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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
2nd
Average Rating
8.8
Reviews Sentiment
7.4
Number of Reviews
345
Ranking in other categories
Log Management (5th), Mobile APM (1st), AIOps (2nd)
VMware Aria Operations for ...
Ranking in Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability
27th
Ranking in Container Monitoring
7th
Average Rating
8.0
Reviews Sentiment
6.9
Number of Reviews
12
Ranking in other categories
IT Infrastructure Monitoring (29th), Cloud Monitoring Software (22nd)
 

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 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.
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

"We are quite happy with the support that they have been providing."
"Being able to identify the blind spots. Before, we had lots of monitoring, but it was all very manual. You only monitor what you know about. As soon as we put Dynatrace in, it sprung to life, and we identified problems instantly."
"Dynatrace gives us and our clients information about all layers and components of their platform, including the most important starting point for us: real-time and historical end user experience."
"I think the design is pretty scalable. It's pretty easy to add additional nodes if we need to. Also, it's easy to migrate changes from one environment to another."
"Dynatrace's power lies in its ability to inspect and chart transactions, and draw the PurePath tree. The parameters of the requests and methods can be selected to access the necessary information for efficient analysis."
"We use PurePath to see exactly what the user observed from the web browser to the end of the request to the dialog box. Every step of what they do is very useful for us to diagnose a problem"
"It helps developers fix old and new problems, helps businesses to understand conversions, statistics, and service health."
"We obtained a better insight into our environment and consolidated a lot of our old apps into one app."
"This solution allows me to have true visibility for any metrics when it comes to my cloud, and private."
"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."
"No issues with stability."
"I find VMware Aria Operations for Applications to be very stable, and I would rate it a ten out of ten."
"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."
"It has a familiar interface, which makes it easy to get started."
"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."
"The features I find most valuable is the querying and alerting capabilities."
 

Cons

"This solution would be improved with the addition of annotations for automated custom metrics creation."
"Needs support for more technologies."
"Sometimes it is hard to find the right setting for what you want to change."
"It would be great to have Synthetic automatically ​retrieve what the customer sees on his side."
"Due to the fact that you doing a lot, you have a problem with the learning curve. We're really looking for ways to make this product more accessible."
"It does not have mature enough dashboards.​"
"This solution needs better support for security and monolithic batch processes."
"I would say it's not scalable, because we've had to move large applications that were in a shared environment to their own separate Dynatrace server instance."
"The documentation and integration with Kubernetes could be improved."
"An area for improvement would be more in-depth reporting, such as analyzing disk IO during business hours compared to after hours."
"The implementation is a long process that should be improved."
"The main problem I have is that the license cost is very high."
"The initial setup should be easier and more seamless."
"I would like to see integration with Kubernetes cluster and APIs so that you can manage the entire stack."
"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."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"Its license is a bit expensive. We renew it yearly."
"It's more expensive than other solutions, but worth it. We use full APM monitoring on our primary systems, but only resource monitoring on lesser systems. We shift licenses around our environment when a deeper dive into lesser systems is required."
"Time to value was surprisingly fast."
"Pricing is based on the number of servers monitored, so for big applications, it is a bit expensive."
"I would like to see them improve on their licensing and the cost. It's been a challenge for us because the way they have it broken out right now, you have to buy it by units. It's hard for us to know where to put those units because our company is broken up into all these different business units, so it's been challenging in that sense. I just would like to see them improve that model a little bit."
"Dynatrace is still kind of an expensive solution compared to others. But I recognize that they are ahead of the competition when we do a feature by feature comparison."
"The price could be improved."
"Dynatrace is usually paid on a yearly basis."
"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."
"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."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Educational Organization
36%
Financial Services Firm
17%
Computer Software Company
7%
Manufacturing Company
6%
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 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 cost of VMware Aria Operations for Applications is fair and reasonable compared to what we receive in support and packages from VMware.
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 as Priority 2 or 1 cases.
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 us to set up alerts for different components and send them via SMTP to a team d...
 

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 2025.
848,207 professionals have used our research since 2012.