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AppDynamics vs Broadcom DX Application Performance Management comparison

 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive SummaryUpdated on Jul 24, 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

AppDynamics
Ranking in Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability
5th
Ranking in Container Monitoring
3rd
Average Rating
8.2
Reviews Sentiment
6.4
Number of Reviews
157
Ranking in other categories
Mobile APM (2nd)
Broadcom DX Application Per...
Ranking in Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability
32nd
Ranking in Container Monitoring
8th
Average Rating
8.0
Reviews Sentiment
7.9
Number of Reviews
161
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
 

Mindshare comparison

As of February 2025, in the Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability category, the mindshare of AppDynamics is 4.6%, down from 5.8% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Broadcom DX Application Performance Management is 0.4%, up from 0.4% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability
 

Q&A Highlights

it_user3396 - PeerSpot reviewer
Jun 19, 2014
 

Featured Reviews

Mahesh Deshpande - PeerSpot reviewer
The transition tracing and user experience are good, but performance degrades past 3,000 or so agents
The Kubernetes cluster agent has not yet matured. That's one area that requires a lot of improvement. You have two options for implementing the Kubernetes agent. One is deployed in DocCloud, but you can't download those images from DocCloud for security reasons at most organizations, so this option isn't that useful. The installation for the second option isn't that user-friendly. Transition tracing for the Kubernetes application is challenging. You have to navigate to a new set of user interfaces in AppDynamics, so that's the pain point. There is an icon you need to click on to get a newer user interface.
aush.111 - PeerSpot reviewer
Provides efficiency in migration and DAW but requires a high level of administrator knowledge for configuration
This solution still relies on inbuilt configuration. For example, I'm pretty much impressed with Dynatrace POC, where we deploy the agent with a simple click, click, click, and then that's it. And we did not build any alerts or anything. We just started getting the alerts, warnings, and everything on its own system, understood what the benchmark is and what is the threshold, and it started giving you the warnings and the caution alerts, the danger alerts. So we expect something like that should be there in Broadcom at the level. But, instead, it expects us to configure. So that is what is missing there. Even if the server CPU usage is 95%t, it doesn't harm you. It doesn't send you any alerts. We think the system is normal. So it's not normal. So this is what they should think and send you AI/ML-related alarms on their own. In future releases, I would like to see more AI and ML capabilities, which are kind of missing. Another area of improvement is its infrastructure monitoring perspective. For example, they are still using UIM, which is a good tool. But for APM, they have come to DXP. However, in terms of UIM, the unified infrastructure management, there is no DXP version or AIML version of it. So they should try to find an updated version of it so that it is not competing with the rest of the solution.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"It gives me the ability to trace logs between transactions, for example, a DB transaction or JVM transaction from one hub to the other. I can easily find out where the problem is or where the bottleneck of the issues lies."
"This solution is easy to use and very powerful, it is a complete tool for us."
"What I like best about AppDynamics is that it's functional, particularly in APM in Java and .NET."
"We set up alerts recently so we can fix any issues more quickly in production."
"The real-time feature provides me with insights into what's happening."
"The flow map is very valuable to us. Before we installed APM, we had no idea how our application looked."
"Capacity planning is, in my opinion, the most useful."
"End-user monitoring (web and mobile)"
"The ability to accomplish the identification of the root cause of problems with applications in drill-down level by integrating the suite with tools for managing and monitoring."
"Being able to pull in and merge the infrastructure and application data."
"The CA tools allow to me to get into detailed transactions for custom ranking, and be able to make predictions. It also gathers data. Some other tools may be good at one area, but not good overall, including the mainframe."
"Cross-platform business transaction tracing supports the ability to monitor end-to-end performance across the stack, providing granular insight into customer experience KPIs, which are a critical success factor for organizations."
"It covers from mainframe, all the way to dotcom, for example. CA currently covers Amazon, Microsoft Azure, Office 365 monitoring."
"The insight it gives into the applications that it's actually applied to, and the flexibility to do many things with those metrics, and also feed your own metrics from external sources."
"An application is quite complicated in the environment of a software reliability engineer, because our applications are like a black box. Thanks to CA APM we are able to transform this black box to a gray box by using the transaction trace functionality services. For me it's the most valuable service of the solution."
"Crash analytics goes down to the level of code you need to check."
 

