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Amazon Web Services (AWS) Logo
7,074 views|6,293 comparisons
100% willing to recommend
Dynatrace Logo
46,602 views|28,133 comparisons
95% willing to recommend
Comparison Buyer's Guide
Executive Summary
Updated on Jun 27, 2023

We performed a comparison between Dynatrace and AWS X-Ray based on real PeerSpot user reviews in five categories. After reading all of the collected data, you can find our conclusion below.

  • Ease of Deployment: Dynatrace is generally straightforward and easy, except for Dynatrace Managed which may become more complex. On the other hand, AWS X-Ray's setup is doable and fast, with a moderate difficulty rating of seven out of ten. The deployment process for Dynatrace is minimal and maintenance is organic, while AWS X-Ray's difficulty level depends on the depth of analysis desired.
  • Features: Dynatrace offers real user tracking, AI automation, and Kubernetes topology visualization, while AWS X-Ray is known for its ability to identify errors, provide detailed information, and ensure compliance. Users looking for these specific features may want to consider which platform best fits their needs.
  • Pricing: Dynatrace has a complex and unclear pricing structure, making it hard for small companies to know how many units to purchase, and the cost model is too expensive for them. AWS X-Ray, on the other hand, has usage-based pricing that is affordable, but it can get more expensive per user for medium to big enterprises.
  • Service and Support: While Dynatrace has received mixed reviews with some customers finding their technical support responsive and helpful and others feeling that it could be faster, its documentation is lacking. On the other hand, AWS X-Ray has limited reviews with some customers never needing to contact their customer service.
  • ROI: Dynatrace offers a remarkable return on investment thanks to its automation, feedback, and cost-effective approach. It has the potential to save money through tool consolidation and reduce mean time to repair by 70% and time to market by 50%. However, measuring its impact can be difficult. In contrast, AWS X-Ray's return on investment remains unknown.

Comparison Results: Dynatrace is the preferred choice over AWS X-Ray due to its extensive features such as real user monitoring, session replay, and synthetic monitoring functionalities. The interface is user-friendly, and it is more scalable than AWS X-Ray. AWS X-Ray is functional, but reviewers suggest improvements in log filtering and user interface configuration.

To learn more, read our detailed AWS X-Ray vs. Dynatrace Report (Updated: March 2024).
768,578 professionals have used our research since 2012.
Featured Review
Quotes From Members
We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use.
Here are some excerpts of what they said:
Pros
"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 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.""It is a very scalable solution.""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.""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 is a strong solution and has a smooth integration process."

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"For stability, our customers have no complaints.""It can give a quick overview of the current health status, end to end, and can quickly point to the root cause if there an issue or problem in one of our applications.""It is easy to see what areas you want to alert on and catch.​""It alerts us, or can detect, potential problems which are building up.""We have configured the alerting so the error or the incident will go to the respective team. Then, the team can contact the user once they see that they have an issue and ask if they can them resolve the issue.""It gives complete stats of the user and what they are doing.""When collecting data with Dynatrace, we saw every single transaction that happened in real-time.""We obtained a better insight into our environment and consolidated a lot of our old apps into one app."

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Cons
"I do not have any notes in terms of improvements.""If you have a small team, it's probably overkill.""They can improve how traces are sent to other providers.""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.""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."

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"The user interface needs to be improved.""I would say that this solution's reports are lacking a little bit, and because of this, you have to rely on API to fetch and pull data. I think they could have done a bit of a better job by providing a more user-friendly search from a reporting perspective.""Needs more compatibility of platforms out-of-the-box.""They should make hooks into some of the more modern performance testing tools a little easier. I think that would go a long way.""Data streaming and dashboard loading can be improved to reduce dashboard latency.""Improvements in Synthetic monitoring would be great. Certain features of thick client, if available in the web interface, would also be a great improvement.""Its pricing could be better. Dynatrace has an option to monitor the end users to see what they are doing, but it required a separate license and had an additional cost. It was coming out to be expensive, because of which we didn't use the feature.""For an easy view of global and entity-specific configurations, a separate tile or pane aggregating these configurations should be implemented."

