here, so we have to use all the automation we can get."
"The primary features we have focused on are reporting and optimization."
"My favorite part of the solution is the automation scheduling. Being able to choose when actions happen, and how they happen..."
"We have seen a 30% performance improvement overall."
"The automated memory balancing, where it looks at whether it's being used in the most efficient way and adds or takes away memory, is the best part. If it didn't do that, it would be something that I would have to do. We have too many machines for one person to do that. The automation helps me in that it is done in a really efficient way and a balanced way because of the policies. It really helps."
"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."
"We can manage multiple environments using a single pane of glass, which is something that I really like."
"It is a good holistic platform that is easy to use. It works pretty well."
"The product is stable and easy to set up. It provides minimum false alarms."
"They keep improving and updating their apps over time."
"vRealize looks at your data over time, at the performance of the machine over time. It can make assessments of the machine's health, based on that, for example, if there are sudden changes... we actually found a machine that had been compromised because it started doing a lot more work after hours and at weird hours."
"I like the monitoring aspect. One of the biggest things in our environment is being able to see what the entire vCenter environment looks like. The health status, being able to determine when we're having issues with resources, utilization, memory, or CPU."
"We went from using industry standard KPIs to going to a complete on-demand model based on the algorithms from vRealize Operations. It has enabled us to drive more utilization out of our existing compute infrastructure to the point where, for a period of six months, we didn't purchase a single server or any additional compute. We were able to continue to sweat our existing assets."
"vROps was the only tool which we found which was capable at the time to create customized dashboards."
"The dashboards and the interface are very easy to understand, very lively, and very dynamic."
"The vRO (using Functional Programming of Javascript) is a hand-down of the favorite component of this suite."
"It has allowed me to give the developers insight into what's actually happening underneath the covers. They used to only be able to see their app and now, they can see underneath. We've also given them access to see into the OS and we've given them a full stack view of how their application is performing."
 

Cons

"Turbonomic doesn't do storage placement how I would prefer. We use multiple shared storage volumes on VMware, so I don't have one big disk. I have lots of disks that I can place VMs on, and that consumes IOPS from the disk subsystem. We were getting recommendations to provision a new volume."
"Remove the need for special in-house knowledge and development."
"The management interface seems to be designed for high-resolution screens. Somebody with a smaller-resolution screen might not like the web interface. I run a 4K monitor on it, so everything fits on the screen. With a lower resolution like 1080, you need to scroll a lot. Everything is in smaller windows. It doesn't seem to be designed for smaller screens."
"They have a long road map when we ask for certain things that will make the product better. It takes time, but that's understandable because there are other things that are higher on the priority list."
"The issue for us with the automation is we are considering starting to do the hot adds, but there are some problems with Windows Server 2019 and hot adds. It is a little buggy. So, if we turn that on with a cluster that has a lot of Windows 2019 Servers, then we would see a blue screen along with a lot of applications as well. Depending on what you are adding, cores or memory, it doesn't necessarily even take advantage of that at that moment. A reboot may be required, and we can't do that until later. So, that decreases the benefit of the real-time. For us, there is a lot of risk with real-time."
"I would love to see Turbonomic analyze backup data. We have had people in the past put servers into daily full backups with seven-year retention and where the disk size is two terabytes. So, every single day, there is a two terabyte snapshot put into a Blob somewhere. I would love to see Turbonomic say, "Here are all your backups along with the age of them," to help us manage the savings by not having us spend so much on the storage in Azure. That would be huge."
"Recovering resources when they're not needed is not as optimized as it could be."
"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."
"Quest Foglight for Virtualization's integration needs enhancement."
"I know that they talk a lot about AI and a sort of forecasting ahead of time. It's a good application, but it has to wait for a certain period of time to actually do an analysis. If it would give you that ahead of time, or even forecasting, it would be really improved."
"One of the big challenge with vROps is there so much to learn as a user as you're doing it. It is also getting these dashboards in front of the executive committee, so they can actually see the environment."
"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."
"I haven't had to use technical support for this version but I have had to use them in the past with other versions. There have been some challenges with them. It's hard to get through to the right person and resolving issues in previous versions was hard."
"We had some problems with updating it. The two times that we upgraded vRealize Operations Manager, we lost all our data."
"I would like to see more features, especially in the way of Flash to HTML5."
"It can be user-friendly once you get the dashboard set up but it can be complicated to get the information you want, the way you want it. Finally, if there were an easier way to share dashboards, that would be a big one."
"We would like the return of the additional partner marketplaces, like DataCore. My customers miss the integration to DataCore."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"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."
"You should understand the cost of your physical servers and how much time and money you are spending year over year on expanding your virtual farm."
"I consider the pricing to be high."
"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."
"It is an endpoint type license, which is fine. It is not overly expensive."
"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."
"The pricing and licensing are fair. We purchase based on benchmark pricing, which we have been able to get. There are no surprise charges nor hidden fees."
"Price is a big one. VMTurbo was very competitively priced."
"The product is affordable."
"The licensing model is annual. Compared to the price of other products, VMware vRealize Operations (vROps) is a bit on the high side. If it could be cheaper, it would be good."
"I have reduced the time to troubleshoot for my customers."
"If the VMs were trimmed, then we wouldn't have to buy as much software/hardware, and this means less licenses. While most of it is VMware licenses, which are relatively cheap, there are SQL licenses for Microsoft, and this is where we could start saving a lot of money."
"There has been a bit of cost savings in that we could decide to move workloads around a bit better."
"We would like to build custom dashboards in the standard license. Right now, this is available in the enterprise license, not the standard license."
"I would give the solution a three out of five, with one being cheap and five being expensive. There are some elements of the pricing that are good, and some areas where I feel like I'm being charged for something the product can't provide yet."
"The licensing is not clear at the moment if the on-premises pricing is the same as on the cloud. I am checking on the pricing. However, you can save a lot of money with the cloud solution because you need to spend time installing, upgrading, and connecting with the on-premises solution. Also, you don't need to spend time scheduling the maintenance and maintaining the solution when using the cloud version."
"Our budgets are always tight. We would like to have more features at lower licensing levels for easier access to them."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Financial Services Firm
15%
Computer Software Company
13%
Manufacturing Company
10%
Insurance Company
7%
No data available
Financial Services Firm
16%
Computer Software Company
16%
Government
9%
Manufacturing Company
8%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
No data available
 

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 Quest Foglight for Virtualization?
The product is stable and easy to set up. It provides minimum false alarms.
What needs improvement with Quest Foglight for Virtualization?
Quest Foglight for Virtualization's integration needs enhancement.
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
VKernel vScope Explorer, vOPS Server, Vizioncore
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.
Unimat, AeroM_xico Delta TechOps
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 VMware, IBM, Nutanix and others in Virtualization Management Tools. Updated: January 2025.
838,713 professionals have used our research since 2012.