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AWS X-Ray vs Broadcom DX Application Performance Management 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
16th
Average Rating
7.8
Reviews Sentiment
6.6
Number of Reviews
11
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
Broadcom DX Application Per...
Ranking in Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability
24th
Average Rating
8.0
Reviews Sentiment
7.3
Number of Reviews
162
Ranking in other categories
Container Monitoring (7th)
 

Mindshare comparison

As of August 2025, in the Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability category, the mindshare of AWS X-Ray is 3.1%, down from 3.4% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Broadcom DX Application Performance Management is 0.6%, up from 0.4% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
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.
MarioGomez - PeerSpot reviewer
Improve application performance management by deploying easy-to-use dashboards but face challenges with support access
The main areas for improvement include making dashboards and interfaces easier to understand. Our version might be a bit old, and we may need to upgrade it. It is also difficult to access the right person in support, and sometimes incidents need to be escalated, taking several contacts to resolve.

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."
"AWS X-Ray shows us exactly when there are delays, helping us understand the depth of issues and what is happening point-to-point."
"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."
"The error analysis capabilities of X-Ray are really good."
"The most beneficial feature is that it shows a dashboard for performance intervals, which reveals latencies."
"AWS X-Ray's endpoints and user monitoring are considered the most valuable features."
"We use it to create dashboards and executive view dashboards, so our higher up managers can take a look and see where our application status stands."
"We receive good transactions from it with good graphs, as well, documenting the activities of total visitors on the site. We can pull the reports and provide them to the client, as required."
"I like that it gives you a wide range of data where you can see the application outage response from concurrent locations and the number of stalled jobs."
"Standard available reports provide us with an automatic insight into the top ten situations to watch. It would have been extremely difficult to program such a report ourselves, and to my knowledge no other competitor can match this functionality."
"Attribute decoration is a unique and very powerful feature. We can add meaningful meta information based on our internal demand."
"With the new feature CA Team Center is much easier to view the information of my user experience, with this unified vision, it was even practical for lay users to use the tool"
"Stability is one of the strongest attributes of CA APM. It is very stable on all platforms."
"The solution is very stable."
 

Cons

"Like most Amazon products, the user interface, configuration, and tuning aren't the easiest. That's the biggest reason why people tend to go to products like TerraForm and Terragrunt. We use TerraForm and Terragrunt. So, for setting things up and interacting with X-Ray, it's definitely the user interface that can be better."
"The user interface is sometimes kind of confusing to understand. It's not very user-friendly."
"If you have a small team, it's probably overkill."
"It should have X-Ray SDKs for different languages like Node.js, Python, or Java."
"I do not have any notes in terms of improvements."
"They can improve how traces are sent to other providers."
"A significant downside is that it is very expensive."
"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."
"One of the challenges is agent releases. So as we employ agents, they are done relatively manually. A little bit of automating of agent release would be helpful."
"The solution still needs the administrator of APM to know a lot more to configure and control everything. So it's a headache for the administrator to do the daily jobs."
"System incident analysis and performance monitoring need improvement."
"Our users lag how to identify the root cause with this solution. If they could come up with a more user-friendly version, that would be a good thing, since other vendors currently have better features and more user-friendly products than CA APM."
"The area of improvement is related to the areas of application onboarding and instrumentation, where the product has certain shortcomings."
"Lacks some integration between all the tools."
"With respect to SQL monitoring, it would be nice to have a little more information because it doesn't provide the full statement all of the time."
"What comes to mind when you speak of a room for improvement in Broadcom DX Application Performance Management is the infrastructure agent, but my company doesn't use it, so I can't say if it's really a problem or not, but it could be the container support or cloud support that could be improved in the solution. An additional feature I'd like to see in the next release of Broadcom DX Application Performance Management is for it to have one agent for cloud and one agent for legacy, with all features included."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"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 pricing for AWS X-Ray is a six out of ten."
"The solution is a bit expensive."
"On pricing, CA is very competitive. I think that's going to help in the long run."
"The pricing structure should be based on memory or CPU usage rather than the number of agents, as it makes the solution more expensive for us."
"The licensing costs are expensive."
"There is some research needed to determine licensing costs, based on the number of DataPower instances for the Nastel agent, for example."
"Setup costs are quite competitive relative to other solutions, and simpler."
"Pricing and licensing are not issues."
"Broadcom is a better and cheaper option from the financial perspective. It also depends on the DLP plug."
"Depends on the size of the product you need."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Financial Services Firm
17%
Computer Software Company
16%
Manufacturing Company
9%
Comms Service Provider
7%
Performing Arts
14%
Financial Services Firm
13%
Manufacturing Company
13%
Recreational Facilities/Services Company
8%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
 

Questions from the Community

What do you like most about AWS X-Ray?
AWS X-Ray is a strong solution and has a smooth integration process.
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?
AWS X-Ray should improve its implementation process to make it easier for developers. The current manual instrumentation is challenging compared to the almost automatic instrumentation of other pro...
What do you like most about Broadcom DX Application Performance Management?
Scalability-wise, I rate the solution a nine out of ten...there is a very easy way to deal with it by adding more servers to the application.
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Broadcom DX Application Performance Management?
The initial pricing is reasonable and competitive compared to other solutions. The challenge arises during annual renewals, as the price increase can be significant, around twenty percent or more, ...
What needs improvement with Broadcom DX Application Performance Management?
The first area for improvement is the discovery feature, which should be enhanced to collect comprehensive information from applications and services. This includes using agents or scripts to gathe...
 

Also Known As

No data available
DX APM, CA APM, CA NetQoS Performance Center, Wily Introscope, CA Wily APM, CA App Experience Analytics, CA AXA
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

COMCAST, ConnectWise, skyscanner, AirAsia, cookpad, cimpress, VTEX, zowdow
Lexmark, Intermountain Healthcare, National Australia Bank, BBVA Compass Bank, Innovapost, Dansk Supermarked Group, U.S. Cellular, Orange, Cetip
Find out what your peers are saying about AWS X-Ray vs. Broadcom DX Application Performance Management and other solutions. Updated: July 2025.
865,140 professionals have used our research since 2012.