Apica is an observability cost optimization provider helping IT teams gain complete control over their telemetry data economics. Apica Ascent processes all observability data types including metrics, logs, traces, and events while optimizing observability costs.
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PagerDuty
Score 8.6 out of 10
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PagerDuty, Inc. (NYSE:PD) provides digital operations management. Serving organizations of all sizes, PagerDuty aims to help them deliver a perfect digital experience to their customers, every time.
I have used Microfocus loadrunner (formerly HP Vugen/BSM), Dynatrace Synthetic, and Gomez. Apica Synthetic has a good price point for its functionality. Dynatrace and Microfocus are expensive. Dynatrace and Gomez are easier to use than Apica Synthetic.
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.
PagerDuty is well-suited for teams or companies that need immediate response, such as production outages, server downtime, failed deployments, API failures, or critical infrastructure alerts. For example, if any company is doing work that requires immediate attention to any problem that arises due to a delay, it means the company loses money; PagerDuty would be the best fit for that company.
PagerDuty feels like something you can absolutely rely on... because in the rarest case where an alert is not acknowledged by the relevant agent, the alert automatically is escalated to our TL, which saves any possible errors or misses.
In terms of integration, I would rate it a 9.4 as it's absolutely seamless with Microsoft Teams or emails, ultimately resulting in a reduction of errors in work, which I greatly appreciate about PagerDuty.
In some cases, when an account requires input from multiple agents, PagerDuty makes sure to notify each of the relevant ones.
Other than this, sometimes when we have new joinings, it becomes easy for us to train them because every alert or response is recorded or logged. Because of this feature, we are able to check our past actions as well, so that a good feature about PagerDuty.
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.
The UI is more complex than I would like. Part of the challenge is that most users use PagerDuty infrequently; I don't remember how I changed a policy last time. Another part of the challenge is that some users expect alerting to be a trivial feature, and are reluctant to invest any time in reading the documentation.
PagerDuty is reliable and easy to set up. It gives an effective way to notify the team about critical incidents which results in a faster turnaround time on issues. users can customize their alerts rules based on their preferences. Overall it's effective and easy to use which adds great business value.
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.
I have not use the 2 technologies for as long as I have used PagerDuty but in my opinion PagerDuty makes things a lot easier. The other tools got the job done and got alerts out but PagerDuty just seemed to make the setup for on-call alert schedules and integrations easier than the others. This isn't to say the others are difficult, just that PagerDuty was slightly better. I also have noticed that more tools have options to integrate to PagerDuty over the other tools.
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.