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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
35th
Ranking in Container Monitoring
8th
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 April 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 1.3%, 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 Management0.8%
Other97.9%
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

"The solution is very stable."
"Technical support is quick to respond and very knowledgeable."
"It helps us prioritize application performance issues. It has assisted triage where we can drill down and see where exactly the problem lies."
"After we started using APM in our environment, we managed to reduce the creation of these rooms by 90%."
"It is the very best solution and will surely enhance anyone’s application performance and resource utilization."
"Introscope helps our application team proactively identify and resolve problems fast."
"Helps the development team to fine-tune and proactively manage the application."
"In the newer versions of the application, they had something called a Triage Map that basically breaks it down from a service perspective, so you actually see it from a service perspective and then you see what components make up that service, which really helps the business because they are not seeing individual servers or individual devices, they're seeing it from a service level, which is what everybody wants to see."
"The solution is great for virtualization and preparing the infrastructure in Tanzu to test products, it's very fast and has good visibility."
"The stability of Aria Operations for Applications has improved significantly over the years."
"It has a familiar interface, which makes it easy to get started."
"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."
"The features I find most valuable is the querying and alerting capabilities."
"VMware comes with a support team, and if you have trouble, you can easily create a ticket, and VMware will help you. Therefore, the best aspect is the support."
"The stability of Aria Operations for Applications has improved significantly over the years."
"This solution allows me to have true visibility for any metrics when it comes to my cloud, and private."
 

Cons

"Our users lag how to identify the root cause with this solution. If they could come up with a more user-friendly version, that would be a good thing, since other vendors currently have better features and more user-friendly products than CA APM."
"User interface - CA is moving towards HTML5, but still a lot is Java, old fashioned, non-customizable and not user friendly. It’s look and feel is still too technical."
"The documentation on customizing instrumentation of methods and classes (derivative files) could be improved, as well as some of the documentation interfacing into other APM products (ADA, CEM, ABA)."
"The main improvement areas for all three tools in CA APM are licensing, licensing and support."
"They tried to streamline the organization, that was the initial point of using APM. It led to so many internal changes, but it didn’t affect the organization much at all in the end."
"One of the challenges is agent releases. So as we employ agents, they are done relatively manually."
"Client user interface and user interface dashboard."
"The pricing and licensing costs are too high."
"Its billing model is consumption-based. I understand the consumption-based model, but it is not necessarily easy to estimate and guess how many points or how much we are going to consume on a specific application up until we get to that point. So, for us, it would be helpful to have more insights or predictability into what we can expect from a cost perspective if we are starting to use specific features. This can potentially also drive our consumption a bit more."
"So far, the solution's learning curve has been pretty high."
"The solution could be expensive, which might be a limiting factor."
"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."
"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."
"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."
"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."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"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."
"There is some research needed to determine licensing costs, based on the number of DataPower instances for the Nastel agent, for example."
"Pricing and licensing are not issues."
"The licensing costs are expensive."
"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."
"Althougth it is a bit expensive, it is really worth it"
"Depends on the size of the product you need."
"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."
"I would rate the pricing as three out of five."
"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."
"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."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Marketing Services Firm
13%
Performing Arts
10%
Construction Company
10%
Manufacturing Company
10%
Financial Services Firm
12%
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: March 2026.
885,376 professionals have used our research since 2012.