AWS X-Ray vs Dynatrace comparison

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AWS X-Ray

Comparison Buyer's Guide

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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: October 2024).

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AWS X-Ray vs. Dynatrace

October 2024

Helped 814,763 peers since 2012

Categories and Ranking

AWS X-Ray

Ranking in Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability

14th

Average Rating

8.0

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

Number of Reviews

344

Ranking in other categories

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

Mindshare comparison

As of November 2024, in the Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability category, the mindshare of AWS X-Ray is 3.9%, up from 3.5% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Dynatrace is 12.7%, down from 14.7% 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

Dec 29, 2022

Saves time, is relatively cheap, and helps find errors

It's basically like a cloud stack. You can trace your entire HTTP request. Once you have submitted any request, it will be addressed as a 500 Error or 401 Error, or if there is any exception happening when this request, and how much time will take. X-Ray can trace all the information about the…

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Manish Ved

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

Mar 20, 2023

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

"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 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 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."

"It is a very scalable solution."

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

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

"We use the Dynatrace AI to assess impact. Because it links to real users, it is generally pretty correct in terms of when it raises an incident. We determine the severity by how many users it is affecting, then we use it as business justification to put a priority on that alert."

"You can do deep dive analysis and find root cause quickly."

"I get valuable information like, for example, if a site is down. That's the key. I'm instantly getting a message, or even on the app, I can see if something overnight went down a few times, or it's not performing at 100%."

"PurePaths help us drill down to the root cause of problems and escape the war room."

"For stability, our customers have no complaints."

"The ability to take each individual request and dive in to inspect what methods and calls are being made is extremely helpful."

"The Session Replay not only allows us to watch the user in 4K video, but to see the individual steps happening behind the scenes, from a developer perspective. It gives us every single step that a user takes in a session, along with the ability to watch it as a video playback. We can see each call to every server as the user goes through the site. If something is broken or not running optimally, it's going to come up in the Session Replay."

"The deployment configuration and everything is simple. It is not that complicated."

More Dynatrace pros

Cons

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

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

"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."

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

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

"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."

"An additional feature that we could use is the rollover. If we could rollover to different datacenters, then it would satisfy our requirement. I.e., if one datacenter fails, then we could rollover to another datacenter."

"We would like to see more external tool integration, which is critical for us."

"Regarding features, it would be good if there would be some features regarding app security."

"I would love to see a better data export, because AppMon's charting capabilities leaves a lot to be desired. You have about a 5,000 line limit. I would really like to see the ability to export, in Dynatrace and AppMon, in essentially in a nice format of whatever you want to whatever else."

"The real complexity that I've seen with Dynatrace is to learn how to navigate through all the options in the troubleshooting process. We have a lot of ways to evaluate the same problem. We had some difficulties in the beginning with the use of the product, but after some time and some experience we have overcome this problem."

"There are lots of features to share information, but we need to learn to leverage that, both on the web browser and on the mobile app."

"The integration between the web monitoring of Dynatrace and OneAgent. "

"When integrating this solution with any third party applications, there is an additional cost to pay. This can make the solution very costly to use."

More Dynatrace cons

Pricing and Cost Advice

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

"The solution is a bit expensive."

"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."

"Time to value was surprisingly fast."

"The setup costs for Dynatrace are low, however licensing costs are high."

"Licensing is very interesting, as you pay only for what is being monitored. A lot of things are given away for no additional cost. If you have a great IT consolidation, it will be pretty cheap. If you have a lot of servers, it will be heavier."

"The limitations I see are more to do - and maybe it's because of the nature of the job I have - but they have to do with pricing. It's a little bit pricey. It's a very good tool. It's worth the price, to a certain degree. But it's hard to justify when it's that costly."

"The price range is quite high."

"The cost is somewhat high."

"I think the pricing is at a fair value for what it is."

"There is time savings. People's times have been cut in half using this solution because we were previously doing a lot of that manual work. Now, it's a lot more automated, and the data is just there."

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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814,763 professionals have used our research since 2012.

Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews

Financial Services Firm

20%

Computer Software Company

18%

Manufacturing Company

Comms Service Provider

Educational Organization

33%

Financial Services Firm

17%

Computer Software Company

Manufacturing Company

Company Size

By reviewers

Large Enterprise

Midsize Enterprise

Small Business

No data available

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?

The solution is a bit expensive.

What needs improvement with AWS X-Ray?

They can improve how traces are sent to other providers.

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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Compared 7% of the time

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Product Reports

Download AWS X-Ray product report

AWS X-Ray

November 2024

Download Dynatrace product report

November 2024

Learn More

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