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Dynatrace vs Splunk AppDynamics vs VMware Aria Operations for Applications comparison

 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive Summary

Review summaries and opinions

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

Mindshare comparison

As of April 2025, in the Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability category, the mindshare of Dynatrace is 10.8%, down from 13.8% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Splunk AppDynamics is 4.8%, down from 6.2% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of VMware Aria Operations for Applications is 0.8%, down from 1.0% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability
 

Featured Reviews

Anand_Kumar - PeerSpot reviewer
Provides a comprehensive view by integrating with other monitoring systems
There may be an issue since there are many tools like Splunk involved in network monitoring. From an IP perspective, Dynatrace is performing well. If they want to develop in network monitoring, they can, as it's part of their product line. It's not rocketry, so they can accomplish it. If I, as an SI, look at it from an enterprise perspective, considering the cost from the client, I prefer not to go with multiple systems, as they don't provide a complete 360-degree view. They need to improve on claims about being an enterprise system. The definition of enterprise is loosely used, however, from a holistic security perspective, including infrastructure, network, ports, software, applications, transactions, and databases, there are areas lacking, especially in network monitoring tools.
Muhammad Zeeshan Siddiqui - PeerSpot reviewer
Dynamic mapping enhances workflows that are user-friendly
One aspect that requires improvement is the agent. Without an agent, gathering sufficient information on applications is challenging. Additionally, the agent sometimes creates performance issues in production environments. If AppDynamics could develop a means to monitor without an agent, it could significantly improve application performance and reduce potential problems. Moving to an agentless solution, like what some competitors are doing, would be beneficial.
ToniLindberg - PeerSpot reviewer
Troubleshooting capabilities have improved application monitoring and support engagement
I can see what happens end to end, which is pretty beneficial. The solution has troubleshooting capabilities, providing a direct connection to knowledge base articles from VMware Broadcom. When I encounter an error, I can search directly within the system to see what solutions have been employed by others. It has a familiar interface, which makes it easy to get started.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"Its AI can tell us when something is wrong, including the impacts and the root cause."
"Dynatrace alerts are based on deviations from the reference metrics which are constantly collected."
"We're able to pinpoint web and mobile interface issues before they trigger a negative customer experience."
"With the Agentless monitoring and ability to create custom plugins, we've been able to transform the tool not just into a great APM solution but a really good enterprise monitoring solution too."
"I like the auto email alerting feature the most, as it is set up based on the application error or condition."
"This tool enables us to make intelligent, fact-based decisions faster."
"The deployment configuration and everything is simple. It is not that complicated."
"Before we had the tool we had no visibility into the user experience and capturing what was going on inside the browser. We utilized tags so we knew how many times people were doing certain things, but we did not know how the performance was, if users were satisfied with what they were doing, and if we were serving up errors."
"In my experience, it's easy to use. There's nothing complex to learn or fear. You can quickly adapt to it without the need for extensive training."
"The most valuable feature is that we can see how our end-users are interacting with our application across regions."
"Users can configure business sections in their environment, and it's possible for customers to configure different sources for the name of the class, the name of the method, or the name of the web service, which is very interesting."
"Database scaling or migration projects play a supportive role throughout the development, monitoring, and troubleshooting phases."
"Setting up the monitoring agents was straightforward."
"AppDynamics makes it much easier for us to detect problems or issues before they become problems. We have alerting on all of our business transactions."
"Capacity planning is, in my opinion, the most useful."
"The solution is very, very stable. We haven't faced any bugs or glitches on the system."
"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."
"It significantly improves application performance management by offering recommendations for resource allocation to avoid wastage or overcommitment."
"The features I find most valuable is the querying and alerting capabilities."
"The most valuable aspects of the solution are its ease of use and its ease of implementation."
"No issues with stability."
"This solution allows me to have true visibility for any metrics when it comes to my cloud, and private."
"The stability of Aria Operations for Applications has improved significantly over the years."
"I gladly recommend VMware Aria Operations for Applications because it is cost effective and has commendable AI response capabilities."
 

