Splunk Observability Cloud vs VMware Aria Operations for Applications comparison

Splunk and Broadcom are both solutions in the Cloud Monitoring Software category. Splunk is ranked #7 with an average rating of 8.7, while Broadcom is ranked #14 with an average rating of 8.8. Splunk holds a 2.1% mindshare in CMS, compared to Broadcom’s 1.8% mindshare. Additionally, 95% of Splunk users are willing to recommend the solution, compared to 93% of Broadcom users who would recommend it.

Splunk Observability Cloud

Read 70 Splunk Observability Cloud reviews

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1,602 Comparison Views

95% willing to recommend

VMware Aria Operations for ...

Read 14 VMware Aria Operations for Applications reviews

2,704 Views
1,055 Comparison Views

93% willing to recommend

Splunk Observability Cloud

VMware Aria Operations for ...

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Executive SummaryUpdated on Jun 19, 2025

Splunk Observability Cloud and VMware Aria Operations for Applications compete in the observability and application performance management category. VMware Aria Operations for Applications appears to have the upper hand due to its superior integration with VMware-specific infrastructures.

Features: Splunk Observability Cloud handles diverse data sources and offers strong dashboard customization and scalability for cloud environments. VMware Aria Operations excels in its integration with the VMware ecosystem, offering extensive application performance management and advantages for VMware-centric operations.

Room for Improvement: Splunk users recommend improvements in its pricing model, third-party integrations, stability, and user-friendliness for smaller enterprises. VMware Aria Operations could enhance predictive capabilities and user-friendly alerting, besides better support and documentation.

Ease of Deployment and Customer Service: Splunk supports hybrid and cloud deployments, offering flexibility, though its customer service may delay detailed technical responses. VMware Aria is preferred for on-premises and hybrid environments, with responsive support and effective documentation, especially in VMware settings.

Pricing and ROI: Splunk Observability Cloud is costly but delivers significant ROI with real-time insights and improved operations. However, VMware Aria Operations proves more cost-effective within VMware environments, especially when bundled with other VMware services, offering reduced overall spending.

To learn more, read our detailed Splunk Observability Cloud vs. VMware Aria Operations for Applications Report (Updated: September 2025).

Buyer's Guide

Splunk Observability Cloud vs. VMware Aria Operations for Applications

September 2025

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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

Splunk Observability Cloud

Ranking in Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability

8th

Ranking in IT Infrastructure Monitoring

7th

Ranking in Cloud Monitoring Software

7th

Average Rating

8.2

Reviews Sentiment

7.0

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

Network Monitoring Software (6th), Container Management (7th), Digital Experience Monitoring (DEM) (2nd)

VMware Aria Operations for ...

Ranking in Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability

18th

Ranking in IT Infrastructure Monitoring

17th

Ranking in Cloud Monitoring Software

14th

Average Rating

8.0

Reviews Sentiment

6.3

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

Container Monitoring (5th)

Mindshare comparison

As of September 2025, in the Cloud Monitoring Software category, the mindshare of Splunk Observability Cloud is 2.1%, up from 1.1% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of VMware Aria Operations for Applications is 1.8%, up from 1.2% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.

Cloud Monitoring Software Market Share Distribution
Product	Market Share (%)
Splunk Observability Cloud	2.1%
VMware Aria Operations for Applications	1.8%
Other	96.1%

Cloud Monitoring Software

Featured Reviews

Taiwo Ige

IT Operations Engineer at ABC Supply Co. Inc.

Alerting improves incident response across teams and enables faster awareness before customer impact

Splunk Observability Cloud could be improved in terms of integrations with more technical add-ons, such as Zoom. Although they have one with Zoom, it's not available in the cloud, so having that feature would be beneficial. Essentially, Splunk should continue expanding to create easier ways to ingest logs from different products. The out-of-the-box customizable dashboards in Splunk Observability Cloud are very effective in showcasing IT performance to business leaders. However, there are aspects that could be improved, such as linking dashboards to one another. While IT leaders may not drill down, it's crucial to create levels of dashboards for technical users to find root causes, making it effective for stakeholders.

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ToniLindberg

senior consultant at Virtual Consultants Sverige AB

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.

Read full review

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"I have primarily used it to go back into the past and understand why something happened. It provides enough information to do research and figure things out."

"Splunk Infrastructure Monitoring gives us complete visibility without the need for storage."

"Splunk's GUI and dashboard capacity are the most valuable features of Splunk Infrastructure Monitoring."

"Great monitoring of network devices."

"This solution is very quick to deploy as it is a SaaS solution and integrates with tools like ServiceNow."

"Splunk has been recognized by Gartner as a leader in providing visibility for observability and monitoring across various platforms, including physical, virtual, and container environments, for several years."

"Splunk's dashboards are great."

"Once configured correctly, the analysis reporting the Splunk APM provides is better than that of the other APM tools."

More Splunk Observability Cloud pros

"It has a familiar interface, which makes it easy to get started."

"People are very pleased with the implementation."

"I gladly recommend VMware Aria Operations for Applications because it is cost effective and has commendable AI response capabilities."

"The most valuable aspects of the solution are its ease of use and its ease of implementation."

"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."

"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."

"The features I find most valuable is the querying and alerting capabilities."

More VMware Aria Operations for Applications pros

Cons

"The monitoring of workloads when using SignalFx could be improved."

"They need more EDR functionalities."

"They do not have all the features that I expect right now."

"The solution's machine learning deployment is hard and should be made user-friendly."

"They can improve the flow system and the keyword language. It has predefined keywords, but they can be improved."

"The solution should have more sensors regarding fiber intelligence for security measures."