Cons

"AppDynamics's agent management could be improved."
"We constantly need to improve our alert mechanism because we get a lot of false-positive alerts. These are not real errors. In addition, for end-user monitoring, sometimes, we are not able to catch all user activities. Because of not being able to follow the user activity from the start to the end, we are missing out on the performance issues."
"We have had downtime, which has been the result of config, application, or cord issues."
"The solution could be more user-friendly for diagnostic purposes. Anyone who is using the solution should be able to infer what that error is about, they should be able to troubleshoot it better."
"The solution could improve by covering more technologies. For example, it does support .NET Core applications. However, it could be a bit better."
"There could log management features included in the product."
"Their agents sometimes claim to be very lightweight, especially with databases, but they are very heavy. They can take up more compute than the actual work that we need to do."
"I think I would like to see a better way to deploy and upgrade the machine agents that we use. Currently, we have to use SCCM, and that might just be our environment with the customer."
"One of the challenges is agent releases. So as we employ agents, they are done relatively manually. A little bit of automating of agent release would be helpful."
"Lacks some integration between all the tools."
"Dashboards need to be improved in order to make them self-explanatory."
"The reason it's not a ten is because they don't focus enough on improving over time like other competitors do who have a more modern and complete tool."
"The upgrade was complex. The documentation could have been a little bit better, but other than that, it was okay.​"
"We enountered stability issues. They were mitigated by performance tuning within infrastructure."
"In order for the tool to be successful, at least in our organization, it will need to have more self-serve features for implementation, instrumentation, and then modification of metric data from the APM."
"The solution still needs the administrator of APM to know a lot more to configure and control everything. So it's a headache for the administrator to do the daily jobs."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"The price of AppDynamics could be reduced in my region."
"It is not a cheap tool, but you also save in manpower to setup because it is easy and fast. At the end of the day, I think the revenue is much better. BUT, they have an awful co-term mode of licensing."
"The pricing model for AppDynamics could be better. You have to subscribe to a yearly or a three-year licensing, which isn't very handy. The solution is one of the most expensive in the market today."
"We are looking forward to purchasing the solution on the AWS Marketplace."
"It is expensive. However, our time to recover has been reduced, and this product has helped recuperate costs and provided us with ROI."
"There is no standard license instead, the license is adapted to the organization's requirements."
"Yearly payments have to be made toward the licensing costs of the solution. The solution has no additional costs apart from the licensing costs."
"I would say the solution is affordable because it is widely used across financial service sectors."
"Dynatrace is the most expensive of these tools followed by AppDynamics which is "medium-expensive." CA APM is a bit lower in price than either Dynatrace or AppDynanics... In my opinion, if you can afford it, go for AppDynamics instead of CA APM."
"On pricing, CA is very competitive. I think that's going to help in the long run."
"There is some research needed to determine licensing costs, based on the number of DataPower instances for the Nastel agent, for example."
"The pricing structure should be based on memory or CPU usage rather than the number of agents, as it makes the solution more expensive for us."
"Setup costs are quite competitive relative to other solutions, and simpler."
"The license for Broadcom DX Application Performance Management is annual. The licensing model could improve because there is not any limit to deploying the agent, there should be some limits on it."
"Negotiate a lot, but do not forget to buy the product because it is worth it."
"It is definitely expensive for what we get, but there isn't an alternate option at the moment."
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Answers from the Community

it_user3396 - PeerSpot reviewer
Jun 19, 2014
Jun 19, 2014
Saluting Henry from another Henry! Thanks for your sound advice. Henry
2 out of 9 answers
it_user118554 - PeerSpot reviewer
May 20, 2014
All three are good tools for monitoring web application transactions. Of course, CA has a much broader set of capabilities than the other two - can monitor networks, servers, databases, etc. AppDynamics provides a product that you can use in-house. NewRelic is only a SaaS offering. Which of these is best for you - depends on what you need. If you already have CA deployed, you are probably looking at just web transaction monitoring then. AppDynamics and NewRelic are more current in this area than CA Wily.
it_user112596 - PeerSpot reviewer
May 20, 2014
From my experience with CA Wily, it's more expensive and requires a long implementation, it is also less flexible. We did not consider New Relic because we did not want to have our sensitive data hosted in the cloud. Not acceptable in our business. AppDynamics offered a short implementation time, immediate satisfaction and only required fine-tuning afterwards. Also the pricing was lower then CA Wily.
 

Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Educational Organization
51%
Financial Services Firm
15%
Computer Software Company
8%
Manufacturing Company
5%
Financial Services Firm
20%
Computer Software Company
16%
Manufacturing Company
13%
Real Estate/Law Firm
7%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
 

Questions from the Community

Any advice about APM solutions?
There are many factors and we know little about your requirements (size of org, technology stack, management systems, the scope of implementation). Our goal was to consolidate APM and infra monitor...
APM tools for a Managed Service Provider - Dynatrace vs. AppDynamics vs. Aternity vs. Ruxit
Hi Avi! It's great to see your thorough approach to selecting an APM package for your MSP company. Considering your focus on SMBs and enterprises in Israel, Dynatrace seems like a solid choice with...
What do you like most about Broadcom DX Application Performance Management?
Scalability-wise, I rate the solution a nine out of ten...there is a very easy way to deal with it by adding more servers to the application.
What needs improvement with Broadcom DX Application Performance Management?
The area of improvement is related to the areas of application onboarding and instrumentation, where the product has certain shortcomings. Broadcom needs to work on application instrumentation and ...
What is your primary use case for Broadcom DX Application Performance Management?
There are multiple users related to Broadcom DX Application Performance Management. During any severity or incident, our company's customers have dealt with their applications with the help of the ...
 

Also Known As

AppD, AppDynamics APM
DX APM, CA APM, CA NetQoS Performance Center, Wily Introscope, CA Wily APM, CA App Experience Analytics, CA AXA
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

Cisco, Sony, Nasdaq, Reserve Bank of New Zealand, Edmunds.com, Puma, Fox News, DirecTV, Pizza Hut, T-Systems, Cornell University, OpenTable, BITMARCK, Green Mountain Power, Care.com, Overstock, Paddy Power, eHarmony, Kraft, The Motley Fool, The Container Store, and more See more customers
Lexmark, Intermountain Healthcare, National Australia Bank, BBVA Compass Bank, Innovapost, Dansk Supermarked Group, U.S. Cellular, Orange, Cetip
Find out what your peers are saying about AppDynamics vs. Broadcom DX Application Performance Management and other solutions. Updated: January 2025.
832,138 professionals have used our research since 2012.