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AWS X-Ray vs VMware Aria Operations for Applications 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
VMware Aria Operations for ...
Ranking in Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability
19th
Average Rating
8.0
Reviews Sentiment
6.3
Number of Reviews
14
Ranking in other categories
IT Infrastructure Monitoring (16th), Container Monitoring (5th), Cloud Monitoring Software (15th)
 

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 VMware Aria Operations for Applications is 1.2%, up from 0.8% 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 (%)
AWS X-Ray2.0%
VMware Aria Operations for Applications1.2%
Other96.8%
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.
AS
Consultant at HCLTech
Automation and insightful diagnostics elevate operations while improvements are welcome
The new version 8.18 has brought significant improvements. The main purpose of using this tool is having a single console to manage all entities. The cloud integration capabilities, including private, public, and hybrid, are already well-implemented. The ability to manage multiple vCenters across different geographical locations is very effective. The new Skyline health feature and certificate and licensing management are particularly useful improvements. The dashboard's overview tab provides comprehensive information about current vCenter status, resizable amounts, reclamation opportunities, anomalies, diagnostics, licensing, and certificates. However, there is room for improvement in application analysis. The current functionality lacks detailed monitoring at the kernel level, focusing mainly on CPU, memory, and storage matrices. Enhanced application monitoring capabilities, including tracking downtime for specific types of applications such as transactional or e-commerce applications, would be beneficial.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"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 identifies bottlenecks in terms of stability and performance and how long certain data lives in terms of response time and duration."
"The error analysis capabilities of X-Ray are really good."
"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'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."
"I find VMware Aria Operations for Applications to be very stable, and I would rate it a ten out of ten."
"The stability of Aria Operations for Applications has improved significantly over the years."
"It significantly improves application performance management by offering recommendations for resource allocation to avoid wastage or overcommitment."
"People are very pleased with the implementation."
"It has a familiar interface, which makes it easy to get started."
"Scalability for VMware Aria Operations for Applications is easy to implement and manage."
"No issues with stability."
"This solution allows me to have true visibility for any metrics when it comes to my cloud, and private."
 

Cons

"If you have a small team, it's probably overkill."
"A significant downside is that it is very expensive."
"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."
"Sometimes, the collector agents are confusing to configure initially."
"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."
"I would like to see integration with Kubernetes cluster and APIs so that you can manage the entire stack."
"They could make it more easy to plug-in data so that a nontechnical person will be able to use it, like accountants or finance people. That way they don't have to ask us."
"The return on investment is best suited for organizations that do not have the resources for a dedicated VM environment team. However, the cost of the product doesn't show significant benefits."
"The solution could be expensive, which might be a limiting factor."
"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."
"Its billing model is consumption-based. I understand the consumption-based model, but it is not necessarily easy to estimate and guess how many points or how much we are going to consume on a specific application up until we get to that point. So, for us, it would be helpful to have more insights or predictability into what we can expect from a cost perspective if we are starting to use specific features. This can potentially also drive our consumption a bit more."
"The solution could be expensive, which might be a limiting factor."
"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 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."
"Different locations require different setups. In your terms, around 300 to around 400K USD."
"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."
"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."
"I would rate the pricing as three out of five."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Financial Services Firm
15%
Computer Software Company
14%
Manufacturing Company
8%
Comms Service Provider
7%
Financial Services Firm
12%
Manufacturing Company
11%
Computer Software Company
8%
Government
8%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business8
Large Enterprise3
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business4
Midsize Enterprise1
Large Enterprise10
 

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...
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for VMware Tanzu Observability by Wavefront?
The solution includes cost drivers that can be configured according to your environment. You can input server-wise, CPU-wise, storage, and memory costs per hour or day. Once cost drivers are provid...
What needs improvement with VMware Tanzu Observability by Wavefront?
The new version 8.18 has brought significant improvements. The main purpose of using this tool is having a single console to manage all entities. The cloud integration capabilities, including priva...
What is your primary use case for VMware Tanzu Observability by Wavefront?
I have been involved in several projects where I had to implement automation and monitoring alerting. I performed automation using VMware Aria Operations for Applications. There is an automation ta...
 

Also Known As

No data available
Tanzu Observability, Wavefront, Wavefront by VMware, VMware Tanzu Observability
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

COMCAST, ConnectWise, skyscanner, AirAsia, cookpad, cimpress, VTEX, zowdow
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 AWS X-Ray vs. VMware Aria Operations for Applications and other solutions. Updated: December 2025.
881,114 professionals have used our research since 2012.