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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
32nd
Ranking in Container Monitoring
7th
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
17th
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 (14th)
 

Mindshare comparison

As of April 2026, in the Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability category, the mindshare of Broadcom DX Application Performance Management is 1.0%, up from 0.5% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of VMware Aria Operations for Applications is 1.3%, up from 0.8% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability Mindshare Distribution
ProductMindshare (%)
VMware Aria Operations for Applications1.3%
Broadcom DX Application Performance Management1.0%
Other97.7%
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

"It is very useful and helpful with the analysis of historical performance data."
"It's provided us with consolidated reports and a monitoring dashboard, and it's helped us greatly that the dashboard allows us to create very customizable views that give us the information we need to determine the overall status of network health."
"CA APM has provided us a solution for this, allowing us to discover the root cause of some speed issues we had in the systems that were very difficult to diagnose."
"It's a very stable product."
"CA APM is a brand name; it is easy, proactive, intelligent and collaborative, and all of these features lead every business transaction as a loyalty-building interaction."
"This application pulls data in 15 seconds. You can imagine the enormous amount of data which streams through."
"We are using the on-premise and cloud versions of Broadcom DX Application Performance Management."
"For me, the most valuable feature is being able to check memory patterns. We check them when we do load testing or soak testing to see if there are any memory leaks."
"It has a familiar interface, which makes it easy to get started."
"Wavefront gives us the complexity we need, instead of spending time coming up with a nice dashboard from some other means, or just creating and coding our own app."
"The most valuable aspects of the solution are its ease of use and its ease of implementation."
"Scalability for VMware Aria Operations for Applications is easy to implement and manage."
"The stability of Aria Operations for Applications has improved significantly over the years."
"People are very pleased with the implementation."
"Wavefront's monitoring tools and visibility into public cloud platforms are competing with the best out there."
"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."
 

Cons

"The biggest area of improvement of APM is with the GUIs."
"When we made the upgrade to 10.3 we have some problems with the new version."
"I'd like to see more integration between all the tools."
"The APM upgrade procedure is a bit complicated with compatibility issues which can emerge like between agents and EM/Collectors."
"The reports are a key part of APM in my vision because it is through them that we manage to generate the evidence to direct the development team and operational support to address. However, we can not extract the information of the tool through reports."
"We did have stability problems."
"One of the challenges is agent releases. So as we employ agents, they are done relatively manually."
"I would like the ability to see a full end-to-end path of a transaction."
"However, it is still not a very mature product."
"The implementation is a long process that should be improved."
"The solution could be expensive, which might be a limiting factor."
"The documentation and integration with Kubernetes could be improved."
"The documentation and integration with Kubernetes could be improved."
"The main problem I have is that the license cost is very high."
"They could make it more easy to plug-in data so that a nontechnical person will be able to use it, like accountants or finance people. That way they don't have to ask us."
"In the new version, I would love to see more prediction capabilities. It would be great if one could see the alerts get a little more enriched with information and become more human-friendly instead of the technical stuff that they put in there. I think those would be really awesome outcomes to get."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"I'm unable to give information on Broadcom DX Application Performance Management licensing costs, but all Application Performance Management products have expensive pricing. This means that it's not only Broadcom that's expensive, and it would be an advantage if the cost would be a little bit cheaper."
"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."
"Pricing and licensing are not issues."
"The licensing costs are expensive."
"It is definitely expensive for what we get, but there isn't an alternate option at the moment."
"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."
"All discounts are case by case to accommodate the client's budgets."
"There is some research needed to determine licensing costs, based on the number of DataPower instances for the Nastel agent, for example."
"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."
"I would rate the pricing as three out of five."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Financial Services Firm
14%
Marketing Services Firm
11%
Performing Arts
9%
Construction Company
9%
Financial Services Firm
13%
Manufacturing Company
11%
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: April 2026.
886,576 professionals have used our research since 2012.