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AWS X-Ray vs ServiceNow Cloud Observability 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

AWS X-Ray
Ranking in Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability
19th
Average Rating
7.8
Reviews Sentiment
7.6
Number of Reviews
8
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
ServiceNow Cloud Observability
Ranking in Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability
42nd
Average Rating
7.6
Reviews Sentiment
6.9
Number of Reviews
4
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
 

Mindshare comparison

As of March 2025, in the Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability category, the mindshare of AWS X-Ray is 3.3%, down from 3.5% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of ServiceNow Cloud Observability 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
 

Featured Reviews

Willy Moura - PeerSpot reviewer
Identifying and resolving deployment issues while configuring can be challenging
I have two use cases with my customers. One involves using AWS Fargate, and the other involves an application running on WordPress. The WordPress application was very slow, and we used AWS X-Ray to understand the main problem. X-Ray helped us identify issues with our EFS, allowing us to adjust…
VinayKumar16 - PeerSpot reviewer
Provides ease of use in areas like analytics and reporting
The feature of the tool that is more impactful for cloud performance stems from the area revolving around analytics and reporting. It is an easy-to-use tool. There is something known as performance analytics within ServiceNow that offers complete analytics, which offers end-to-end analytics along with the KPI metrics with what we have in place and so on. With the aforementioned aspects of the tool, I think we should be able to create a dashboard according to the operations view called the operation dashboard view, specifically for C-level executives.

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."
"The most beneficial feature is that it shows a dashboard for performance intervals, which reveals latencies."
"AWS X-Ray shows us exactly when there are delays, helping us understand the depth of issues and what is happening point-to-point."
"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 shows us exactly when there are delays, helping us understand the depth of issues and what is happening point-to-point."
"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 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 UI is very intuitive."
"The solution Lightstep/ServiceNow has a couple of pretty advanced functionalities to help us investigate a deviation and help the development teams have better observability in the environment using distributed and complex services."
"The ability to create a stream based on different parameters, operation name, service name, URL, tags, and URI part, is one valuable feature."
"To a certain extent, it is possible to save on the costs of the product."
 

Cons

"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."
"I do not have any notes in terms of improvements."
"If you have a small team, it's probably overkill."
"A significant downside is that it is very expensive."
"The user interface is sometimes kind of confusing to understand. It's not very user-friendly."
"Sometimes, the collector agents are confusing to configure initially."
"They can improve how traces are sent to other providers."
"It should have X-Ray SDKs for different languages like Node.js, Python, or Java."
"The support team could be better. Because of the different versions of different tactics of integrating reactive code base, the documentation is not very clear if someone has to be onboard. I would rate the documentation of Lightstep a five out of ten. It could need improvement."
"The dashboard and graphics must be improved."
"In terms of licensing, users would want the product to offer them the ability to tailor the tasks offered in the solution to suit their needs."
"The design of this solution is not very intuitive and probably could come with more friendly tips for beginners."
 

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."
"The product is expensive. I rate the tool's pricing model an eight out of ten."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Financial Services Firm
20%
Computer Software Company
17%
Manufacturing Company
9%
Comms Service Provider
6%
Financial Services Firm
19%
Computer Software Company
14%
Manufacturing Company
12%
Retailer
10%
 

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?
Compared to other open-source tools, AWS X-Ray needs improvement in providing discounts. Customers often seek cheaper solutions. When using many AWS resources, pricing can be a mid-range cost, give...
What needs improvement with AWS X-Ray?
Sometimes, the collector agents are confusing to configure initially. It requires research to understand the correct configurations, especially when deploying on-premises or on an EC2 instance. Usi...
What needs improvement with LightStep?
There are a lot of workflows and connectors. In terms of licensing, users would want the product to offer them the ability to tailor the tasks offered in the solution to suit their needs.
What is your primary use case for LightStep?
I use the solution in my company since it has multiple tenants available. Basically, what happens in business is that you have a hybrid setup model, and for that, you extensively use a cloud platfo...
 

Also Known As

No data available
LightStep
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

COMCAST, ConnectWise, skyscanner, AirAsia, cookpad, cimpress, VTEX, zowdow
InVision, Twilio, Lyft, Yext, DigitalOcean,
Find out what your peers are saying about AWS X-Ray vs. ServiceNow Cloud Observability and other solutions. Updated: March 2025.
839,515 professionals have used our research since 2012.