AWS X-Ray vs Dynatrace comparison

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AWS X-Ray

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Executive SummaryUpdated on Jul 24, 2024

Dynatrace and AWS X-Ray are two prominent products in the APM and monitoring space. Dynatrace seems to have the upper hand due to its comprehensive features and ease of deployment, despite AWS X-Ray's lower cost and integration with AWS services.

Features: Dynatrace has AI-driven insights, full-stack monitoring, and detailed analytics. AWS X-Ray provides tracing capabilities, seamless AWS integration, and value for cost. Dynatrace's extensive features give it an edge in functionality and versatility.

Room for Improvement: Dynatrace needs better documentation and more flexible pricing models. AWS X-Ray requires improved debugging capabilities and broader support for non-AWS environments. Addressing documentation and pricing can benefit Dynatrace, while AWS X-Ray should focus on expanding environment compatibility.

Ease of Deployment and Customer Service: Dynatrace offers a straightforward deployment process and strong customer support. AWS X-Ray is easy to deploy within AWS but needs more steps for mixed environments. Dynatrace's superior customer support and smoother deployment process are significant advantages.

Pricing and ROI: Dynatrace is expensive but yields high ROI due to its capabilities. AWS X-Ray has a lower cost and offers good value within the AWS environment. Dynatrace seems worth the higher price for comprehensive monitoring needs.

To learn more, read our detailed AWS X-Ray vs. Dynatrace Report (Updated: January 2025).

AWS X-Ray vs. Dynatrace

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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

AWS X-Ray

Ranking in Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability

17th

Average Rating

7.8

Reviews Sentiment

7.7

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

No ranking in other categories

Dynatrace

Ranking in Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability

2nd

Average Rating

8.8

Reviews Sentiment

7.4

Number of Reviews

344

Ranking in other categories

Log Management (4th), Mobile APM (1st), Container Monitoring (1st), AIOps (2nd)

Mindshare comparison

As of January 2025, in the Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability category, the mindshare of AWS X-Ray is 3.9%, up from 3.6% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Dynatrace is 12.4%, down from 14.5% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.

Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability

Featured Reviews

Parth Solanki

Founder & CEO at Quicklead.io

Saves time, is relatively cheap, and helps find errors

If we get any error, we can go to X-Ray and get all the requests for a certain error in one place. It makes it easy to find the issue in your own product. You can look at logs and error logs and find loopholes. You can do direct queries to get specific requests over the course of a day. It's very good at error reporting and quite fast. You also get a lot of information, including IP addresses, user locations, et cetera.

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Manish Ved

Lead Infrastructure Domain Architect (Systems) at a healthcare company with 10,001+ employees

Solution has a useful AI engine, but the reports could be a bit better

We are typically about a version or two behind. We are on the managed solution. Our model of deployment is on-premises. I would say there are a couple of thousand users of this solution in our company. We are also planning on increasing the usage as our apps migrate to the cloud. I would advise other people looking into solutions, to do their homework beforehand and not assume that by deploying all the tools everything will automatically work, so there's still a lot of configuration involved. I would rate this solution as a whole an eight, on a scale from one to 10, with one being the worst and 10 being the best.

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Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"AWS X-Ray is a strong solution and has a smooth integration process."

"AWS X-RAY identifies bottlenecks in terms of stability and performance and how long certain data lives in terms of response time and duration."

"The error analysis capabilities of X-Ray are really good."

"It is a very scalable solution."

"The most beneficial feature is that it shows a dashboard for performance intervals, which reveals latencies."

"The most promising feature of AWS X-Ray is that you can debug the issues through the proper logs. You can also get an analysis out of the logs for some use cases, though I have yet to try all the features of AWS X-Ray."

"The solution has made it easier for us to trace the problems that we have with our requests and to monitor the timing of each step in each request we do in our endpoints."

"The most important one is compliance. We're able to achieve our regulatory levels. We're able to achieve the security level that we need for the federal government."

"The solution has a very good user interface."

"No one else works with security gateways. I am able to configure those perfectly well within the banking and FDIC infrastructure to pass audits."

"The most valuable feature is capture of 100% of the traffic. Also, exposure to downstream services, that might not necessarily be new, to everybody who's using applications. It triggers them and captures them and it gives visibility to some pieces that might be forgotten or even obscured."

"It provides a better understanding of what is going on."

"It helps to show where the problem is and isolates the issue."

"Through end-user monitoring, we were able to measure the user's perceived performance and build an SLA based on that information."

