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 primary features we have focused on are reporting and optimization."
"The notifications saying, "This is a corrective action," even though some of them can be automated, are always welcome to see. They summarize your entire infrastructure and how you can better utilize it. That is the biggest feature."
"Rightsizing is valuable. Its recommendations are pretty good."
"Using this product helps us to reduce performance risk because it shows us where resources are needed but not yet allocated."
"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."
"The system automatically sizes and moves resources based on the needs of the applications."
"We've saved hundreds of hours. Most of the time those hours would have to be after hours as well, which are more valuable to me as that's my personal time."
"We have a system where our developers automate machine builds, and that is constantly running out of resources. Turbonomic helps us with that, so I don't have to keep buying hardware. The developers always say, "They don't have enough. They don't have enough. They don't have enough," when they just configured it improperly. Therefore, Turbonomic helps us identify configuration issues on their side so it doesn't cost me money on the other end to buy resources that I don't really need."
"With this solution, we are able to see where problems are happening quickly and improve turnaround time, which matters to us."
"One of the most valuable features is that it gives us granular insight into how the infrastructure is operating and running, down to the storage level, the hypervisor level, even the hardware level. It really gives us a deep dive into what is going on and lets us see. Instead of our having to figure it out, it figures it out for us. It is also user-friendly and intuitive."
"This solution is most definitely scalable. We've already gone back to the drawing board and specifically designed it from the ground up, to be scalable with the size of our environment moving forward."
"One of the most valuable features is the ability to compare between AWS/Azure and the local cloud. When customers deploy something on the local cloud, with the same configuration that would apply to AWS or Azure, we can calculate the estimated cost difference between the local cloud and the public cloud. We do this kind of analysis for optimization and it is one of the best features of vROps."
"I have found the backup extremely useful in my use cases."
"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."
"The most valuable feature is the way you can look at your virtual machine and see if it's using too many resources or not enough, and you can add resources to it if you need to, or take some away to save on them."
"It has helped improve the quality of service to users. It's made sure that we don't have servers that are over-subscribed with storage that starts to end up being at the minimalist points."
"Some features are only available via changes to the deployment YAML, and it would be better to have them in the UI."
"If they would educate their customers to understand the latest updates, that would help customers... Also, there are a lot of features that are not available in Turbonomic. For example, PaaS component optimization and automation are still in the development phase."
"Turbonomic doesn't do storage placement how I would prefer. We use multiple shared storage volumes on VMware, so I don't have one big disk. I have lots of disks that I can place VMs on, and that consumes IOPS from the disk subsystem. We were getting recommendations to provision a new volume."
"The GUI and policy creation have room for improvement. There should be a better view of some of the numbers that are provided and easier to access. And policy creation should have it easier to identify groups."
"There is an opportunity for improvement with some of Turbonomic's permissions internally for role-based access control. We would like the ability to come up with some customized permissions or scope permissions a bit differently than the product provides."
"While the product is fairly intuitive and easy to use once you learn it, it can be quite daunting until you have undergone a bit of training."
"The planning and costing areas could be a little bit more detailed. When you have more than 2,000 machines, the reports don't work properly. They need to fix it so that the reports work when you use that many virtual machines."
"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 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."
"The solution’s pricing could be improved."
"I would like to see more functionality. I would also like to see better support, because the pack that we use, the Horizon, it's an additional pack. It's not currently actually built by VMware, it's built by a separate company. When they merge the two, there will be better support in the future."
"When it comes to policies, they need to fine tune things to make it easier. It is a bit difficult setting up policies."
"I'd like to see a little more training, free training on the VMware site; to get some more information within the VMware community. There's quite a bit of stuff out there but getting that access can be daunting sometimes."
"One of the big areas that would help us in the future is to focus on using vROps more as a tool to help us respond to these CVEs and security vulnerabilities that are coming in today's world. We're getting CVEs upon CVEs about security vulnerabilities, whether it's a process, or architecture, or VMware bug. It would be nice to be able to have those come into vROps and help us track them across our environment... It would be nice if we could integrate that into a vROps dashboard, which sees every host and every VM in the environment."
"It's complex to manage because there are a lot of options and metrics. It's complex when you want to do something very specific."
"The biggest room for improvement would be the customizability of the alerting function. The emails that come through are somewhat difficult to tailor along with the information contained within them and how they are laid out."
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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