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Pricing and Cost Advice
  • "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 a bit expensive."
  • More AWS X-Ray Pricing and Cost Advice →

  • "Pricing is based on the number of servers monitored, so for big applications, it is a bit expensive."
  • "Licensing is a bit complicated for Dynatrace, and pricing is dependent on how much your organization invests."
  • "We found an issue within the first week of ownership that has been costing us more than the entire license cost."
  • "Product pricing can seem a little over complex, however this is minor and does not detract from the benefits of the solution."
  • "Getting the first agents installed, getting information, and coverage in a initial set of systems can be done in hours and with a low cost entry point."
  • "Price (of the product) is a major concern for all the clients I work with."
  • "The licensing model is confusing in solutioning clients for the number of hosts needed to deploy."
  • "The product is superior to others, but it comes with a price tag that is often difficult to position back to clients."
  • More Dynatrace Pricing and Cost Advice →

    report
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    Questions from the Community
    Top Answer:AWS X-Ray is a strong solution and has a smooth integration process.
    Top Answer:They can improve how traces are sent to other providers.
    Top Answer: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… more »
    Top Answer: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 else… more »
    Top Answer: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… more »
    Ranking
    Views
    7,074
    Comparisons
    6,293
    Reviews
    5
    Average Words per Review
    547
    Rating
    8.2
    Views
    46,602
    Comparisons
    28,133
    Reviews
    15
    Average Words per Review
    468
    Rating
    8.5
    Comparisons
    Datadog logo
    Compared 17% of the time.
    Azure Monitor logo
    Compared 15% of the time.
    New Relic logo
    Compared 14% of the time.
    Sentry logo
    Compared 13% of the time.
    Prometheus logo
    Compared 7% of the time.
    Datadog logo
    Compared 18% of the time.
    New Relic logo
    Compared 12% of the time.
    AppDynamics logo
    Compared 10% of the time.
    ThousandEyes logo
    Compared 1% of the time.
    Learn More
    Overview

    AWS X-Ray is a powerful debugging and performance analysis tool offered by Amazon Web Services. It allows developers to trace requests made to their applications and identify bottlenecks and issues. 

    With X-Ray, developers can visualize the entire request flow and pinpoint the exact location where errors occur. It provides detailed insights into the performance of individual components and helps optimize the overall application performance. 

    X-Ray integrates seamlessly with other AWS services, making it easy to trace requests across different services and identify dependencies. It also offers a comprehensive set of APIs and SDKs, enabling developers to instrument their applications and capture valuable data for analysis. With its user-friendly interface and powerful features, AWS X-Ray is a valuable tool for developers looking to improve the performance and reliability of their applications.

    Dynatrace is an AI-powered software intelligence monitoring platform that accelerates digital transformation and simplifies cloud complexities. Dynatrace is an entirely automated full-stack solution that provides data and answers about the performance of your applications and deep insight into every transaction throughout every application, including the end-user experience. By modernizing and automating enterprise cloud operations, users can deliver an optimal digital experience with higher quality software to customers faster.

    Dynatrace offers an all-in-one automated artificial intelligence solution that brings together application performance, cloud and infrastructure, and digital experience monitoring. Dynatrace accelerates performance-driven results through operations, development, and business teams with a shared metrics platform. In addition, users are provided a full-stack monitoring experience with three patented technologies:

    • Smartscape - visualization mechanism that maps the totality of everything working in your environment and detects any casual dependencies between your applications, processes, websites, services, hosts, cloud infrastructure, and networks.

    • OneAgent - a technology that analyzes, gathers ,and unifies all business performance metrics throughout every layer of your technology stack.

    • PurePath Technology - code-level context and timings are captured from the mainframe to the cloud for all end-to-end transactions.

    What does Dynatrace offer?

