Cribl vs VMware Aria Operations for Applications comparison

Why PeerSpot?

Cribl and Broadcom are both solutions in the Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability category. Cribl is ranked #6 with an average rating of 8.5, while Broadcom is ranked #18 with an average rating of 8.8. Cribl holds a 1.2% mindshare in APM, compared to Broadcom’s 1.3% mindshare. Additionally, 98% of Cribl users are willing to recommend the solution, compared to 93% of Broadcom users who would recommend it.

Cribl

Read 65 Cribl reviews

25,607 Views
8,450 Comparison Views

98% willing to recommend

VMware Aria Operations for ...

Read 14 VMware Aria Operations for Applications reviews

7,944 Views
4,369 Comparison Views

93% willing to recommend

Cribl

VMware Aria Operations for ...

Comparison Buyer's Guide

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Executive SummaryUpdated on Mar 29, 2026

VMware Aria Operations for Applications and Cribl compete in operational intelligence and log data management. VMware is strong in integration within VMware environments, while Cribl excels with log routing and data simplification, appealing to large-scale data environments.

Features: VMware Aria Operations for Applications provides comprehensive application visibility, detailed analytics for performance enhancement, and tight integration with VMware tools. Cribl offers flexibility in filtering and routing data, reduces storage costs by sending essential data only, and supports multiple destinations for data output.

Room for Improvement: VMware could enhance its integration with non-VMware environments and simplify its analytics interface. Cribl may improve ease of deployment and broaden its documentation for complex architectures. Both could benefit from reducing costs related to scaling and enhancing support for intricate data scenarios.

Ease of Deployment and Customer Service: VMware Aria Operations for Applications offers smooth deployment within its ecosystem and a well-regarded customer service. Cribl's deployment can be more challenging due to its flexible architecture but is supported by extensive documentation and support resources.

Pricing and ROI: VMware Aria Operations for Applications might have higher upfront costs but offers significant ROI in VMware-centric environments. Cribl presents cost-effective entry options with varying ROI, depending on data management complexity and volume, making it appealing for high observability needs.

To learn more, read our detailed Cribl vs. VMware Aria Operations for Applications Report (Updated: September 2026).

Buyer's Guide

Cribl vs. VMware Aria Operations for Applications

September 2026

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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

Cribl

Ranking in Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability

6th

Average Rating

8.6

Reviews Sentiment

6.8

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

Log Management (4th), Security Information and Event Management (SIEM) (5th), Observability Pipeline Software (1st)

VMware Aria Operations for ...

Ranking in Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability

18th

Average Rating

8.0

Reviews Sentiment

6.3

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

IT Infrastructure Monitoring (14th), Container Monitoring (5th), Cloud Monitoring Software (13th)

Mindshare comparison

As of September 2026, in the Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability category, the mindshare of Cribl is 1.2%, up from 1.0% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of VMware Aria Operations for Applications is 1.3%, up from 1.0% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.

Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability Mindshare Distribution
Product	Mindshare (%)
Cribl	1.2%
VMware Aria Operations for Applications	1.3%
Other	97.5%

Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability

Featured Reviews

JigarHirani

Splunk Engineer at a recruiting/HR firm with 11-50 employees

Log pipelines have reduced daily data volume and now simplify traffic analysis

Overall, the pipelines and all the features are good with Cribl. The UI is good. Just sometimes, when I actually started using Cribl, I faced the issue where I was not able to connect the nodes. The pipeline is structured in a certain way, then the data will be routed to there, and something of that nature. I was very much confused about their whole products, such as Data Lake and pipelines. It's possible that at that time I didn't take any university courses, which is why I did not know much. But if they can give an intro on how we can connect nodes, or they can provide simple use cases showing what you can do with Cribl, it would help. If you just need to add the source and the destination and pre-build some proper workflow, then it will be easy for new customers to navigate through Cribl.

Read full review

Ajay Shukla

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.

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

"Cribl is excellent for scalability, as it is good overall for pipeline maintaining, horizontal scaling, distributed architecture, parallel pipelines, and load balancing."

"Cribl's ability to handle high volumes of diverse data types such as logs and metrics is impressive."

"The features of Cribl that I appreciate the most are the ability for in-place searching for our logs, so we don't have to move our logs outside of our cloud, which gives us privacy and compliance requirements."

"Cribl is one of the best data pipelining platforms, and with all the features that have been upgraded over the past three years, it has been seamless."

"I'd highly recommend other organizations to use Cribl Search because it did help us a lot with data processing and everything."

"Cribl brings significant benefits like cost-effectiveness, reducing CM costs, and making our data vendor-agnostic since data flows through Cribl."

"Cribl's interface is user-friendly and easy to learn, making it simple to teach new users how to use it."

"The solution saves a significant amount of time and resources, and I would estimate the return on investment to be double or triple the investment we made."

More Cribl pros

"Scalability for VMware Aria Operations for Applications is easy to implement and manage."

