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BMC AMI DevX vs Sentry comparison

 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive SummaryUpdated on Sep 11, 2025

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

BMC AMI DevX
Ranking in Debugging
8th
Average Rating
8.0
Reviews Sentiment
7.2
Number of Reviews
19
Ranking in other categories
Software Configuration Management (1st), Database Development and Management (20th), Mainframe Application Development (1st), Test Data Management (7th), Mainframe Testing Tools (1st), Data Masking (8th)
Sentry
Ranking in Debugging
1st
Average Rating
8.4
Reviews Sentiment
6.8
Number of Reviews
13
Ranking in other categories
Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability (11th)
 

Mindshare comparison

As of September 2025, in the Debugging category, the mindshare of BMC AMI DevX is 0.2%. The mindshare of Sentry is 19.3%, down from 30.6% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Debugging Market Share Distribution
ProductMarket Share (%)
Sentry19.3%
BMC AMI DevX0.2%
Other80.5%
Debugging
 

Featured Reviews

Brian Westerman - PeerSpot reviewer
Helps to make mainframe data management process easier and saves manhours
We plan to replace BMC Compuware File-AID due to its price. Two years back, we paid 11,000 dollars. However, the current price is 27,900 dollars. The price has increased to at least eight times its initial cost. We would need to pay around 60,000 dollars to have all three products together. We also encountered issues during version updates.
Abdullah Baig - PeerSpot reviewer
An easy-to-use solution that has a good dashboard, performs well, and provides flexible pricing
Sentry was easy to learn compared to New Relic and Azure Monitor. I saw some valuable input. It took us the least amount of time to see how Sentry is valuable. It took just a few minutes. Session Replay provides a replay of the recorded errors. It is a good feature. Azure Monitor does not have this feature. The error reporting is straightforward. We can see everything that we need to see. The dashboard seems pretty fine. The product performs well. We can see the user's IP addresses.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"The most valuable feature of Topaz is Xpediter. It's more flexible than Xpediter through MVS."
"The smart editor helps because it will code-complete for me. I can see code working a lot faster and I'm able to get things coded in less time."
"Test data management capabilities are good."
"I like the ability to flow through the source and see what happens to the data as the statements are executed. If there is a fault, it will track the event, and we can then look back to see why it may have caused the fault. You can also reverse engineer your test. You can set it so that you can go backward as well as forward in your test. This is something that I haven't done here at my company. Compuware Xpediter is one of the best debugging tools for mainframe software development. We have currently licensed only the COBOL language for Xpediter, but I know they have other languages, including Assembler, PL/I."
"I have worked with DB2's great features in the last five years. The IDAA feature transformed the vision of warehousing, business analytics, and big data at my bank. Besides the mainframe, I saw that this solution was evolutionary. It gives real-time information."
"I like the ability that it has to format copy books in a presentable manner. So, you will be able to see the starting offset in length of each field within the layout."
"We had parallel development before, but the way ISPW implements it is better. It has more control and oversight of the process, whereas before, it was like the Wild West. Everybody could have their own package with their own version of the component in it... ISPW is constantly aware of it. It notifies when someone else is using or has a different version of that component."
"The product has made our mainframe data management process easier. It has helped us save manhours. The tool's most valuable feature is the ability to edit tape files. Its ability to clone files is beneficial in application development."
"The most valuable feature we have found with Sentry is the security that it provides."
"It's a great visibility tool for the developer team."
"Sentry's performance monitoring has helped us understand where the bottlenecks are in our application and allowed us to optimize critical transactions for a faster user experience."
"The product performs well."
"I would rate the stability of Sentry as eight out of ten."
"Sentry's performance monitoring has helped us understand where the bottlenecks are in our application and allowed us to optimize critical transactions for a faster user experience."
"Its initial setup process is relatively straightforward."
"The stability is very good for Sentry and in general works well."
 