    Dynatrace redefines how organizations monitor their digital ecosystems. The solution offers:

    • Cloud Automation: With AI engine Davis®, users can see the exact reason for problems and facilitate quick auto-remediation and intelligent cloud orchestration.

    • Application Security: With automated application vulnerability management, users can deliver applications faster and more securely.

    • Infrastructure Monitoring: Convenient broad visibility across your environments is provided with streamlined, automated infrastructure monitoring.

    • Digital Experience Monitoring (DEM): Optimize your applications, provide better support, and improve user experience with a combination of Real User Monitoring (RUM), Session Replay, and synthetic monitoring throughout your environment.

    • Applications and Microservices: For complex cloud environments, Dynatrace can automatically provide visibility and root-cause answers. It can also monitor microservices.

    • Digital Business Analytics: Get AI-powered, real-time answers to analytical business queries with KPIs and metrics that are already flowing through applications.

    Reviews from Real Users

    Dynatrace is the only solution that provides answers to organizations based on deep insight into each user, transaction, and organization's environment.

    Barry P., a managing performance engineer at Medica Health Plans, writes, "With Dynatrace, we have synthetic checks and real-user monitoring of all of our websites, places where members and providers can interact with us over the web. We monitor the response times of those with Dynatrace, and it's all integrated into one place."

    A consultant at a tech service company notes, "A feature that's one of the highlights of Dynatrace is the AI. The second most valuable feature is OneAgent. Between infrastructures, applications, operating systems, you can deploy with just a single agent and can practically install and forget about it."

    Sample Customers
    COMCAST, ConnectWise, skyscanner, AirAsia, cookpad, cimpress, VTEX, zowdow
    Audi, Best Buy, LinkedIn, CISCO, Intuit, KRONOS, Scottrade, Wells Fargo, ULTA Beauty, Lenovo, Swarovsk, Nike, Whirlpool, American Express
    Top Industries
    VISITORS READING REVIEWS
    Financial Services Firm19%
    Computer Software Company16%
    Manufacturing Company9%
    Comms Service Provider6%
    REVIEWERS
    Financial Services Firm28%
    Insurance Company9%
    Computer Software Company9%
    Manufacturing Company8%
    VISITORS READING REVIEWS
    Educational Organization28%
    Financial Services Firm18%
    Computer Software Company8%
    Manufacturing Company6%
    Company Size
    VISITORS READING REVIEWS
    Small Business19%
    Midsize Enterprise12%
    Large Enterprise69%
    REVIEWERS
    Small Business17%
    Midsize Enterprise13%
    Large Enterprise71%
    VISITORS READING REVIEWS
    Small Business11%
    Midsize Enterprise33%
    Large Enterprise56%
    Buyer's Guide
    AWS X-Ray vs. Dynatrace
    March 2024
    Find out what your peers are saying about AWS X-Ray vs. Dynatrace and other solutions. Updated: March 2024.
    768,578 professionals have used our research since 2012.

    AWS X-Ray is ranked 13th in Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability with 6 reviews while Dynatrace is ranked 2nd in Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability with 340 reviews. AWS X-Ray is rated 8.0, while Dynatrace is rated 8.8. The top reviewer of AWS X-Ray writes "Saves time, is relatively cheap, and helps find errors". On the other hand, the top reviewer of Dynatrace writes "AI identifies all the components of a response-time issue or failure, hugely benefiting our triage efforts". AWS X-Ray is most compared with Datadog, Azure Monitor, New Relic, Sentry and Prometheus, whereas Dynatrace is most compared with Datadog, New Relic, AppDynamics, Splunk Enterprise Security and ThousandEyes. See our AWS X-Ray vs. Dynatrace report.

    See our list of best Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability vendors.

    We monitor all Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability reviews to prevent fraudulent reviews and keep review quality high. We do not post reviews by company employees or direct competitors. We validate each review for authenticity via cross-reference with LinkedIn, and personal follow-up with the reviewer when necessary.