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Broadcom DX Application Performance Management vs VMware Aria Operations for Applications comparison

 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive SummaryUpdated on Feb 3, 2025

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

Broadcom DX Application Per...
Ranking in Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability
36th
Ranking in Container Monitoring
9th
Average Rating
8.0
Reviews Sentiment
7.3
Number of Reviews
162
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
VMware Aria Operations for ...
Ranking in Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability
20th
Ranking in Container Monitoring
6th
Average Rating
8.0
Reviews Sentiment
6.3
Number of Reviews
14
Ranking in other categories
IT Infrastructure Monitoring (17th), Cloud Monitoring Software (15th)
 

Mindshare comparison

As of February 2026, in the Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability category, the mindshare of Broadcom DX Application Performance Management is 0.8%, up from 0.5% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of VMware Aria Operations for Applications is 1.2%, up from 0.8% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability Market Share Distribution
ProductMarket Share (%)
VMware Aria Operations for Applications1.2%
Broadcom DX Application Performance Management0.8%
Other98.0%
Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability
 

Featured Reviews

EG
Director of Technical Part at NOS SGPS
Dashboards facilitate prompt alerts but discovery feature needs enhancement
I would recommend Broadcom DX Application Performance Management if a customer doesn't have any existing performance solution. However, ten years ago, the solution was better, and now there are many competitive options. My overall rating would be between six and seven. The product rating I would give is 6.5 out of 10.
AS
Consultant at HCLTech
Automation and insightful diagnostics elevate operations while improvements are welcome
The new version 8.18 has brought significant improvements. The main purpose of using this tool is having a single console to manage all entities. The cloud integration capabilities, including private, public, and hybrid, are already well-implemented. The ability to manage multiple vCenters across different geographical locations is very effective. The new Skyline health feature and certificate and licensing management are particularly useful improvements. The dashboard's overview tab provides comprehensive information about current vCenter status, resizable amounts, reclamation opportunities, anomalies, diagnostics, licensing, and certificates. However, there is room for improvement in application analysis. The current functionality lacks detailed monitoring at the kernel level, focusing mainly on CPU, memory, and storage matrices. Enhanced application monitoring capabilities, including tracking downtime for specific types of applications such as transactional or e-commerce applications, would be beneficial.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"Cross-VM transaction traces provide a complete "what happened where"."
"Standard available reports provide us with an automatic insight into the top ten situations to watch. It would have been extremely difficult to program such a report ourselves, and to my knowledge no other competitor can match this functionality."
"We are able to spot issues much quicker with the use of the out-of-the-box metrics given to us by CA. But we also develop that further with the use of the EPA Agent and expand what we can give and show the business by creating our own scripts. This has allowed us to develop our own self-monitoring and before anybody else sees the issue we are on hand to solve that as quickly as possible."
"WAS GC monitoring enhanced our application performance and DB SQL performance."
"The solution is very stable."
"CA APM is very scalable and used in a clustered environment because it supports more than its technical capacity."
"With the new feature CA Team Center is much easier to view the information of my user experience, with this unified vision, it was even practical for lay users to use the tool"
"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."
"The features I find most valuable is the querying and alerting capabilities."
"VMware Aria Operations for Applications offers significant features such as real-time statistics, the ability to identify possible issues within the VM environment, and helpful heat maps."
"The stability of Aria Operations for Applications has improved significantly over the years."
"For us, the ease of deployment in combination with TMZ was the most important part because we don't have to manually deploy a complex monitoring solution. We can more or less do that with the click of a button, and we are not dependent on the developers to provide us with all the necessary features and functions to make that work. We can just deploy it on a workload cluster and monitor at least a good part of the workload. If we want to go into detail, we clearly need to make changes, but for a good part of application monitoring, it gives us good insights."
"People are very pleased with the implementation."
"Tanzu itself, integrated with multiple solutions, bestows support and security upon a container platform, especially when it comes to managing open-source container platforms such as Kubernetes."
"This solution allows me to have true visibility for any metrics when it comes to my cloud, and private."
"No issues with stability."
 

