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AWS X-Ray vs Dynatrace 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
Dynatrace
Ranking in Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability
2nd
Average Rating
8.8
Reviews Sentiment
7.0
Number of Reviews
356
Ranking in other categories
Log Management (6th), Mobile APM (2nd), Container Monitoring (1st), AIOps (2nd), AI Observability (4th)
 

Mindshare comparison

As of January 2026, in the Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability category, the mindshare of AWS X-Ray is 2.0%, down from 3.4% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Dynatrace is 6.6%, down from 11.4% 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 (%)
Dynatrace6.6%
AWS X-Ray2.0%
Other91.4%
Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability
 

Featured Reviews

Muhmad Tabrez A Deewanji - PeerSpot reviewer
Lead Software Engineer at a tech services company with 1,001-5,000 employees
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.
Manish Indupuri - PeerSpot reviewer
senior DevOps engineer at a tech services company with 10,001+ employees
AI-driven insights have reduced downtime and improved cross-team collaboration
We encountered some challenges while using Dynatrace. Although the initial setup was smooth, fine-tuning alert thresholds and custom metrics took some time. Another challenge was that Dynatrace charges based on host units, so we had to carefully plan our agent deployments. The licensing model is expensive. Additionally, the complexity of setup is an issue. While OneAgent and auto-discover services are powerful, the setup is more complex compared to other tools such as Prometheus and Grafana. These integrations are simple and basic, but Dynatrace setup requires more complexity based on the environment. For new users wanting to use Dynatrace, it is difficult. However, the AI-related solutions and metrics took us to the next level for identifying and fixing things. Dynatrace requires an agent for operation. OneAgent is powerful, but it is also resource-heavy. On lightweight nodes or older systems, the agent can slightly impact performance. If Dynatrace could implement a lightweight agent behavior, we could make things faster. Additionally, if Dynatrace could add a long-term retention policy so that we could store more data and find fine-grained details, that would help us. While Dynatrace managed edition supports on-premises deployment, the SaaS version depends on cloud connectivity. For highly regulated or air-gapped environments, setup and updates can be challenging. Although the initial setup is smooth, if someone wants to fine-tune it and fully understand the tool end-to-end, it could be tricky.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"The error analysis capabilities of X-Ray are really good."
"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's endpoints and user monitoring are considered the most valuable features."
"It is a very scalable solution."
"The most beneficial feature is that it shows a dashboard for performance intervals, which reveals latencies."
"The best feature of AWS X-Ray is the ability to correlate data out of the box, ensuring that if one service calls another service, it will provide a full flow of what has happened without needing to build or develop anything around it."
"I would give AWS X-Ray a nine out of ten overall."
"AWS X-Ray shows us exactly when there are delays, helping us understand the depth of issues and what is happening point-to-point."
"Working with the user interface is a pleasure for any customer since it is fast, responsive, and very well designed."
"Smartscape is a valuable feature. They also have a technology named PurePath. PurePath is the distributed tracing data."
"The triaging is amazing. And at the same time, it provides depth, all the way to what kind of a method, what variables are inside those methods. Without getting too into the technical, the depth it gets to, pinpointing the problematic area - where exactly the problem is happening - is amazing."
"Dynatrace has an auto-baseline and uses AI to monitor the performance of each API. The response time is related to the baseline."
"The dashboards are a really cool feature when I get to talking to clients. I ask them, "Why Dynatrace?" Because I need to push the tools that I have in my application. Then, they explain the monitoring of Dynatrace, saying the rate of the updates and features. They want to go with Dynatrace."
"It collects and analyses information with AI, which is useful."
"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."
"The dashboard allows us to monitor and proactively act upon any breaches in the threshold for our infrastructure."
 

Cons

"It should have X-Ray SDKs for different languages like Node.js, Python, or Java."
"A significant downside is that it is very expensive."
"The user interface is sometimes kind of confusing to understand. It's not very user-friendly."
"They can improve how traces are sent to other providers."
"Sometimes, the collector agents are confusing to configure initially."
"AWS X-Ray should improve its implementation process to make it easier for developers."
"Compared to other open-source tools, AWS X-Ray needs improvement in providing discounts."
"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."
"I don't see those monitoring capabilities for NVIDIA chips, NPUs, GPUs, or anything similar, and maybe it has them, but unfortunately, I lack the knowledge to understand where I can view all those things."
"We are still struggling a bit with finding an answer quickly."
"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."
"I do not like after 60 days or 90 days it gets aggregated to summary data. I would like to be able to analyze specific PurePaths after 30 days or 60 days with real numbers."
"Infrastructure monitoring could be improved."
"The reporting could be better."
"When it comes to monitoring, we did the integration with VMware vCenter, and we were able to see some good stuff. The VMware vCenter integration was really great, but what we really missed was the integration with the network management stuff such as Cisco ACI. We wanted to see integration in that area, but it was not provided by Dynatrace. So, the main feature for us is integration with things like Cisco ACI. If they can bring that one in, with vCenter in there, it would be a total solution. It would be absolutely incomparable to anything else in the market."
"Under heavyweight, Dynatrace becomes slower when listing PurePaths."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"The pricing for AWS X-Ray is a six out of ten."
"The solution is a bit expensive."
"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 cost is somewhat high."
"There is a license issue where if we increase the memory we have to up the licenses. I was unaware of that going in. I thought it was scalable without all the paperwork behind the scenes. ​​"
"The licensing model is confusing in solutioning clients for the number of hosts needed to deploy."
"We have not fully been able to get the full value out of the product. It is expensive compared to other things that we have had in the past. Paying that much and not being able to get the full return on the product is a downgrade. ​"
"The pricing is not bad, but it could be better."
"Dynatrace is an expensive solution."
"Consider volume because that is where you will get the most benefit. Doing a point solution is not cost-effective."
"Our annual costs were about the same for both AppDynamics and Dynatrace."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Financial Services Firm
15%
Computer Software Company
15%
Manufacturing Company
8%
Comms Service Provider
8%
Financial Services Firm
23%
Computer Software Company
9%
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 Business78
Midsize Enterprise50
Large Enterprise297
 

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...
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...
 

Comparisons

 

Overview

 

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
Find out what your peers are saying about AWS X-Ray vs. Dynatrace and other solutions. Updated: December 2025.
879,425 professionals have used our research since 2012.