Conductor Website Monitoring vs. SolarWinds Pingdom

The times when [ContentKing] is most useful is when working with migrations, or changing dynamic websites that you want to continuously monitor fix and rapidly resolve issues. Because you can share URLs to key issues and create segments out of them it is very easy to highlight issues. Because it isn't charged a per user level this does mean you can give access to clients and their development teams.

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

Incentivized

• Proactive monitoring of the website on a broad spectrum of on-page and technical issues.
• Insights for page-specific action points based on different data streams.
• Identifying technical and on-page website issues.

Incentivized

• The alerts are very responsive offering quite detailed timing information
• The UI for reports is very clear and set up of reports is very intuitive
• Customer service was good when there were problems - e.g. lapsing billing causing reporting to go down

Incentivized

• It is a single host only, which means that if your website spans mulitple subdomains it falls down
• It isn't as easy to control as desktop crawlers, the continuous nature means you can't just give it a set of URLs to monitor.
• Some of the issues it highlights aren't always issues, and so you need an expert user

• 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.

Incentivized

Because it does its job very well.

Incentivized

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.

Really like the walkthrough onboarding of the app to get your bearings when you sign up. You can quickly glance at the interface and understand where everything is located and what each feature is used for. The dashboard is incredibly useful to understand the health of your site and address any persistent issues on your site quickly.

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.

Incentivized

Interface is unnecessarily complicated and frequently responds slowly.

They respond very quickly and have deep technical knowledge so they will always find a solution to your problem. They are based in Europe but are planning to open offices soon in the USA that will help with time-difference issues. If you are based in Europe, you will get an answer in 15 minutes.

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.

Incentivized

Very easy to set up.

Incentivized

Content King provides a much more immersive dashboard. Additionally, the reports offered by Content king give us much more granular data allowing management to see the results country site by country site. The other tool would have required us to hire an external developer to create a custom dashboard to provide reporting. This to, us made the decision easy.

1. 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
2. Amazon CloudWatch is specific to AWS resources and cannot be easily use outside of the AWS Ecosystem

Incentivized

• My website health score went from 700 tot 986/1,00 in three years time.
• The authority of my website went from 1,9 to 2,6 in three years time.
• The visitors to my website climbed from 10/day to 60/day in three years time.

Incentivized

• 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.
• Its time to explore other alternatives.