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AWS X-Ray vs Azure Monitor comparison

 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive SummaryUpdated on Jul 24, 2024

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

AWS X-Ray
Ranking in Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability
15th
Average Rating
7.8
Reviews Sentiment
6.6
Number of Reviews
11
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
Azure Monitor
Ranking in Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability
6th
Average Rating
7.8
Reviews Sentiment
7.0
Number of Reviews
55
Ranking in other categories
Cloud Monitoring Software (3rd)
 

Mindshare comparison

As of November 2025, in the Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability category, the mindshare of AWS X-Ray is 2.5%, down from 3.4% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Azure Monitor is 4.3%, down from 8.3% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability Market Share Distribution
ProductMarket Share (%)
Azure Monitor4.3%
AWS X-Ray2.5%
Other93.2%
Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability
 

Featured Reviews

Muhmad Tabrez A Deewanji - PeerSpot reviewer
Improving performance through efficient trace metrics and data insights
As an application developer and architect, I appreciate AWS X-Ray for checking latency and identifying bottlenecks. I use it for performance tuning, conducting performance testing on applications, getting real-time traces, and gaining data insights. It helps in improving throughput and tuning infrastructure. The trace metrics and data collected provide valuable insights.
Muhammad Usman Khawar - PeerSpot reviewer
Native integration simplifies monitoring but documentation and cost improvements are needed
The ease of access in Azure is significant since it's native to the platform and easy to integrate. It has no maintenance overhead, and users don't have to navigate to another portal to get their desired result. It's the handiness that it has, rather than the features. The interpretation from the logs and injection requires custom runbooks. While it's complex, many services provide native insights and workbooks. It does the basic job quite efficiently. They added new kinds of metrics with more integrations to send out metrics. They have even added support for third-party tools that can be integrated. Azure Monitor is working on improvements and becoming more mature. Azure Monitor is stable and scalable. Azure Monitor is evolving with new workbooks and dashboards.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"AWS X-RAY identifies bottlenecks in terms of stability and performance and how long certain data lives in terms of response time and duration."
"I would give AWS X-Ray a nine out of ten overall."
"The most beneficial feature is that it shows a dashboard for performance intervals, which reveals latencies."
"The most important one is compliance. We're able to achieve our regulatory levels. We're able to achieve the security level that we need for the federal government."
"The most promising feature of AWS X-Ray is that you can debug the issues through the proper logs. You can also get an analysis out of the logs for some use cases, though I have yet to try all the features of AWS X-Ray."
"The solution has made it easier for us to trace the problems that we have with our requests and to monitor the timing of each step in each request we do in our endpoints."
"AWS X-Ray shows us exactly when there are delays, helping us understand the depth of issues and what is happening point-to-point."
"AWS X-Ray is a strong solution and has a smooth integration process."
"Among the valuable features of this solution, Application Insights stands out as one of the most significant. It provides insights into application performance and helps identify issues and bottlenecks."
"The ease of access in Azure is significant since it's native to the platform and easy to integrate."
"The solution works well overall. It's easy to implement and simple to use."
"The solution has tons of valuable features."
"The tool's most valuable feature is the alert system, which can be set according to our metrics. The integration is smooth."
"The feature that I found most valuable in Azure Monitor is its monitoring abilities. With Azure Monitor, you are able to monitor all of your cloud resources across multiple subscriptions in one dashboard and create solution-specific alerts that can trigger an email to the team responsible for that specific solution."
"The features that are most valuable are the alerting function and also the logging functionality to analyze certain issues using log analytics"
"Recently, they have improved their integration with other resources, so we get even more robust data."
 

