mPulse, from Akamai, is a real-time end-user digital experience monitoring solution (or RUM, for real user monitoring) that enables the user to capture user experience data, optimize website performance, and measure ROI.
N/A
SolarWinds Pingdom
Score 9.5 out of 10
N/A
SolarWinds Pingdom is a website uptime monitoring and alert tool, with additional reporting and Real User Monitoring capabilities. Pingdom is part of SolarWinds’s DevOps package, enabling full-stack monitoring as a service.
In general, if you manage a website, you must have a real user monitoring tool. mPulse is one of the leaders in the market, so if you use this product, you can count on the reliability of the product itself. Personally, I think that if you need to collect technical KPIs, mPulse is a good choice. If on top of technical metrics, you want to collect also business KPIs, potentially there are other products doing this better.
I believe the scenarios we used it for were quite well covered, from the executive perspective. The downtime alarms worked very well and were easy to setup, uptime monitoring tools were clear and easy to use, even for non-technical people (C-level) and the SLA management tools allowed us to spend less time, and have less friction, with our clients
The PagerDuty integration could be a lot better. When you use the PagerDuty integration, it doesn't send any information about which check failed! It just sends a message like "Timeout (> 30s)" -- this isn't very helpful when we have hundreds of checks. We've worked around this by using both the PagerDuty and Slack integrations and having them both post to the same Slack channel. But this means that when an engineer is paged from PagerDuty, they have to go to Slack (or Pingdom) to find the details about the page; it's not available on the page itself.
Recently added features have made Pingdom less intuitive for our requirements. While Pingdom has a broad offering and remains a good value, it is becoming more than we need. Our customer base is becoming more and more global and Pingdom still lacks Asia-Pacific monitoring, which we will need within a year.
Pingdom is easy to use, very intuitive and has a very short learning curve. From the onset, we've been able to jump in and leverage the tool to accomplish our goals for page speed performance and discover the insights we need to make improvements. Its a well-designed tool and makes for a good user experience.
Support responded the same day to my query, as I was setting the product up but couldn't find the setting I needed. This was successfully resolved in a short time frame, so I was pleased with how quickly we were able to get this resolved. I haven't needed to contact support since.
Generally speaking, both products allow you to not be blind on your website. Easily, you can see how your website is performing. At the moment, Blue Triangle is better than Akamai for the business part (there are more business metrics collected and many more available dashboards for consuming this kind of data). Moreover, the look and feel and the usability of the Blue Triangle portal is better than Akamai one.
PRTG Network Monitor was a far more complicated tool to use and set up albeit it does both Internal and External monitoring. The setup wasn't intuitive and there are too many configuration options to complete to form an alert
Amazon CloudWatch is specific to AWS resources and cannot be easily use outside of the AWS Ecosystem
Honestly, we have 4 other products that overlap this functionality whose organizations provide far superior support. At this point it is an unnecessary expense.
In my opinion, their lack of support responsiveness and commitment has impacted our IT agility.
