We performed a comparison between IBM Turbonomic and VMware Aria Operations based on our users’ reviews in five categories. After reading all of the collected data, you can find our conclusion below.
IBM Turbonomic reviewers like its automation and orchestration components and say that it greatly reduces operational expenditures and saves them vast amounts of time by identifying misconfigurations very early on. Some users mention that they would like better generic reports.
VMware Aria Operations users praise its capacity planning feature and say that it is easy to use, is excellent for monitoring, and provides them with valuable insights. Several users say they would like more APIs and integration options.
Comparison Results: IBM Turbonomic comes out on top in this comparison. It is a reasonably priced solution that greatly reduces costs. On the other hand, VMware Aria Operations users say that it is an expensive solution.
"The proactive monitoring of all our open enrollment applications has improved our organization. We have used it to size applications that we are moving to the cloud. Therefore, when we move them out there, we have them appropriately sized. We use it for reporting to current application owners, showing them where they are wasting money. There are easy things to find for an application, e.g., they decommissioned the server, but they never took care of the storage. Without a tool like this, that storage would just sit there forever, with us getting billed for it."
"The recommendation of the family types is a huge help because it has saved us a lot of money. We use it primarily for that. Another thing that Turbonomic provides us with is a single platform that manages the full application stack and that's something I really like."
"It is a good holistic platform that is easy to use. It works pretty well."
"The most important feature to us is an objective measurement of VM headroom per cluster. In addition, the ability to check for the right-sizing of VMs."
"It became obvious to us that there was a lot more being offered in the product that we could leverage to ensure our VMware environment was running efficiently."
"We can manage multiple environments using a single pane of glass, which is something that I really like."
"I like Turbonomic's automation and AI machine learning features. It shows you what it can do, but it can also act on recommendations automatically. Integration with an APM system makes the AI/ML features truly effective. Understanding what the application is doing and the trends of application behavior can help you make real-world decisions and act on that information."
"I like Turbonomic's built-in reporting. It provides a ton of information out of the box, so I don't have to build panels for the monthly summaries and other reports I need to present to management. We get better performance and bottleneck reporting from this than we do from our older EMC software."
"The stability in vRealize has been great. We've had no outages nor impacts. The upgrade process has been great so far."
"Its job automation features and reporting capabilities are unique and valuable."
"It is easy to drill down directly to the root cause of a problem. It goes from network to storage and having access to all the metrics. When you run 100 percent virtual, then everything is in one tool."
"The most valuable feature is that everything is integrated for monitoring, performance, and troubleshooting."
"We are not constantly having to babysit or troubleshoot it. It does what it is designed to do, and it does a very good job of it."
"Troubleshooting is one of the most valuable features for us. It identifies problems that other monitoring solutions are giving us, offers us insight into the problem and then digs into it and finds out what the actual problems are and addresses them."
"Right now I'm working with a lot of other products. We're in the process of flushing out our old HPE system and moving everything over. A lot of the automation that we do, and emailing, sending out customer notices, we've been able to take that over from the HPE Operations Orchestration, and the old stack, and automate it into vRO very quickly."
"One of the most valuable features is the trending analysis of our environment to make capacity-planning decisions, in addition to providing real-time analysis of events."
"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."
"The reporting needs to be improved. It's important for us to know and be able to look back on what happened and why certain decisions were made, and we want to use a custom report for this."
"Since the introduction of a HTML 5 based interface, our main - but minor - criticism of a less than intuitive operation managers' GUI would be the area of improvement."
"It would be nice for them to have a way to do something with physical machines, but I know that is not their strength Thankfully, the majority of our environment is virtual, but it would be nice to see this type of technology across some other platforms. It would be nice to have capacity planning across physical machines."
"It sometimes does get false positives. Sometimes, it'll move something when it really wasn't a performance metric. I've seen it do that, but it's pretty much an automated tool for performance. We've only got about 500 virtual machines, so lots of times, I'm able to manage it physically, but it's definitely a nice tool for a larger enterprise that might be managing 2,000 or 3,000 virtual machines."
"I would like Turbonomic to add more services, especially in the cloud area. I have already told them this. They can add Azure NetApp Files. They can add Azure Blob storage. They have already added Azure App service, but they can do more."
"We don't use Turbonomic for FinOps and part of the reason is its cost reporting. The reporting could be much more robust and, if that were the case, I could pitch it for FinOps."
"The one point is the reporting. We do have reports out of it, but they're not the level of graphical detail I would like."
"I'd like to see more out-of-the-box dashboards and less customizing of the environment. The interface could be more streamlined. There are still a lot of old dashboards versus the new UI dashboards."
"We would like to see an improved licensing model to be set up for this solution. The current model charges per CPU, as opposed to being product-based, which would allow us to monitor our complete virtual infrastructure under a single license."
"A reporting engine would be good, where the database could dump into something like Splunk integration, so we could write our own reports."
"The UI interface of the application has been stagnant for a long time."
"In the beginning, I picked up an implementation that had been designed wrong from the ground up."
"They need to improve the capacity and infrastructure planning side of things. Also, I would like to see them integrate more stuff, with more detailed monitoring and different cloud providers."
"The VMware Aria Operations solution is a very technical product and is not for everyone. As a top-of-the-chain VMware tool, it is only normal that it has a learning curve. While the UI has been improved, it may still be difficult for some users. The solution has a lot of functionality and can monitor all areas of infrastructure, such as storage and network."
"It would break, and you would have to go fix it. Then it would break, and they would have some other guys that knew a bit more about it, and they fixed it."
IBM Turbonomic is ranked 4th in Cloud Management with 204 reviews while VMware Aria Operations is ranked 2nd in Cloud Management with 360 reviews. IBM Turbonomic is rated 8.8, while VMware Aria Operations is rated 8.2. The top reviewer of IBM Turbonomic writes "The solution reduced our operational expenditures and is able to identify points before we even noticed them ". On the other hand, the top reviewer of VMware Aria Operations writes "It has good stability, but the report-generating feature needs improvement". IBM Turbonomic is most compared with Azure Cost Management, Cisco Intersight, VMware Aria Cost powered by CloudHealth, VMware vSphere and Cloudability, whereas VMware Aria Operations is most compared with VMware Aria Automation, VMware vSphere, Veeam ONE, Nutanix Prism and SolarWinds Virtualization Manager. See our IBM Turbonomic vs. VMware Aria Operations report.
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