Cons

"When you're setting up the parameters for how ISPW will work in your shop, there are a lot of questions that have to be answered... BMC Compuware should have more in-depth explanations about what the choices in each question mean. If you pick A, what does that mean has to happen? What does that impact? If you pick B, what does that mean? What does that impact?"
"It's a very complicated tool."
"It's not as intuitive as it should be. In terms of navigation, there is a large training curve for using it. For a millennial it might be better, if they're used to Eclipse. But coming from a non-Eclipse environment and using Eclipse, though I have experience with Eclipse, it might be cumbersome."
"I'm always looking for improvement in things like the documentation, to make things a little bit easier and simpler to understand, a place where people can go to troubleshoot issues."
"It would be good if the vendors would work together or at least have some collaboration between them, so they would know what would work and what wouldn't work. Right now, the way things are working, they're relying on the customer to make everything work."
"DB2 is a hard tool to grasp. It's hard for users to learn how to use it. It's not easy to see how it works."
"It would be nice to have an audit trail to see what mainframe developers are using what."
"Their technical support could be better. There were times where, when we reported bugs, they would fix one bug but add another one. That's probably because of their support model. A lot of organizations are developing software using Agile rather than the Waterfall method, so things are happening all over the place. You get things quicker, but sometimes one fix will break another one or add other bugs."
"To deal with its shortcomings, Sentry needs to continuously improve in areas like the user interface and documentation, apart from its other features."
"I would like to see a role registration feature added."
"I would like to have alert policies and alert conditions enhanced in the next release."
"It would be nice if the product provided a map showing the users’ geographic location."
"The price could be lowered."
"One area where I think Sentry can improve is in the granularity of its alerting system, as it sometimes feels too sensitive or not customizable enough."
"The log centralization and analysis could be improved in Sentry."
"Its debugging feature needs to be faster."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"The price point is great."
"It has saved our developers time and effort when working on documentation, which is now more readable and fluent."
"The only thing I would mention related to the licensing and/or the pricing, is that they have some visualization features in there that are licensed by concurrent users. We're starting to trip up on that. We're looking to probably increase the number of concurrent licenses that we have. But those types of licensing strategies, where they license by concurrent users or the number of seats is confusing for some people. They don't understand why it works sometimes and doesn't work other times."
"In general, Compuware tools are very competitive."
"I like the seat-based licensing much more than MSU-based licensing, and that the cost has been competitive."
"In terms of pricing, there isn't an extra charge for the parts of it we use. It comes with the licenses we purchased for other products, so no complaints there. The licensing is built in with the other products that you purchase from Compuware."
"We are currently paying through Cloudera for the Sentry service."
"Currently, we are in the production phase of our project and we are on free plans to use Sentry. Once we go live we will have to be on a subscription-based plan."
"I am currently using a self-hosted open version."
"We can adjust the price a little bit based on our needs."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Financial Services Firm
37%
Insurance Company
12%
Computer Software Company
7%
Manufacturing Company
7%
Computer Software Company
17%
Comms Service Provider
11%
Financial Services Firm
10%
Manufacturing Company
7%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business6
Large Enterprise16
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business7
Midsize Enterprise3
Large Enterprise3
 

Questions from the Community

What do you like most about Compuware File-AID?
The product has made our mainframe data management process easier. It has helped us save manhours. The tool's most valuable feature is the ability to edit tape files. Its ability to clone files is ...
What needs improvement with Compuware File-AID?
We plan to replace BMC Compuware File-AID due to its price. Two years back, we paid 11,000 dollars. However, the current price is 27,900 dollars. The price has increased to at least eight times its...
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Sentry?
Sentry is very affordable. We spend less than $200 to $300 a month. Compared to New Relic, it provides the necessary features at a cheaper cost, especially since we moved infrastructure monitoring ...
What needs improvement with Sentry?
Right now, Sentry meets our needs and we have not encountered any bottlenecks. However, additional personalization and easier setup for capturing all the different application logs could be an area...
 

Comparisons

 

Also Known As

File-AID, Data for Db2, Code Debug, Data Studio, Workbench for Eclipse, Code Pipeline
No data available
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

Helvetia, The IMT Group, Hapag-Lloyd, Royal Bank of Canada, Chunghwa Telecom
Dropbox, Airbnb, Stripe, Uber
Find out what your peers are saying about Sentry, SmartBear, MathWorks and others in Debugging. Updated: August 2025.
867,497 professionals have used our research since 2012.