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 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."
"The system automatically sizes and moves resources based on the needs of the applications."
"The ability to monitor and automate both the right-sizing of VMs as well as to automate the vMotion of VMs across ESXi hosts."
"Turbonomic has helped optimize cloud operations and reduced our cloud costs significantly. Overall, we are at about 40 percent savings, and we spend about three million a year just in Azure. It reduces the size of the VMs, putting them into the right template for usage. People don't realize that you don't have to future-proof a virtual machine in Azure. You just need to build it for today. As the business or service grows, you can scale up or out. About 90 percent of all the costs that we've reduced has been from sizing machines appropriately."
"We have VM placement in Automated mode and currently have all other metrics in Recommend mode."
"Before implementing Turbonomic, we had difficulty reaching a consensus about VM placement and sizing. Everybody's opinion was wrong, including mine. The application developers, implementers, and infrastructure team could never decide the appropriate size of a virtual machine. I always made the machines small, and they always made them too big. We were both probably wrong."
"We like that Turbonomic shows application metrics and estimates the impact of taking a suggested action. It provides us a map of resource utilization as part of its recommendation. We evaluate and compare that to what we think would be appropriate from a human perspective to that what Turbonomic is doing, then take the best action going forward."
"I only deal with the infrastructure side, so I really couldn't speak to more than load balancing as the most valuable feature for me. It provides specific actions that prevent resource starvation. It always keeps things in perfect balance."
"vROps is more user-friendly than some other products that we've seen on the market. It was very easy for our technicians to pick up. The search functionality works well. It makes it easy for our technicians to get down to a workload that they're possibly having an issue with."
"The most valuable feature is the ability to get a view of our entire environment in a single pane of glass. We're a very large company, so going from one interface to another to troubleshoot an issue, or even just to get capacity information, is time-consuming and not efficient. Being able to go to one place and get that information is very helpful."
"It has helped us with troubleshooting key points of our environment. If there are issues that come up, we can dig down to a virtual machine and see if it's having issues and where those issues lie: if it needs more memory, CPU, or if there is a storage issue."
"The solution gives suggestions regarding whether resources are underutilized or overutilized."
"I have found the reporting tool, capacity planning, and reports for performance monitoring the most valuable features."
"It allows for a bit more transparency regarding consumption and it also helps us plan ahead."
"The most valuable feature is the insight into how our infrastructure is actually working and the kind of performance that when users either say there is an issue, it gives some insight into finding out what's going wrong with it. I think its cause we have it mainly based on our production units."
"I like the monitoring aspect. One of the biggest things in our environment is being able to see what the entire vCenter environment looks like. The health status, being able to determine when we're having issues with resources, utilization, memory, or CPU."
"I like the detail I get in the old user interface and will miss some of that in the new interface when we perform our planned upgrade soon."
"There are a few things that we did notice. It does kind of seem to run away from itself a little bit. It does seem to have a mind of its own sometimes. It goes out there and just kind of goes crazy. There needs to be something that kind of throttles things back a little bit. I have personally seen where we've been working on things, then pulled servers out of the VMware cluster and found that Turbonomic was still trying to ship resources to and from that node. So, there has to be some kind of throttling or ability for it to not be so buggy in that area. Because we've pulled nodes out of a cluster into maintenance mode, then brought it back up, and it tried to put workloads on that outside of a cluster. There may be something that is available for this, but it seems very kludgy to me."
"They have a long road map when we ask for certain things that will make the product better. It takes time, but that's understandable because there are other things that are higher on the priority list."
"The automation area could be improved, and the generic reports are poor. We want more details in the analysis report from the application layer. The reports from the infrastructure layer are satisfactory, but Turbonomic won't provide much information if we dig down further than the application layer."
"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."
"It would be good for Turbonomic, on their side, to integrate with other companies like AppDynamics or SolarWinds or other monitoring softwares. I feel that the actual monitoring of applications, mixed in with their abilities, would help. That would be the case wherever Turbonomic lacks the ability to monitor an application or in cases where applications are so customized that it's not going to be able to handle them. There is monitoring that you can do with scripting that you may not be able to do with Turbonomic."
"Some features are only available via changes to the deployment YAML, and it would be better to have them in the UI."
"They could add a few more reports. They could also be a bit more granular. While they have reports, sometimes it is hard to figure out what you are looking for just by looking at the date."
"There is a learning curve because it's a complex program. There is a lot to consume in terms of the metrics inside of it. That's the biggest hurdle: trying to understand all the places to go look."
"There is room for improvement in asset management and resource usage."
"It does the functions that we need it to. Although we do have some issues from time to time. We're looking for more maturity out of the product but it's getting better with every release."
"One way the solution could be improved, in my opinion: management packs, more native management packs with API."
"We use a large installation of this solution with multiple nodes and so the setup was pretty complex."
"If this tool can integrate with other products, for example, those that monitor the network devices or any other storage devices, it will be very beneficial."
"Lately, the chargeback site has improved, but it could be simpler. You need to create your own dashboards. It should be simple to get a virtual machine and break down the compute and storage costs."
"It's getting better from what it used to be but it still has a pretty steep learning curve. It's not super-intuitive when you first log into it. To find a lot of the information you need, you have to dig through multiple categories, subcategories, panes, and dashboards and widgets. They've been making it better by presenting some of the most commonly used ones more in the forefront. But some of the more advanced stuff is still pretty difficult to find."
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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