blackfire.io vs. SolarWinds AppOptics

Blackfire.io is super helpful in allowing proactive testing of applications before releasing on the production environment. Blackfire.io provides actionable insights to improve code proactively by integration with the development software. Also tracks the live production environment and is able to highlight any loading issues or unusual bounce rates. Blackfire.io also monitors HTTP requests and SQL queries which again help improve efficiency for developers and reduce development time.

Incentivized

AppOptics is good for small to medium-sized organizations with less than 150 servers or less than 40 services to monitor. It performs well for this use case where people need to get an overview of application performance, and 95%ile data is okay. Somewhere every data point and every record is critical; it should be avoided.

Incentivized

• Provide details on processes eating up valuable server resources
• Alert against bottlenecks and find bottlenecks
• Performs load tests in code before moving to production environments

Incentivized

• Request tracing with code profiling.
• Automated alerting on latency and response codes for each API.
• Low resource overhead while collecting data from our application servers.
• Highly performant dashboard that enables us to make progress rapidly.
• Very resilient. We have not seen a downtime in their service in the entire year that we have used them.
• Identify database and cache requests that are taking longer than expected

Incentivized

• They count same API endpoint AND same method (e.g. POST, OPTIONS, GET etc) as different profiles
• Customer service needs a lot of improvement
• The documentation can be a bit more detailed to remove any scope of doubts

Incentivized

• The only thing that I would add is the possibility to display every single query our servers receive to eventually analyze them and query through them. We could also generate nice visualizations from that. Right now I believe we can only see averages.

Incentivized

We have been using AppOptics for over 3.5 years and expect to continue to renew it for the foreseeable future

Incentivized

As far a usability is concerned for AppOptics, it is just as matter of few minutes away even if you start from scratch, as all you need to do is register on the site and you will get the URL and password. And after this all you have to do is follow the instruction, as per the configuration wizard (tool tip) within the console for various technology such as SQL, IIS, .NET

Incentivized

Solarwinds AppOptics is rated as 9 out of 10 and the reason is there are still few areas where AppOptics needs to improve such as Service Now Integration, GCP Cloud Support, Better Dashboard visualization for application transactions flow. Other than these feature everything is there in AppOptics and that's a reason given 9 points out of 10.

Incentivized

blackfire.io definitely provides an edge over competing products such as Datadog due to the level of monitoring and analysis it provides. Datadog is a great tool however when evaluating and catching inefficiencies in lower non production environments, blackfire.io provides a level of reporting that were did not find any competing products.

Incentivized

What we found positive in AppOptics from others is:

• Easy to install and manage.
• Various stack support.
• Point to point deep-dive metrics and correlation.
• Metrics like DB connection, query analysis, latency in API calls, and other connections, response codes for various APIs, etc are the key ones in our case, which AppOptics provides efficiently.
• Alerts can be sent on different channels.

Incentivized

• Reduce in bugs by 50%, more happy customers
• 2x decrease in load time for the website
• 100% performance validation before production release

Incentivized

• Application monitoring troubleshooting became more accurate. Accurate results save more man-hours of manual troubleshooting.
• As Realtime monitoring and alerts provide more flexibility, downtime can be minimized and Accurate Root causes can be provided.
• Dashboards can be useful for making future strategy based on trends.
• Installation and integration is easy.

Incentivized