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Dynatrace 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

Dynatrace
Ranking in Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability
2nd
Ranking in Container Monitoring
3rd
Average Rating
8.8
Reviews Sentiment
7.0
Number of Reviews
360
Ranking in other categories
Log Management (5th), Mobile APM (2nd), AIOps (2nd), AI Observability (3rd)
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 Dynatrace is 5.6%, down from 11.2% 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 (%)
Dynatrace5.6%
VMware Aria Operations for Applications1.3%
Other93.1%
Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability
 

Featured Reviews

Manish Indupuri - PeerSpot reviewer
senior DevOps engineer at a tech services company with 10,001+ employees
AI-driven insights have reduced downtime and improved cross-team collaboration
We encountered some challenges while using Dynatrace. Although the initial setup was smooth, fine-tuning alert thresholds and custom metrics took some time. Another challenge was that Dynatrace charges based on host units, so we had to carefully plan our agent deployments. The licensing model is expensive. Additionally, the complexity of setup is an issue. While OneAgent and auto-discover services are powerful, the setup is more complex compared to other tools such as Prometheus and Grafana. These integrations are simple and basic, but Dynatrace setup requires more complexity based on the environment. For new users wanting to use Dynatrace, it is difficult. However, the AI-related solutions and metrics took us to the next level for identifying and fixing things. Dynatrace requires an agent for operation. OneAgent is powerful, but it is also resource-heavy. On lightweight nodes or older systems, the agent can slightly impact performance. If Dynatrace could implement a lightweight agent behavior, we could make things faster. Additionally, if Dynatrace could add a long-term retention policy so that we could store more data and find fine-grained details, that would help us. While Dynatrace managed edition supports on-premises deployment, the SaaS version depends on cloud connectivity. For highly regulated or air-gapped environments, setup and updates can be challenging. Although the initial setup is smooth, if someone wants to fine-tune it and fully understand the tool end-to-end, it could be tricky.
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 customer that we are using the product for is extremely pleased with the reports and detail of information that they are receiving online, 24x7."
"The solution has a very good user interface."
"Our customers are now able to control their infrastructure with a single tool and can easily check the connections with all components."
"This is a stable solution."
"This tool helps us gather information from all hosts and services, then cross reference the information."
"It is limitless when it comes down to being able to scale up or even scale back, if we need it to."
"PurePath is one of the best features."
"The ability to real-time monitor servers and databases without any major drain on application resources is invaluable."
"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."
"The solution is great for virtualization and preparing the infrastructure in Tanzu to test products, it's very fast and has good visibility."
"Scalability for VMware Aria Operations for Applications is easy to implement and manage."
"People are very pleased with the implementation."
"Wavefront's monitoring tools and visibility into public cloud platforms are competing with the best out there."
"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 most valuable aspects of the solution are its ease of use and its ease of implementation."
"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

"Pretty much every month there are new features. However, its information on those new features is scarce."
"Cloud monitoring and reporting need improvement, as well as how to manipulate data and export it to share with business executives."
"I do know that for the size of our organization, we're talking thousands of agents and hundreds of applications, it does get to the point where the servers themselves that house Dynatrace are at a point where, in some cases, they are just too big for one machine, since you have to have an entire application ecosystem all funnel into a single system."
"It's a rather complex environment."
"Message Bus monitoring: it is not possible to deep dive into the Tibco EMS bus."
"Right now, for AppMon, the maximum handling load, the transaction per minute, is around 6,500. We had an issue on Black Friday or Cyber Monday, some kind of stability issue for users who could not log in. I want to see an increase in the load, at least to 7,000 or 8,000 transactions per second"
"The problem evaluation feature is an awesome idea, but bit difficult to pick up initially."
"The user interface needs to be improved."
"The main problem I have is that the license cost is very high."
"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."
"I would like to see integration with Kubernetes cluster and APIs so that you can manage the entire stack."
"The implementation is a long process that should be improved."
"So far, the solution's learning curve has been pretty 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."
"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."
"An area for improvement would be more in-depth reporting, such as analyzing disk IO during business hours compared to after hours."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"Pricing can be high, especially for Portuguese standards. But as one says, you get what you pay for."
"There was also some complexity in the adoption rate of it because of how costly the licensing is."
"The product is superior to others, but it comes with a price tag that is often difficult to position back to clients."
"Time to value was surprisingly fast."
"The setup costs for Dynatrace are low, however licensing costs are high."
"They could improve their price ranges, as there is no option for startups or testing."
"It's expensive."
"While it is quite good in respect to its functionality, there are few area in regards to pricing that they can look at how to possibly change. I have heard it's costly."
"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."
"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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886,976 professionals have used our research since 2012.
 

Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Financial Services Firm
21%
Manufacturing Company
8%
Computer Software Company
7%
Government
6%
Financial Services Firm
13%
Manufacturing Company
11%
Government
7%
Computer Software Company
7%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business78
Midsize Enterprise50
Large Enterprise300
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business4
Midsize Enterprise1
Large Enterprise10
 

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 you need to monitor applications end to end. I have tested them all and have not f...
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 stack. Both production and Dev/Test. I find it to be quite superior to anything els...
Any advice about APM solutions?
There are many factors and we know little about your requirements (size of org, technology stack, management systems, the scope of implementation). Our goal was to consolidate APM and infra monitor...
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

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
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 Dynatrace vs. VMware Aria Operations for Applications and other solutions. Updated: April 2026.
886,976 professionals have used our research since 2012.