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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Sumo Logic
Score 8.0 out of 10
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Sumo Logic is a log management offering from the San Francisco based company of the same name.
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.
SumoLogic is a fantastic log aggregator and analysis tool, a fine alternative to Splunk. Searching is powerful and mostly intuitive and results come fast. If you have application logs in clusters or Kubernetes pods that lose their logs every time they're restarted, Sumo is the solution for you
Sumo Logic allowed for our InfoSec team to ingest logs from our CDN directly, in real-time, instead of massive compressed archives that were sent every two-hours (the only alternative at the time). Sumo Logic had an app for these logs, that allowed us to easily get an immediate payoff from the data, with canned dashboard and saved searches.
Sumo Logic has a fairly extensive REST API when it comes to log sources, source configurations, dashboard data, searches, etc. Their wiki for the API is usually kept up to date.
Sumo Logic, during the period of time I had used their product, had added the ability to configure agents via configuration files. This allowed customers to configure their endpoints, and modify the endpoints, with configuration management tools like Chef / Puppet / Salt. Beforehand, the only option was to always make changes either via the web portal or REST API.
The solutions engineers were extremely helpful, and easily reachable when issues would occur.
Users at our company found it easy to get started, working on new dashboards, scheduled searches, and alerting. The alerting worked well with our third-party paging tool.
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.
Sumo Logic is very powerful but definitely requires some configuration work to get the most out of it. You can get a certification related to this, but it is definitely not something you can just throw together.
I would give this rating because I attended a free Sumo Logic training at a WeWork in Chicago. I found the training very useful, and I learned a lot of features that I was not aware of before I went to the training. I like the idea that SumoLogic provides free training seminars. I am certified in level1, and I plan on certifying to level2.
I was satisfied with the implementation, as at the time, it was the best way to implement the product with the available feature sets in Sumo Logic. User creation and management became more of an issue during continued use, instead of it being an issue related to deploying the product in our environment.
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.
Sumo Logic works very well out of the gate. For a small business it has given us what we need. I worked at a larger company previously, and we produced so many logs we had to create a custom logging service to handle them all. Cost and availability are big issues when deciding between the different services, whether self maintained and hosted, or provided by another company.
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.