Cons

"If you have a small team, it's probably overkill."
"I do not have any notes in terms of improvements."
"They can improve how traces are sent to other providers."
"Sometimes, the collector agents are confusing to configure initially."
"What needs to be better in AWS X-Ray is the log filtering. Predefined filters could be helpful because the power of analytics comes from how you can filter the data. I also want to see more KPIs from AWS X-Ray."
"The user interface is sometimes kind of confusing to understand. It's not very user-friendly."
"A significant downside is that it is very expensive."
"Compared to other open-source tools, AWS X-Ray needs improvement in providing discounts."
"The scalability could be improved as there are some limitations."
"Setting up this solution is complex. It's also missing the functionality of assigning alerts."
"There are a lot of things that take more time to do, such as charting, alerting, and correlation of data, and things like that. Azure Monitor doesn't tell you why something happened. It just tells you that it happened. It should also have some type of AI. Environments and applications are becoming more and more complex every day with hundreds or thousands of microservices. Therefore, having to do a lot of the stuff manually takes a lot of time, and on top of that, troubleshooting issues takes a lot of time. The traditional method of troubleshooting doesn't really work for or apply to this environment we're in. So, having an AI-based system and the ability to automate deployments of your monitoring and configurations makes it much easier."
"This solution has fewer features than some of its competitors, so adding more features to it would make it better."
"What I feel is when I open a screen of Azure, some places are very complex to navigate to. It is not very user-friendly when it comes to accessing certain sections."
"n comparison to New Relic, which I've used before, it's a bit more complicated. It's not as easy to use. It also took some time to get it working. The implementation needs to be simpler."
"Integration with third-party tools from other vendors than Azure is more time-consuming"
"In my opinion, they should improve the overall user experience, especially when it comes to indexing and searching collective logs."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"The solution is a bit expensive."
"The pricing for AWS X-Ray is a six out of ten."
"As you develop a relationship with Amazon, your pricing gets lower. You get credits for the amount of the system you use, and then if you're the government, you can get government pricing. For commercial users, there's a hump when you go from small to medium to big enterprise. Small businesses can live pretty easily off the free tier in a lot of cases, but when you go from a medium to a big enterprise, it becomes more expensive on a per-user basis. I'd like to see that curve going in a different way where pricing can be driven down while people are trying to adopt the technology."
"The solution is very costly because you have to pay for various things such as adding to logs and internet alerts."
"The solution’s pricing depends on how much logs it collects."
"Azure Monitor is a low-priced solution, which is why it would work best on small-scale projects."
"The cost of Azure Monitor application performance should be less expensive."
"The price of the solution is reasonable."
"The product offers a pay-as-you-go model to users. The charges are to be paid according to the usage of the product."
"Its cost depends on the ingestion of the logs. It could go anywhere. For an out-of-the-box platform such as FrameFlow, you pay pretty much a fixed price and you get what you get, whereas, with something like Azure Monitor, you pay by the ingestion charge, so you can have one client who pays hardly anything for the same alerts, and another client pays loads and loads."
"The tool is expensive."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Financial Services Firm
16%
Computer Software Company
16%
Manufacturing Company
9%
Comms Service Provider
8%
Computer Software Company
14%
Financial Services Firm
13%
Manufacturing Company
8%
Government
6%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business8
Large Enterprise3
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business23
Midsize Enterprise6
Large Enterprise29
 

Questions from the Community

What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for AWS X-Ray?
While I have not compared it with GCP or Azure ( /products/microsoft-azure-reviews ), AWS generally offers cost-effective services. Some services, like Athena ( /products/odyssey-software-athena-eo...
What needs improvement with AWS X-Ray?
The challenges we faced with AWS X-Ray were that some of the AWS services we were using did not support it, which we discovered at a later stage. This was potentially a design consideration we shou...
What is your primary use case for AWS X-Ray?
I have been using AWS X-Ray for creating insights to our applications we have developed. It is used to correlate different services in AWS when a transaction happens, allowing us to see the flow of...
How does Splunk compare with Azure Monitor?
Splunk handles a high amount of data very well. We use Splunk to capture information and as an aggregator for monitoring information from different sources. Splunk is very good at alerting us if we...
What do you like most about Azure Monitor?
Azure Monitor is a very easy-to-use product in the cloud environment.
What needs improvement with Azure Monitor?
The challenges with Azure Monitor are that it's initially complex to set up because you need multiple components. Azure Monitor is one thing, but within Azure Monitor, you need to bring Log Analyti...
 

Comparisons

 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

COMCAST, ConnectWise, skyscanner, AirAsia, cookpad, cimpress, VTEX, zowdow
Rackspace, First Gas, Allscripts, ABB Group
Find out what your peers are saying about AWS X-Ray vs. Azure Monitor and other solutions. Updated: November 2025.
872,846 professionals have used our research since 2012.