"It would be beneficial to have more enhanced features with capabilities to adapt more integrated applications. Improvements in dashboard configuration, customization, and artificial intelligence functionalities are desired."

"The UI of Splunk Observability Cloud is one of the major issues; it's old and has been there for more than 10 years, acquired by other applications from other companies. It's time to reinvent how the UI is going to work with the AI modules and integrations, making it softer and cleaner."

More Splunk Observability Cloud cons

"The main problem I have is that the license cost is very high."

"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 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."

"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."

"In the new version, I would love to see more prediction capabilities. It would be great if one could see the alerts get a little more enriched with information and become more human-friendly instead of the technical stuff that they put in there. I think those would be really awesome outcomes to get."

"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."

More VMware Aria Operations for Applications cons

Pricing and Cost Advice

"Splunk APM is a very cost-efficient solution."

"The price of Splunk APM is less than some of its competitors."

"Licensing cost is the biggest argument I get from those divesting from Splunk. There are those within our organization who say we are going to go to other tools since Splunk is too expensive."

"It appears to be expensive compared to competitors."

"It is expensive."

"Splunk can be expensive, as its licensing is based on the daily data ingestion volume."

"This is an expensive solution."

"Splunk offers a 14-day free trial and after that, we have to pay but the cost is reasonable."

More Splunk Observability Cloud pricing and cost advice

"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."

"I would rate the pricing as three out of five."

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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews

Financial Services Firm

15%

Computer Software Company

13%

Retailer

Manufacturing Company

Financial Services Firm

14%

Manufacturing Company

12%

Computer Software Company

Government

Company Size

By reviewers

Large Enterprise

Midsize Enterprise

Small Business

By reviewers
Company Size	Count
Small Business	19
Midsize Enterprise	10
Large Enterprise	44

By reviewers
Company Size	Count
Small Business	4
Midsize Enterprise	1
Large Enterprise	10

Questions from the Community

What do you like most about SignalFx?

The most valuable feature is dashboard creation.

See all answers

What needs improvement with SignalFx?

Regarding dashboard customization, while Splunk has many dashboard building options, customers sometimes need to create specific dashboards, particularly for applicative metrics such as Java and pr...

See all answers

What is your primary use case for SignalFx?

The solution involves observability in general, such as Application Performance Monitoring, and generally addresses digital applications, web applications, sites, and mobile applications. I worked ...

See all answers

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...

See all answers

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...

See all answers

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...

See all answers

Comparisons

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Compared 5% of the time

Dynatrace vs Splunk Observability Cloud

Compared 4% of the time

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Compared 11% of the time

Dynatrace vs VMware Aria Operations for Applications

Compared 9% of the time

Zabbix vs VMware Aria Operations for Applications

Compared 8% of the time

Datadog vs VMware Aria Operations for Applications

Compared 5% of the time

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Product Reports

Buyer's Guide

Splunk Observability Cloud

August 2025

Download Splunk Observability Cloud product report

Buyer's Guide

VMware Aria Operations for Applications

August 2025

VMware Aria Operations for Applications report

Download VMware Aria Operations for Applications product report

Also Known As

Splunk Infrastructure Monitoring, Splunk Real User Monitoring (RUM), Splunk Synthetic Monitoring

Tanzu Observability, Wavefront, Wavefront by VMware, VMware Tanzu Observability

Overview

Splunk Observability Cloud offers sophisticated log searching, data integration, and customizable dashboards. With rapid deployment and ease of use, this cloud service enhances monitoring capabilities across IT infrastructures for comprehensive end-to-end visibility.

Focused on enhancing performance management and security, Splunk Observability Cloud supports environments through its data visualization and analysis tools. Users appreciate its robust application performance monitoring and troubleshooting insights. However, improvements in integrations, interface customization, scalability, and automation are needed. Users find value in its capabilities for infrastructure and network monitoring, as well as log analytics, albeit cost considerations and better documentation are desired. Enhancements in real-time monitoring and network protection are also noted as areas for development.

What are the key features?

Log Searching: Efficiently search and analyze logs from various sources.
Data Integration: Seamlessly integrate with multiple environments.
Dashboard Customization: Tailor dashboards to specific monitoring needs.
Monitoring Capabilities: Provides comprehensive insights into application performance.
Security Features: Analyze and address security threats across systems.
Visualization Tools: Enhance data analysis and system performance optimization.

Why consider this for ROI?

Comprehensive Visibility: Gain complete insights into IT infrastructure.
Performance Optimization: Improve overall system performance and efficiency.
Rapid Deployment: Quick setup to meet organization demands swiftly.
Enhanced Security: Strengthen security measures through detailed analytics.

In industries, Splunk Observability Cloud is implemented for security management by analyzing logs from detection systems, offering real-time alerts and troubleshooting for cloud-native applications. It is leveraged for machine data analysis, improving infrastructure visibility and supporting network and application performance management efforts.

Splunk

VMware Tanzu Observability by Wavefront is a powerful tool for monitoring and analyzing the performance and availability of applications and infrastructure in real-time.

With its comprehensive monitoring capabilities, visualizing and analyzing data becomes effortless. The real-time alerting system ensures timely issue resolution, while scalability and a user-friendly interface provide a seamless experience for smooth operations.

Broadcom

Sample Customers

Sunrun, Yelp, Onshape, Tapjoy, Symphony Commerce, Chairish, Clever, Grovo, Bazaar Voice, Zenefits, Avalara

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

Buyer's Guide

Splunk Observability Cloud vs. VMware Aria Operations for Applications

September 2025

Free Report: Splunk Observability Cloud vs. VMware Aria Operations for Applications

Find out what your peers are saying about Splunk Observability Cloud vs. VMware Aria Operations for Applications and other solutions. Updated: September 2025.

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