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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 May 2025, in the Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability category, the mindshare of Dynatrace is 10.6%, down from 13.5% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Splunk AppDynamics is 4.7%, down from 6.1% 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

"We also use it in our performance testing. We found an issue that way, and we would have put that change live without Dynatrace. Finding that problem in "live", that would have been three or four days of investigation, whereas we found the issue, fixed the issue, reran the tests, all same day."
"The web dashboards are quite useful, good looking, and easy to use."
"It has improved our critical incident response, exposing critical issues impacting the environment and our ability to respond to those events prior to client impact as well as resolving those events more quickly. We have use cases where we have studied a 70 percent improvement for response times in an occurring event as well as future reoccurrences being improved."
"This monitoring capability gives us the ability to measure the end-user experience."
"The best feature of the product for me is the real troubleshooting capability through the PurePath analysis."
"Great for monitoring critical internal and public-facing applications."
"We are now able to identify the root cause in 15 minutes. It has helped the entire operations of our company."
"Dynatrace has designed its agents to capture limited stack traces for each transaction executed."
"Technical support is helpful."
"The ability to identify the top running queries has been extremely valuable for us."
"It's good for a larger scale deployment such as what my company is working on."
"The AppDyniamics technical support is good. We haven't had any problems with them. They answer very quickly."
"The flow map is very valuable to us. Before we installed APM, we had no idea how our application looked."
"The customer service and support are helpful and responsive."
"The initial setup is simple."
"What I like the most about Splunk AppDynamics is the end-to-end observability for the application, along with traces."
"It significantly improves application performance management by offering recommendations for resource allocation to avoid wastage or overcommitment."
"The solution is great for virtualization and preparing the infrastructure in Tanzu to test products. It's very fast and has good visibility."
"The features I find most valuable is the querying and alerting capabilities."
"The stability of Aria Operations for Applications has improved significantly over the years."
"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."
"This solution allows me to have true visibility for any metrics when it comes to my cloud, and private."
"No issues with stability."
 

Cons

"Dynatrace has APIs, but they are unfriendly APIs. If they were friendly like Splunk or Sumo Logic had, we might integrate that same data on a single webpage, then start showing these internally."
"It needs a dashboard for cluster events in general, and for Kubernetes specifically."
"It would help if Dynatrace allowed more features that work with metrics like Grafana or New Relic."
"When compared with other tools, the experience needs improvement. I would like them to build out the interactions and make them friendlier."
"It would be great to have Synthetic automatically ​retrieve what the customer sees on his side."
"Needs support for more technologies."
"In the next release, I would like to see some new reports and more tiles on the Dashboard."
"If Dynatrace is capturing everything in your application, it has to "sense" that information, and that sensing needs sensors which we have to include in our applications. The more you apply sensors - the more details you want - the more you have to increase the level of sensing. If I increase the level of sensing, my application's performance goes down, because something is there that is, again and again, checking each and every thing in the application. So that load on the applications increases. So, many times my applications used to crash because Dynatrace was working on them. We had to remove some sensing; either we had to reduce the sensing or we had to remove Dynatrace immediately."
"The networking monitor function could be better, we are not getting many details from it."
"Things are being done differently in the industry now, and many of these problems are being solved with cloud databases."
"The solution needs to support IBM products."
"The solution has performance issues after we deploy the agent."
"An area for improvement in AppDynamics Server Monitoring is integration; in particular, it needs a better way to integrate with custom applications such as Siebel CRM. Right now, it's challenging to integrate AppDynamics Server Monitoring with Siebel CRM because it sometimes gives an error and cannot integrate properly."
"The pricing falls within the mid-range category."
"Maybe some more CPU power or something like that could be an area to improve."
"The integration ability of AppDynamics with other performance testing tools is an area with shortcomings where improvements are required."
"An area for improvement would be more in-depth reporting, such as analyzing disk IO during business hours compared to after hours."
"The solution could be expensive, which might be a limiting factor."
"The initial setup should be easier and more seamless."
"The solution could be expensive, which might be a limiting factor."
"The implementation is a long process that should be improved."
"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."
"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

"The pricing is a bit on the higher end."
"Its license is a bit expensive. We renew it yearly."
"Purchasing through the AWS Marketplace is excellent."
"​Make sure your leadership buy-in is in place. Ensure leadership understands that an APM solution is a fairly expensive, so they know what they are getting into."
"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."
"Licensing is very interesting, as you pay only for what is being monitored. A lot of things are given away for no additional cost. If you have a great IT consolidation, it will be pretty cheap. If you have a lot of servers, it will be heavier."
"If there are no corporate requirements to run Dynatrace Managed (operating it yourself), I would definitely go for the size option. For small and medium-sized companies, the size option is probably the cheapest one. You don't need to look into operating it. You don't need to run hardware. It is pay as you go."
"The product is really fast to implement and gives customers instant value. This is important, because it reduces costs on the implementation."
"AppDynamics is more expensive than competitors."
"The pricing needs to come down."
"The license for AppDynamics is procured by our customers."
"Purchasing the product through the AWS Marketplace was good."
"The pricing for AppDynamics Server Monitoring in Africa and the Middle East is too expensive, so it's very hard to sell it to customers. If there could be different pricing or package for the region, that would be great. My company pays for the license of AppDynamics Server Monitoring on a per-agent, per-server basis. It's $700 to $1000 per server, and it's paid annually. My company is on a subscription model for the solution. On a scale of one to five, where one is expensive and five is cheap, my rating for the price of AppDynamics Server Monitoring is a two."
"The pricing is very competitive."
"The pricing of the solution is reasonable for what features you receive."
"Yearly payments have to be made toward the licensing costs of the solution. The solution has no additional costs apart from the licensing costs."
"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.
849,686 professionals have used our research since 2012.