Apica WebPerformance is a synthetic monitoring platform. It features pre-release and scalability testing, and can integrate with other reporting and analysis programs.
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GitLab
Score 8.7 out of 10
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GitLab DevSecOps platform enables software innovation by aiming to empower development, security, and operations teams to build better software, faster. With GitLab, teams can create, deliver, and manage code quickly and continuously instead of managing disparate tools and scripts. GitLab helps teams across the complete DevSecOps lifecycle, from developing, securing, and deploying software. Differentiators, as described by Gitlab:
Simplicity: With GitLab, DevSecOps can…
As I use this for only my area, it is very well suited to what I need it to do. Apica Synthetic monitors two different web applications in a time interval that is easily customizable for uptime and latency. These are critical indicators for a cloud-based point-of-sale system. We need solid uptime and limited latency across the enterprise.
GitLab is good if you work a lot with code and do complex repository actions. It gives you a very good overview of what were the states of your branches and the files in them at different stages in time. It's also way easier and more efficient to write pipelines for CI\CD. It's easier to read and it's easier to write them. It takes fewer clicks to achieve the same things with GitLab than it does for competitor products.
It's very clunky. Infrastructure is large and very difficult to upgrade.
SaaS and On-premise versions are different. There is an LDAP integration but users can only be assigned to one group (i.e. department). If you are in 2 departments, you need 2 separate logins.
Update: they now offer federated logins
It filled a gap in monitoring for us, but we're looking to move on.
We trust the results that Apica Synthetic has achieved. Real-time alerting is critical to our clients and with limited resources, we can't handle many false positives; Apica Synthetic is the only solution that provides both of those features.
Gitlab is the best in its segment. They have a free version, they have open-source software, they provide a good service with their SaaS product, they are a fully-remote company since the beginning (which means they are fully distributed and have forward-thinking IMO). I would certainly recommend them to everyone.
I find it easy to use, I haven't had to do the integration work, so that's why it is a 9/10, cause I can't speak to how easy that part was or the initial set up, but day to day use is great!
At this point, I do not have much experience with Gitlab support as I have never had to engage them. They have documentation that is helpful, not quite as extensive as other documentation, but helpful nonetheless. They also seem to be relatively responsive on social media platforms (twitter) and really thrived when GitHub was acquired by Microsoft
We were using different monitoring tools for different requirements (e.g.,Nagios and Checkmk for infrastructure issues) and we were in need of a tool for service and API monitoring for which we were using ThousandEye. But alerts were 60-70% valid irrespective of conditions like network issues. But Apica Synthetic's alert mechanism is a perfect fit for our department. It helped us to reduce unnecessary/false alerts and a number of wrong tickets.
Gitlab seems more cutting-edge than GitHub; however, its AI tools are not yet as mature as those of CoPilot. It feels like the next-generation product, so as we selected a tool for our startup, we decided to invest in the disruptor in the space. While there are fewer out-of-the-box templates for Gitlab, we have never discovered a lack of feature parity.
My department is not charged for Apica Synthetic so no ROI, but from a customer service perspective, we can react to an outage and repair it faster than our customers can report the outage.
Our vendor's own monitoring tools are not as accurate nor as timely as ours. They rely on us telling them, from Apica Synthetic, that they have an issue.
