ControlUp, from the company of the same name headquartered in San Francisco, offers an end user experience monitoring focuses on being able to easily find the root cause of IT issues, remediate directly from its UI vs. having to rely on several tools, and strategically analyze historical resources, usage, and issues data.
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Riverbed Aternity
Score 5.0 out of 10
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Riverbed Aternity delivers AI-enabled insights based on real end user experience data and high-fidelity telemetry across endpoints, application, infrastructure and network.
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SolarWinds Pingdom
Score 9.5 out of 10
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SolarWinds Pingdom is a website uptime monitoring and alert tool, with additional reporting and Real User Monitoring capabilities. Pingdom is part of SolarWinds’s DevOps package, enabling full-stack monitoring as a service.
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?")
We are a services organization and we use Riverbed SteelCentral AppInternals with our customers. It has allowed us to expand the footprint in the application management business with virtually all of our major accounts. We were able to expand and go into other applications that we weren't in or offering previously. Now, we have a new value proposition for our customer enhanced visibility, enhanced stability, and we can reduce our cost to them because our cost structure is reduced by using Riverbed SteelCentral AppInternals.
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
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.
The tool demands High CPU resources to perform monitoring which reduces the overall performance and the user experience is sluggish
Also a good amount of training is required to set up the different use cases and monitoring parameters which in return demands a dedicated resource to work on the tool
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.
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.
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.
The support I give the highest rating because it is really amazing. Every time we triggered the tool support, we were very well served very quickly and efficiently. The problems were solved quickly and without stress. The staff helped us within minutes and had a lot of patience with us
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.
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.
There is a wide variety of APM solutions out there for companies to pick from. Riverbed AppInternals sits near the top of the stack certainly. We already deploy steelhead units across the estate with client licenses, that aided us in our decision to select AppInternals. We found the costs of AppDynamics and New Relic ( which we had trials for) both costly against AppInternals.
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
Amazon CloudWatch is specific to AWS resources and cannot be easily use outside of the AWS Ecosystem
This product has really wonderful features and one of the most valuable ones is the transaction searches into TTW.
This will show you the operations that occurred under conditions that the user specifies, giving you the opportunity to drill down on the things that are more important and affecting system performance.
Besides that, the capability of analyzing each individual transaction captured to a very low-level detail (method call/line of code). This ability empowers the testing teams to provide more visibility to developers on how they can improve.
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.