Cons

"User Experience is a BIG one. Integration of all of APM components into one swift deployment."
"Very often, we use tools such as Kibana or Jaspersoft for dashboards and reporting on CA APM data because CA APM’s old interfaces do not reflect well in modern displays, compared to those new tools."
"There is no auto flow diagram, and the alert mechanism is not as good when compared to other tools."
"They can make it easier to configure."
"There are several areas that could be improved in Broadcom DX Application Performance Management. One of the main areas is user experience monitoring, which is currently not available. Additionally, they need to develop a solution that is compatible with OpenShift 4, as their current solution only works when an agent is installed within the image, which is not possible in OpenShift 4 as it removes the agent."
"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."
"The technical support is very poor."
"Improve the targeting interface is to make it more user-friendly and current."
"The main problem I have is that the license cost is very high."
"I find that there could be improvements in the support service response time, as the urgency varies unless specified as Priority 2 or 1 cases."
"The solution could be expensive, which might be a limiting factor."
"It could use a URL document server. Everything in the market is moving towards automation and everybody's looking for the single click operations as well relational data locality."
"I find that there could be improvements in the support service response time, as the urgency varies unless specified as Priority 2 or 1 cases."
"VMware technical support has declined since the Broadcom acquisition. Previously, they were more focused on issue resolution, but now they prioritize licensing verification before providing support."
"The initial setup should be easier and more seamless."
"The documentation and integration with Kubernetes could be improved."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"The licensing costs are expensive."
"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."
"There is some research needed to determine licensing costs, based on the number of DataPower instances for the Nastel agent, for example."
"It is definitely expensive for what we get, but there isn't an alternate option at the moment."
"Negotiate a lot, but do not forget to buy the product because it is worth it."
"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."
"Depends on the size of the product you need."
"Althougth it is a bit expensive, it is really worth it"
"I would rate the pricing as three out of five."
"The licensing costs are very high, particularly when you consider that we have to purchase a level 1 license for every integration, such as the load balancer, HAProxy, and the MSSP. And if you want to use vSAN, that's another license. Then, of course, Tanzu Observability has its own separate license."
"I don't have the details. In our case, there is a mixture in place. We have production usage, and we are also doing training for VMware. So, we also have a training instance. It is worth the money you would spend on it. That's because if you were to build all of this yourself by using some of the open source tools, then you would need a lot of time."
"Different locations require different setups. In your terms, around 300 to around 400K USD."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Marketing Services Firm
15%
Performing Arts
12%
Manufacturing Company
10%
Financial Services Firm
9%
Financial Services Firm
12%
Manufacturing Company
12%
Government
8%
Computer Software Company
7%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business26
Midsize Enterprise24
Large Enterprise124
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business4
Midsize Enterprise1
Large Enterprise10
 

Questions from the Community

What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Broadcom DX Application Performance Management?
The initial pricing is reasonable and competitive compared to other solutions. The challenge arises during annual renewals, as the price increase can be significant, around twenty percent or more, ...
What needs improvement with Broadcom DX Application Performance Management?
The first area for improvement is the discovery feature, which should be enhanced to collect comprehensive information from applications and services. This includes using agents or scripts to gathe...
What is your primary use case for Broadcom DX Application Performance Management?
Our primary use case involves having a large dashboard with significant information for alerts, alarms, and metrics to summarize the state of critical businesses and applications. When an issue ari...
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for VMware Tanzu Observability by Wavefront?
The solution includes cost drivers that can be configured according to your environment. You can input server-wise, CPU-wise, storage, and memory costs per hour or day. Once cost drivers are provid...
What needs improvement with VMware Tanzu Observability by Wavefront?
The new version 8.18 has brought significant improvements. The main purpose of using this tool is having a single console to manage all entities. The cloud integration capabilities, including priva...
What is your primary use case for VMware Tanzu Observability by Wavefront?
I have been involved in several projects where I had to implement automation and monitoring alerting. I performed automation using VMware Aria Operations for Applications. There is an automation ta...
 

Also Known As

DX APM, CA APM, CA NetQoS Performance Center, Wily Introscope, CA Wily APM, CA App Experience Analytics, CA AXA
Tanzu Observability, Wavefront, Wavefront by VMware, VMware Tanzu Observability
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

Lexmark, Intermountain Healthcare, National Australia Bank, BBVA Compass Bank, Innovapost, Dansk Supermarked Group, U.S. Cellular, Orange, Cetip
1. Atlassian 2. Cisco 3. Databricks 4. DigitalOcean 5. Equinix 6. Fidelity Investments 7. Google 8. Hewlett Packard Enterprise 9. Honeywell 10. IBM 11. Intel 12. JetBlue Airways 13. LinkedIn 14. Lyft 15. Mastercard 16. Microsoft 17. MongoDB 18. Netflix 19. Nvidia 20. Oracle 21. PayPal 22. Pinterest 23. Qualcomm 24. Red Hat 25. Salesforce 26. SAP 27. Spotify 28. Square 29. TMobile 30. Twitter 31. Uber 32. VMware
Find out what your peers are saying about Broadcom DX Application Performance Management vs. VMware Aria Operations for Applications and other solutions. Updated: January 2026.
882,813 professionals have used our research since 2012.