GitLab vs. SolarWinds AppOptics

We started to use GitLab for hosting git source code repositories of our projects only but slowly we started to use it to store container images, packages, dependency proxy as well infrastucture registry and it is now well suited for Continuous Integration in our projects, It wasn't that good in Continuous Deployment before 12.0 version but after 12.0 it is amazingly good for Continuous Deployment as well since it keeps deployment information in a well organized manner which can be configure in ci yaml configuration.

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

• GitLab excels in managing code versions, allowing easy tracking of changes, branch management, and merging contributions.
• It helps maintain code stability and reliability, saving time and effort in the development or research workflow.
• Powerful code review features, enabling collaboration and feedback among team members.
• Robust project management features, including issue tracking, kanban boards, and milestones.

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

• CI variables management is sometimes hard to use, for example, with File type variables. The scope of each variable is also hard to guess.
• Access Token: there are too many types (Personal, Project, global..), and it is hard to identify the scope and where it comes from once created.
• Runners: auto-scaled runners are for the moment hard to put in place, and monitoring is not easy.

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

Gitlab is the best in its segment. They have a free version, they have open-source software, they provide a good service with their SaaS product, they are a fully-remote company since the beginning (which means they are fully distributed and have forward-thinking IMO). I would certainly recommend them to everyone.

Incentivized

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

Incentivized

I find it easy to use, I haven't had to do the integration work, so that's why it is a 9/10, cause I can't speak to how easy that part was or the initial set up, but day to day use is great!

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

At this point, I do not have much experience with Gitlab support as I have never had to engage them. They have documentation that is helpful, not quite as extensive as other documentation, but helpful nonetheless. They also seem to be relatively responsive on social media platforms (twitter) and really thrived when GitHub was acquired by Microsoft

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

GitLab is easily the preferred tool when it comes to versioning and source control. With other tools the UI often feels outdated and clunky leading to inefficiency and confusion. With some of the sleeker tools such as GitKraken, while the aesthetic is pleasing, the experience is plagued by a lack of support, lack of optional plugins, and a plethora of bugs that cause unnecessary legwork to resolve. GitLab is the best of both aesthetic and functionality

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

• We were able to streamline our project's codebase which made us very organised and laid out a proper plan for development.
• Our deployment and infra pipelines are well structured now making our process 10x faster.
• We are more focused into project building rather infra, as infra is totally on autopilot mode. Which has enabled us to grow our ROI by records.

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