"The ability to drill down from an alert into a problem and pinpoint the source of an issue saves my client teams hours of time."

"Daily metrics which us analyze the page composition and the corresponding performance metrics so we can quickly and easily determine when something has changed, to aid in root cause analysis."

More Dynatrace pros

Cons

"If you have a small team, it's probably overkill."

"What needs to be better in AWS X-Ray is the log filtering. Predefined filters could be helpful because the power of analytics comes from how you can filter the data. I also want to see more KPIs from AWS X-Ray."

"It should have X-Ray SDKs for different languages like Node.js, Python, or Java."

"The user interface is sometimes kind of confusing to understand. It's not very user-friendly."

"They can improve how traces are sent to other providers."

"Like most Amazon products, the user interface, configuration, and tuning aren't the easiest. That's the biggest reason why people tend to go to products like TerraForm and Terragrunt. We use TerraForm and Terragrunt. So, for setting things up and interacting with X-Ray, it's definitely the user interface that can be better."

"I do not have any notes in terms of improvements."

"A significant downside is that it is very expensive."

"Ease of use could be improved because it can be hard to determine how you made it to the screen you are on and how to get back to it later."

"SSO options are missing."

"I'd like to see the UI a bit more polished. For example, I saw a demo of the dashboards here at the Perform 2018 conference. There was a table of these widgets, but they're not sorted alphabetically and there's, like, 50 of them. So if you want to find your widgets, you're of scrolling up and down. So small features, being able to search for widgets, that things are more categorized; just a bit more focused on the user experience."

"The initial setup was relatively complex because we were trying to implement into environments that they did not yet support."

"Provide much better alignment between AppMon and Dynatrace."

"I think at times AppMon has given some folks some headaches from a configuration standpoint, and a maintenance standpoint, but aside from that I don't think they've really had many headaches with it."

"This solution would be improved with the addition of annotations for automated custom metrics creation."

"This tool had a feature of doing load test in production or lower environment, which was shut down earlier this year. We are missing that feature badly and we definitely want to see that feature back."

More Dynatrace cons

Pricing and Cost Advice

"The pricing for AWS X-Ray is a six out of ten."

"As you develop a relationship with Amazon, your pricing gets lower. You get credits for the amount of the system you use, and then if you're the government, you can get government pricing. For commercial users, there's a hump when you go from small to medium to big enterprise. Small businesses can live pretty easily off the free tier in a lot of cases, but when you go from a medium to a big enterprise, it becomes more expensive on a per-user basis. I'd like to see that curve going in a different way where pricing can be driven down while people are trying to adopt the technology."

"The solution is a bit expensive."

"Dynatrace has a place for everybody. How you use it and what your budgetary limitations are will dictate what you do with it. But it's within everybody's reach. If you're a small organization and you have a large infrastructure, you may not be able to monitor the whole thing. You may have to pick and choose what you want to monitor, and you have the ability to do so. Your available funds are going to dictate that."

"Setup cost is very low considering that it is an almost totally, automatic process."

"Dynatrace is bit costly and not easily affordable."

"They could improve their price ranges, as there is no option for startups or testing."

"Dynatrace's pricing for their consumption units is rather arcane compared to some of the other tools, thus making forward-looking calculations based on capacity planning quite hard."

"Dynatrace is usually paid on a yearly basis."

"Decodes on less used/popular protocols are available, but they should be included. Additional investment should not be required."

"It's understandable to do a smaller scale initial evaluation. However, as you identify the product value, don't hesitant in your scope and scale to maximize the initial investment and your opportunity to do a bulk investment of the product."

More Dynatrace pricing and cost advice

See which vendors are best for you

Use our free recommendation engine to learn which Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability solutions are best for your needs.

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831,158 professionals have used our research since 2012.

Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews

Financial Services Firm

21%

Computer Software Company

17%

Manufacturing Company

Comms Service Provider

Educational Organization

35%

Financial Services Firm

17%

Computer Software Company

Manufacturing Company

Company Size

By reviewers

Large Enterprise

Midsize Enterprise

Small Business

Questions from the Community

What do you like most about AWS X-Ray?

AWS X-Ray is a strong solution and has a smooth integration process.

What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for AWS X-Ray?

AWS X-Ray is very beneficial, however, it is expensive. It should be more cost-effective.

What needs improvement with AWS X-Ray?

It should have X-Ray SDKs for different languages like Node.js, Python, or Java. It should also have custom annotations and better instruments for external API services. In addition to these, X-Ray...

