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Cisco Intersight vs VMware Aria Operations for Applications comparison

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Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive SummaryUpdated on Oct 9, 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

Cisco Intersight
Ranking in IT Infrastructure Monitoring
9th
Average Rating
8.2
Reviews Sentiment
7.0
Number of Reviews
23
Ranking in other categories
Cloud Management (7th)
VMware Aria Operations for ...
Ranking in IT Infrastructure Monitoring
13th
Average Rating
8.0
Reviews Sentiment
6.3
Number of Reviews
14
Ranking in other categories
Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability (18th), Container Monitoring (6th), Cloud Monitoring Software (13th)
 

Mindshare comparison

As of November 2026, in the IT Infrastructure Monitoring category, the mindshare of Cisco Intersight is 1.5%, down from 1.6% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of VMware Aria Operations for Applications is 1.4%, down from 1.6% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
IT Infrastructure Monitoring Mindshare Distribution
ProductMindshare (%)
Cisco Intersight1.5%
VMware Aria Operations for Applications1.4%
Other97.1%
IT Infrastructure Monitoring
 

Featured Reviews

reviewer2922069 - PeerSpot reviewer
Software Developer
Centralized monitoring has improved visibility and standardizes profiles across multiple sites
One area where Cisco Intersight could be improved is making the interface and troubleshooting workflows more intuitive, especially for users who do not work with the platform every day. Sometimes finding the exact information needed or understanding certain alerts can require navigating to multiple locations. I would also appreciate more actionable recommendations alongside alerts rather than just identifying an issue and leaving the next step entirely to me. Overall, the functionality is strong, but improving usability and making troubleshooting more straightforward would enhance the everyday experience. Apart from usability, Cisco Intersight could benefit from smoother integration with third-party monitoring and IT management tools. Having alerts, performance data, and infrastructure information flow more seamlessly between platforms would reduce the need to switch between different systems. Performance-wise, keeping dashboards responsive when managing larger environments would also be important. I would also like to see more practical documentation, particularly step-by-step troubleshooting guides and real-world examples for automation workflows. These improvements would make the platform more accessible and efficient for everyday operations for new and existing users. Smoother integration with third-party monitoring and IT management tools would allow alerts, performance data, and infrastructure information to flow more seamlessly between platforms. These improvements, including usability enhancements, would make the platform more accessible and efficient for new and existing users.
AS
Consultant at HCLTech
Automation and insightful diagnostics elevate operations while improvements are welcome
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 private, public, and hybrid, are already well-implemented. The ability to manage multiple vCenters across different geographical locations is very effective. The new Skyline health feature and certificate and licensing management are particularly useful improvements. The dashboard's overview tab provides comprehensive information about current vCenter status, resizable amounts, reclamation opportunities, anomalies, diagnostics, licensing, and certificates. However, there is room for improvement in application analysis. The current functionality lacks detailed monitoring at the kernel level, focusing mainly on CPU, memory, and storage matrices. Enhanced application monitoring capabilities, including tracking downtime for specific types of applications such as transactional or e-commerce applications, would be beneficial.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"Cisco Intersight has positively impacted my organization by making it a lot quicker to diagnose or foresee problems that might be coming up, and since it is a technology that is at the heart of our infrastructure, it helps us feel safe."
"Scalable portfolio of services for remote device management, with good cloud integration. It's also easy to set up."
"Intersight is the best solution with the data center, and I like it because of the integration with HashiCorp, Kubernetes, and each cloud, as well as the orchestration of the data center system and integration with Pure Storage, Veeam, HashiCorp, and Umbrella."
"What I like best about Cisco Intersight is the way it's developing and converging into everything that the cloud has to offer, e.g. it's converging into one platform which is good."
"The features enable you to abstract the server personality away from the hardware, similar to the B-Series."
"Cisco Intersight makes onboarding much easier; it provides comprehensive hardware monitoring, firmware management, proactive alerts, server inventory, UCS configurations, service profiles for compliance, support integration, automation capabilities, and it offers multi-site visibility with cloud-based access that simplifies management."
"The product has good integration."
"I rate it a ten out of ten. I don't have any issues with it."
"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."
"We haven't had any issues with stability."
"The most valuable aspects of the solution are its ease of use and its ease of implementation."
"I gladly recommend VMware Aria Operations for Applications because it is cost effective and has commendable AI response capabilities."
"The stability of Aria Operations for Applications has improved significantly over the years."
"The features I find most valuable is the querying and alerting capabilities."
"It significantly improves application performance management by offering recommendations for resource allocation to avoid wastage or overcommitment."
"Scalability for VMware Aria Operations for Applications is easy to implement and manage."
 

Cons

"Regarding improvements for Cisco Intersight, I would say more third-party integration is needed."
"More products should be made compatible with iWORK, including more software and hardware."
"I would like AI to be more integrated into Cisco Intersight."
"Cisco Intersight needs some improvement in terms of stability. Hybrid cloud management and proper hyperscaler tie-up are other areas for improvement."
"The product could be easy to use, similar to CloudIQ."
"The product's setup should be easier."
"The usability must be better."
"An area for improvement in Cisco Intersight is automation. It needs more automation capabilities. Apart from enhanced automation, I want Cisco Intersight to integrate with third-party monitoring tools in its next release."
"However, it is still not a very mature product."
"The support from VMware is not very helpful. This is because you always receive many questions from the support service but few actual solutions."
"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."
"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."
"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 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."
"So far, the solution's learning curve has been pretty high."
"An area for improvement would be more in-depth reporting, such as analyzing disk IO during business hours compared to after hours."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"It's just the standard licensing cost. There are no additional fees."
"Cisco Intersight is not cheap, but it's not the most expensive product either."
"Cisco Intersight has competitive pricing. On a scale of one to five, my rating for its pricing is four."
"The product is cost-effective."
"You can get a free license for monitoring but need to purchase a license if you need extra control."
"I would rate the pricing as three out of five."
"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."
"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."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Manufacturing Company
12%
Financial Services Firm
10%
Computer Software Company
8%
Comms Service Provider
8%
Manufacturing Company
10%
Financial Services Firm
9%
Comms Service Provider
8%
Outsourcing Company
8%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business10
Midsize Enterprise4
Large Enterprise10
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business4
Midsize Enterprise1
Large Enterprise10
 

Questions from the Community

What needs improvement with Cisco Intersight?
Regarding improvements for Cisco Intersight, I would say more third-party integration is needed. At the moment it does have a basic integration of Pure Storage, so I can add my Pure Storage if I ha...
What is your primary use case for Cisco Intersight?
My main use case for Cisco Intersight is to register our Cisco UCS servers and apply profiles to our servers with configurations, firmware deployment automatically, and install the operating system...
What advice do you have for others considering Cisco Intersight?
I would rate Cisco Intersight a nine out of ten. I give it a nine because personally, I think it is one of the best management tools ever. I have worked before with different server vendors and dif...
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

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

Overview

 

Sample Customers

EXMAR, RapidScale
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 Cisco Intersight vs. VMware Aria Operations for Applications and other solutions. Updated: November 2026.
920,929 professionals have used our research since 2012.