Cons

"The products or company go through a rebrand/renaming about once a year, which creates some confusion with our customers."
"The solution could improve by allowing more dashboards customization. This would allow us to monitor the metric better."
"Sometimes it is hard to find the right setting for what you want to change."
"Documentation is slightly in error as far as directory set ups and guidance. We came to our own solution for distributing the disk loads."
"There are a lot of features that could be added that would make this a very useful solution, but it is getting there.​"
"Filters should have a “negative” option."
"​The integration between the web monitoring of Dynatrace and OneAgent. ​"
"It needs container log monitoring."
"Based on the user experience feedback that we have had, I think that the most important thing to improve is the availability of the SaaS, the cloud environment."
"If AppDynamics could do a one-agent function with their actual monitoring effectiveness, it will be the greatest tool."
"I would like to be able to monitor both cloud an on-prem infrastructures, displayed in one dashboard."
"There could log management features included in the product."
"There could be some improvement in the constructions of the diagrams, it is too difficult currently."
"The solution's user interface should be improved."
"The solution's pricing could be improved and made more competitive."
"The major concern lies with reports, specifically their configurability. It's like, if I want to combine multiple reports and generate them all at once, that's not possible. Even though there's a setup for generating 25 reports, I wanted to group them all and generate them in one go, which isn't currently feasible. I have to manually run each report and set the time for it."
"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."
"An area for improvement would be more in-depth reporting, such as analyzing disk IO during business hours compared to after hours."
"The main problem I have is that the license cost is very high."
"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."
"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."
"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."
"The documentation and integration with Kubernetes could be improved."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"Purchasing through the AWS Marketplace is excellent."
"Surprisingly, it is quite expensive. That is something that we could always see: Improved pricing and the overall construct on how do we use each license in regards to usage of the tool."
"It is quite costly. Dynatrace was the most expensive, compared to the other products we looked at. But it was also a lot better. If you want value for your money, Dynatrace is the way to go."
"​Do a PoC and see if you like it."
"The licensing for Dynatrace is high. If you want to go for monitoring solutions, then why Dynatrace? If you have a particular budget, you can go for many other monitoring tools - apart from Dynatrace - and they can help you more and give more data than Dynatrace can. It's not worth the money that you spend for Dynatrace."
"The product is pricey, but it is feature-rich, which is why we probably haven't looked away from it."
"The price of the solution is expensive."
"From what I have heard in the company, Dynatrace is expensive."
"We have two different licensing models for this solution. One of them is the agent based model, which requires payment per agent. The other is an infrastructure based model, where the price is based on the CPU core. For the infrastructure model wholesale level pricing applies. All of the up to date licensing prices for this product are available on the manufacturers website."
"The way it is structured in terms of price could be better. You pay for individual modules and that adds on to the cost, which detracts you from implementing those modules and slows you down."
"It could be cheaper. It's a little cost prohibitive. There are so many features that also show a lot of value, but it’s not always easy to justify the cost."
"We have a license-based solution. That means you need a license for each server you monitor."
"There is a license for the solution and we paid approximately $2,000. There is also an additional cost above the standard license which cost us approximately $3,000."
"Because it is priced per JVM, the price can increase pretty fast, into the millions. We have had challenges because we had to justify the price to our clients, as well, when we are putting in certain tools."
"It is not a cheap tool, but you also save in manpower to setup because it is easy and fast. At the end of the day, I think the revenue is much better. BUT, they have an awful co-term mode of licensing."
"The pricing for AppDynamics is expensive, but it is possible to negotiate special pricing through bids."
"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."
"I would rate the pricing as three out of five."
"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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Comparison Review

ITspe9886 - PeerSpot reviewer
Feb 24, 2019
Compared to AppDynamics where we are still trying to get it into production, we had the latest version of Dynatrace in production within three days
Our primary use case for both Dynatrace and AppDynamics is for application performance monitoring (APM). The main reason for having application performance monitoring is, when we see something is running slowly, we can immediately look to see where the issue is at before our systems crash on us…
 

Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Educational Organization
36%
Financial Services Firm
17%
Computer Software Company
7%
Manufacturing Company
6%
Educational Organization
48%
Financial Services Firm
16%
Computer Software Company
9%
Manufacturing Company
5%
Financial Services Firm
15%
Computer Software Company
14%
Manufacturing Company
10%
Government
6%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
 

Questions from the Community

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 yo...
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 sta...
Any advice about APM solutions?
There are many factors and we know little about your requirements (size of org, technology stack, management systems,...
APM tools for a Managed Service Provider - Dynatrace vs. AppDynamics vs. Aternity vs. Ruxit
Hi Avi! It's great to see your thorough approach to selecting an APM package for your MSP company. Considering your f...
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for AppDynamics?
I would rate the pricing an eight out of ten. The solution is highly expensive. Our company pays for the solution on ...
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for VMware Tanzu Observability by Wavefront?
The cost of VMware Aria Operations for Applications is fair and reasonable compared to what we receive in support and...
What needs improvement with VMware Tanzu Observability by Wavefront?
I find that there could be improvements in the support service response time, as the urgency varies unless specified ...
What is your primary use case for VMware Tanzu Observability by Wavefront?
Our primary use case for VMware Aria Operations for Applications is to enhance application monitoring tasks, allowing...
 

Also Known As

No data available
No data available
Tanzu Observability, Wavefront, Wavefront by VMware, VMware Tanzu Observability
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

Audi, Best Buy, LinkedIn, CISCO, Intuit, KRONOS, Scottrade, Wells Fargo, ULTA Beauty, Lenovo, Swarovsk, Nike, Whirlpool, American Express
Cisco, Sony, Nasdaq, Reserve Bank of New Zealand, Edmunds.com, Puma, Fox News, DirecTV, Pizza Hut, T-Systems, Cornell University, OpenTable, BITMARCK, Green Mountain Power, Care.com, Overstock, Paddy Power, eHarmony, Kraft, The Motley Fool, The Container Store, and more See more customers
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 Datadog, Dynatrace, Splunk and others in Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability. Updated: April 2025.
848,989 professionals have used our research since 2012.