Any advice about APM solutions?

The key is to have a holistic view over the complete infrastructure, the ones you have listed are great for APM if you need to monitor applications end to end. I have tested them all and have not f...

What cloud monitoring software did you choose and why?

While the environment does matter in the selection of an APM tool, I prefer to use Dynatrace to manage the entire stack. Both production and Dev/Test. I find it to be quite superior to anything els...

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...

Azure Monitor vs AWS X-Ray

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Azure Monitor vs Dynatrace

Compared 7% of the time

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Compared 7% of the time

New Relic vs Dynatrace

Compared 7% of the time

Splunk Enterprise Security vs Dynatrace

Compared 6% of the time

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Product Reports

AWS X-Ray

Download AWS X-Ray product report

Download Dynatrace product report

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Amazon Web Services (AWS)

Overview

AWS X-Ray is a powerful debugging and performance analysis tool offered by Amazon Web Services. It allows developers to trace requests made to their applications and identify bottlenecks and issues.

With X-Ray, developers can visualize the entire request flow and pinpoint the exact location where errors occur. It provides detailed insights into the performance of individual components and helps optimize the overall application performance.

X-Ray integrates seamlessly with other AWS services, making it easy to trace requests across different services and identify dependencies. It also offers a comprehensive set of APIs and SDKs, enabling developers to instrument their applications and capture valuable data for analysis. With its user-friendly interface and powerful features, AWS X-Ray is a valuable tool for developers looking to improve the performance and reliability of their applications.

Dynatrace is an AI-powered software intelligence monitoring platform that accelerates digital transformation and simplifies cloud complexities. Dynatrace is an entirely automated full-stack solution that provides data and answers about the performance of your applications and deep insight into every transaction throughout every application, including the end-user experience. By modernizing and automating enterprise cloud operations, users can deliver an optimal digital experience with higher quality software to customers faster.

Dynatrace offers an all-in-one automated artificial intelligence solution that brings together application performance, cloud and infrastructure, and digital experience monitoring. Dynatrace accelerates performance-driven results through operations, development, and business teams with a shared metrics platform. In addition, users are provided a full-stack monitoring experience with three patented technologies:

Smartscape - visualization mechanism that maps the totality of everything working in your environment and detects any casual dependencies between your applications, processes, websites, services, hosts, cloud infrastructure, and networks.
OneAgent - a technology that analyzes, gathers ,and unifies all business performance metrics throughout every layer of your technology stack.
PurePath Technology - code-level context and timings are captured from the mainframe to the cloud for all end-to-end transactions.

What does Dynatrace offer?

Dynatrace redefines how organizations monitor their digital ecosystems. The solution offers:

Cloud Automation: With AI engine Davis®, users can see the exact reason for problems and facilitate quick auto-remediation and intelligent cloud orchestration.
Application Security: With automated application vulnerability management, users can deliver applications faster and more securely.
Infrastructure Monitoring: Convenient broad visibility across your environments is provided with streamlined, automated infrastructure monitoring.
Digital Experience Monitoring (DEM): Optimize your applications, provide better support, and improve user experience with a combination of Real User Monitoring (RUM), Session Replay, and synthetic monitoring throughout your environment.
Applications and Microservices: For complex cloud environments, Dynatrace can automatically provide visibility and root-cause answers. It can also monitor microservices.
Digital Business Analytics: Get AI-powered, real-time answers to analytical business queries with KPIs and metrics that are already flowing through applications.

Reviews from Real Users

Dynatrace is the only solution that provides answers to organizations based on deep insight into each user, transaction, and organization's environment.

Barry P., a managing performance engineer at Medica Health Plans, writes, "With Dynatrace, we have synthetic checks and real-user monitoring of all of our websites, places where members and providers can interact with us over the web. We monitor the response times of those with Dynatrace, and it's all integrated into one place."

A consultant at a tech service company notes, "A feature that's one of the highlights of Dynatrace is the AI. The second most valuable feature is OneAgent. Between infrastructures, applications, operating systems, you can deploy with just a single agent and can practically install and forget about it."

Sample Customers

COMCAST, ConnectWise, skyscanner, AirAsia, cookpad, cimpress, VTEX, zowdow

Audi, Best Buy, LinkedIn, CISCO, Intuit, KRONOS, Scottrade, Wells Fargo, ULTA Beauty, Lenovo, Swarovsk, Nike, Whirlpool, American Express

AWS X-Ray vs. Dynatrace