ControlUp vs. RES ONE by RES Software (discontinued) vs. SolarWinds Pingdom

An environment where visibility of general performance metrics isn't currently done or is done with a system that is difficult to use (which was our case). An environment where resource allocation decisions need to be made (e.g. how much RAM and CPU to allocate to VM pools). An environment where a troubleshooting tool is needed (e.g. to answer the question, "Why is this person experiencing poor performance right now?")

It is very well suited for environments where users move/roam between systems such as VDI, hosted shared servers, or where immutable systems are in place (mandatory profiles or desired state systems).

Incentivized

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

• The triggers are very flexible and can be configured to alert on things from events in sessions to hardware failures. Script actions are what they sound like. They are scripts that can be created and run on demand or tied to a trigger. One example is that if a hard drive is low on space we have a script to clean up certain things on the drive.
• Script actions are supported by the ControlUp community. Community members can submit scripts that are reviewed by ControlUp and approved. This means more script are added over time.
• ControlUp support and sales support has been great. Our sales engineer is always willing to jump on and help us with configuration issues and standard support is quick to respond and are good at resolving issues.

Incentivized

• Lock down OS settings, network, and files.
• Capture profile settings and make them easily accesible and fast to load.
• Create and deploy registry changes for end users.
• Capture user customizations.
• Content Filtering (Web).

• 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 seems that there is a gradual transition occurring from one interface (a local program) to another (Web). This creates confusion at times.
• ScoutBees module has a problem with our version of Horizon, so we can't do a login test
• The local program for ControlUp uses a lot of resources
• The training session focus on very large environments, which we aren't. Might be good to offer SMB sessions separately.

• It would be nice if the instant report function had the possibility to also show added users/groups

Incentivized

• 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

The tool is integral to how business is done by end users, thus it's imperative to keep the solution around. Not to mention the business leverages the experience to assist clients with building out the solution for their needs.

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.

Easy to deploy and transparent for the end user.

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.

Ivanti's support department is great. They resolved incidents great and quickly.

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

The implementation is typcially pretty simple on a flat active directly and non-DMZ based environment. Once things become more complex it is imperative to move slowly and test frequently with UAT groups and engineers.

Incentivized

I feel all these products are good and have their strengths but for me it came down to two categories. How easy is it to find issues and cost. It seemed to me that the easiest to use is ControlUp and eG. Price broke down to ControlUp and SysTrack being lower than Goliath and eG.

Incentivized

Totally different approach. More easy and more flexxible.

Incentivized

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

• its licensing cost is a bit on high

Incentivized

• It increases managability which saves a lot of time, which saves money
• It increases troubleshooting possibilities which helps solve problems faster

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.