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Grafana Enterprise Stack vs VMware Aria Operations for Applications comparison

 

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

Grafana Enterprise Stack
Ranking in IT Infrastructure Monitoring
14th
Average Rating
8.4
Reviews Sentiment
6.4
Number of Reviews
13
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
VMware Aria Operations for ...
Ranking in IT Infrastructure Monitoring
17th
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 (5th), Cloud Monitoring Software (14th)
 

Mindshare comparison

As of August 2025, in the IT Infrastructure Monitoring category, the mindshare of Grafana Enterprise Stack is 0.9%, up from 0.5% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of VMware Aria Operations for Applications is 1.4%, up from 1.2% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
IT Infrastructure Monitoring
 

Featured Reviews

Muralitharan KS - PeerSpot reviewer
Effective data visualization and effortless integration with Kubernetes
Grafana's most valuable feature is its ability to provide a graphical representation of data collected from various sources. It categorizes signals accurately and is easy to integrate with Kubernetes or OpenShift clusters using Helm charts. It helps administrators put in minimal effort due to its automatic data source collection capabilities.
ToniLindberg - PeerSpot reviewer
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.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"Grafana's full observability stack, known as LGTM, is highly valuable."
"The dashboards are pretty good."
"Compared to other packages, Grafana Enterprise Stack is user-friendly and easy to configure quickly."
"It is truly reliable."
"Grafana has enough features around dashboard management. It's got enough plugins to create your dashboards."
"Grafana's most valuable feature is its ability to provide a graphical representation of data collected from various sources."
"The most valuable feature of Grafana Enterprise Stack is the dashboards."
"The ability to graph actual, live, or on-the-fly activity is valuable; it is an added value to work with Grafana Enterprise Stack and to display results or logs, which are huge in nature, in graphical characters."
"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."
"The stability of Aria Operations for Applications has improved significantly over the years."
"It has a familiar interface, which makes it easy to get started."
"The features I find most valuable is the querying and alerting capabilities."
"This solution allows me to have true visibility for any metrics when it comes to my cloud, and private."
"The solution provides single-console management for multiple VMware environments and cloud integrations, whether hybrid, private, or public cloud."
"People are very pleased with the implementation."
"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."
 

Cons

"The connection between metrics, logs, and traces could be improved."
"If Grafana Enterprise Stack could display transaction queries in dashboard format similar to New Relic, it would provide more options and capabilities for users."
"I find Grafana really hard to configure. It's difficult to build the dashboard, and it's non-intuitive. In my opinion, it's very difficult to work with Grafana."
"Integrating AI capabilities for automated self-healing and reduced manual interventions would be valuable."
"The tool needs to show only fewer updates."
"I have encountered occasional issues with false inputs or incorrect data in Grafana."
"In terms of what Grafana provides, it just provides the charting tools. Everything else is third-party."
"They could use more small tutorials to explain a bit about how Grafana works."
"The initial setup should be easier and more seamless."
"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."
"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."
"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."
"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."
"The main problem I have is that the license cost is very high."
"An area for improvement would be more in-depth reporting, such as analyzing disk IO during business hours compared to after hours."
"The implementation is a long process that should be improved."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"I use the tool's free license."
"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."
"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."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Energy/Utilities Company
17%
Financial Services Firm
14%
Manufacturing Company
11%
Computer Software Company
11%
Manufacturing Company
13%
Financial Services Firm
13%
Computer Software Company
10%
Government
7%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
 

Questions from the Community

What do you like most about Grafana Enterprise Stack?
The tool's most valuable feature is real-time monitoring. It helps in securing the application or the node by allowing us to monitor and manage resource consumption during peak times. For instance,...
What needs improvement with Grafana Enterprise Stack?
I believe there are some areas for improvement in the product. Something that could be better is the time series functionality. If we choose a longer time range, it averages out some of the visibil...
What is your primary use case for Grafana Enterprise Stack?
I am using Grafana Enterprise Stack just for monitoring purposes. The main use case is monitoring, and Grafana Enterprise Stack gives all the historical trends, which makes it easy to understand ho...
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

No data available
Tanzu Observability, Wavefront, Wavefront by VMware, VMware Tanzu Observability
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

1. Uber 2. PayPal 3. eBay 4. Sony 5. Red Hat 6. IBM 7. Cisco 8. Adobe 9. Expedia 10. Booking.com 11. Airbnb 12. LinkedIn 13. Twitter 14. Netflix 15. Spotify 16. Pinterest 17. Slack 18. GitLab 19. Docker 20. Atlassian 21. Salesforce 22. Microsoft 23. Google 24. Amazon 25. Facebook 26. Apple 27. Intel 28. Oracle 29. SAP 30. VMware 31. HP 32. Dell
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 Grafana Enterprise Stack vs. VMware Aria Operations for Applications and other solutions. Updated: July 2025.
865,295 professionals have used our research since 2012.