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

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

"Wavefront's monitoring tools and visibility into public cloud platforms are competing with the best out there."

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

"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."

"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."

More VMware Aria Operations for Applications pros

Cons

"I think Cribl can be improved because I do not believe it is a mature product. It has gone down many times and when we are doing upgrades, many things break and we face a lot of issues, especially with scaling."

"Cribl's initial setup is quite complex."

"The reason I would not give it a ten is mainly due to the learning curve and initial complexity, especially for new users."

"My experience with the user interface when managing log processing tasks is quite complex for new beginners, and there is also a documentation gap that leads new beginners to take a while to get fluency over the software."

"Improvement could be made in the logging area, as sometimes we encounter issues in a pipeline or something, and it's not immediately obvious when you look at the logs that the pipeline is failing."

"It would be really nice to be able to see Cribl gain insights from the data as the data is in stream, in flight, on the way to wherever its final storage destination is."

"The main downside of Cribl is that it is not very beginner-friendly."

"From my perspective of the stability and reliability of the solution, there have been times where certain releases have bugs inside of them that we have to work around in order to make the solution work as intended."

More Cribl cons

"The solution could be expensive, which might be a limiting factor."

"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 just need more capability. A few areas still need more enhancements in the technology capability space."

"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."

"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 documentation and integration with Kubernetes could be improved."

"However, it is still not a very mature product."

More VMware Aria Operations for Applications cons

Pricing and Cost Advice

"I would not say it is a cheaply priced tool as it has been doing wonders in the market. The tool has been budget-friendly for organizations."

"The product pricing is reasonable compared to other solutions."

"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."

"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."

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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews

Financial Services Firm

19%

Manufacturing Company

11%

Healthcare Company

Government

Financial Services Firm

11%

Manufacturing Company

10%

Comms Service Provider

Outsourcing Company

Company Size

By reviewers

Large Enterprise

Midsize Enterprise

Small Business

By reviewers
Company Size	Count
Small Business	50
Midsize Enterprise	8
Large Enterprise	35

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

Questions from the Community

What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Cribl?

I find the pricing of Cribl to be cost-efficient because it has helped us save costs for data storage by removing unwanted logs.

See all answers

What needs improvement with Cribl?

Currently, Cribl is perfectly fine for us, and we have not observed any such issues. However, if we find anything later on, we will document it and share it with you. Cribl could respond more quick...

See all answers

What is your primary use case for Cribl?

We are using Cribl for log trimming with a vast majority of log sources that have different log patterns or log types. Some logs come in syslog format, some are in JSON, and some are in other HTML ...

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?

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

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Product Reports

Buyer's Guide

Cribl

September 2026

Download Cribl product report

Buyer's Guide

VMware Aria Operations for Applications

August 2026

VMware Aria Operations for Applications report

Download VMware Aria Operations for Applications product report

Also Known As

No data available

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

Overview

Cribl offers advanced data transformation and routing with features such as data reduction, plugin configurations, and log collection within a user-friendly framework supporting various deployments, significantly reducing data volumes and costs.

Cribl is designed to streamline data management, offering real-time data transformation and efficient log management. It supports seamless SIEM migration, enabling organizations to optimize costs associated with platforms like Splunk through data trimming. The capability to handle multiple data destinations and compression eases log control. With flexibility across on-prem, cloud, or hybrid environments, Cribl provides an adaptable interface that facilitates quick data model replication. While it significantly reduces data volumes, enhancing overall efficiency, there are areas for improvement, including compatibility with legacy systems and integration with enterprise products. Organizations can enhance their operational capabilities through certification opportunities and explore added functionalities tailored towards specific industry needs.

What are Cribl's most important features?

Data Transformation: Real-time data routing and transformation for improved efficiency.
Data Reduction: Reduces data volumes, lowering storage and licensing costs.
Routing and Masking: Offers powerful data masking and easy plugin configurations.
Log Collection: Simplifies the log collection process across different environments.
Deployment Flexibility: Supports on-prem, cloud, or hybrid deployments.
Seamless Integration: Facilitates easy migration to SIEMs and various data destinations.

What benefits or ROI should users look for?

Cost Savings: Reduces licensing costs by trimming unnecessary data.
Enhanced Efficiency: Improves data handling through seamless integration and transformation.
Operational Flexibility: Provides multiple deployment options to suit organizational preferences.
Data Management: Enhances user control over logs with advanced data reduction and compression.
Certification Opportunities: Offers users chances to enhance skills and operational capabilities.

Cribl sees extensive use in industries prioritizing efficient data management and cost optimization. Organizations leverage its capabilities to connect between different data sources, including cloud environments, improving both data handling and storage efficiency. Its customization options appeal to firms needing specific industry compliance and operational enhancements.

Cribl

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

Information Not Available

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

Cribl vs. VMware Aria Operations for Applications

September 2026

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