Goliath Performance Monitor is an IT infrastructure monitoring platform from Goliath Technologies in Conshohocken, Pennsylvania.
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IBM Instana
Score 8.2 out of 10
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Instana, an IBM company since the December 2020 acquisition, provides APM services for SOA, microservices, containerized applications and Kubernetes, and cloud native applications, as well as discovery and monitoring for IT assets.
GPM is well suited to environments where there is a high volume of Citrix traffic coupled with a lot of different hardware infrastructure endpoints. Large scale multi-user operations where performance issue detection and resolution are key are the primary areas where GPM excels. Use of the GPM product is less appropriate when trying to monitor response times in a JVM application environment.
With enterprise IT assets in a multitude of ecosystems, cloud infrastructures and sometimes still left stuck in a legacy on prem architecture, IBM Instana makes it easy to get the right data to drive development and / or DevSecOps processes with tangible input from the target environment itself.
GPM does exceptionally well at gathering and presenting deep metrics from our Citrix servers and storing them in the GPM database server. This is a vital strength for any system monitoring tool and allows administrators to address almost any system related performance question.
The MonitorIT front end console does a great job of providing graphical views the summarize data from a multitude of locations. This is particularly important in that it allows administrators to focus in on the reasons for performance issues in a proactive manner before hearing from the end users, especially given the large volumes of detailed data captured by the system
The MonitorIT product is also very adept at gathering metrics across the processing continuum, providing metrics for system resources, service availability and end-to-end user activity. This is a great strength of the system and allows us to develop Tableau visualizations in addition to the extensive reports and dashboarding capabilities of the GPM product.
Can monitor application(s) and system(s) with very large throughput of transactions by the second ( it gets everything !!!)
Provide strong drill down for your applications and will tell you where the points of failure of an application's is ( servers , network , Databases , etc you name it )
Very easy to set up and have it up and running when using the SaaS solution. There's an on premise solution which works just as well but requires more effort and preparation from an infrastructure point of view for your teams to implement.
Continuously improve their features and their agents auto-update and keep up. All while not interfering with your applications.
Let's you create your own dashboards and visualizations that can be tailored for different kind of users with the data collected.
Create your own events and smart alerts so you can know on the spot if something is happening or is likely to happen that needs addressing on your applications / systems
From a purely personal level I would like to see MonitorIT be able to consume data from our clinical/operational databases instead of relying only on taking data in via the agent, log files and scripted sysoutput.
I think some improvements are possible in the area of custom monitoring of file systems, especially for the detection of missing file scenarios and file volume/rates. GPM only monitors traditional file system metrics like I/O, availability and space utilization, but custom scripting is possible within the design of the system.
Improvements in documenting the data model of the GPM database schema would also be very useful to advanced users of the system especially when additional external reporting tools are used to extend the GPM usefulness
It's very difficult to create custom dashboards, only a handful of scenarios can be visualized to dashboards.
Extracting information from Instana to further analysis into excel for example is something that can be improved. Using an API to get data is very limiting.
Open telemetry features which allow to send application data to Instana is not working as documented.
Instana has been able to fulfill our all requirement and provide out of box solution for multiple component like AWS RDS Monitoring and real time alerting setup on basis of that. it is also easy to integrate with other open-source alerting and monitoring tools which makes it easier to incorporate into our solutions
IBM Instana totally alters our monitoring approach since it increases the stability of the system and simplifies the process of problem solving. And since it helps to lower the degree of alert exhaustion that we experience, it is a total game changer for us.
We eventually settled on GPM because of its very obvious strength and depth with Citrix monitoring. Our entire clinical system is deployed over a Citrix infrastructure so it was essential to choose a system whose key focus was Citrix monitoring. GPM's functionality is unrivaled when it comes to Citrix monitoring which is immediately apparent when one witnesses the deep internals of the Citrix platform being collected and reported on, in close to real-time.
As a DevOps engineer, I've explored various Application Performance Monitoring (APM) tools, including New Relic for real-time insights, AppDynamics for code-level visibility, Dynatrace for AI-driven monitoring, Datadog for comprehensive observability, Splunk for log management, Stackify Retrace for error tracking, and Raygun for crash reporting. Each tool offers distinct features, and the choice depends on specific use cases, technology stacks, and organizational needs. Thorough evaluations, considering factors like ease of use, integration capabilities, and scalability, help in selecting the most suitable APM solution for effective application monitoring in a DevOps environment.
GPM has had a decent positive ROI particularly in terms of identifying systemic issues and prevention of system downtimes or resource depletion etc. The GPM product shines a spotlight on configuration and design flaws and as a result makes the systems more stable and responsive, saving us time and effort in diagnosing and reporting on system problems. unfortunately these are quite intangible but nevertheless invaluable business objectives for us, but we can say that downtimes and slowness events have dropped consistently year on year since we deployed GPM.
Our overall objectives with the GPM project was to deploy a system that could be deployed centrally in our Corp datacenter while monitoring devices and users out in the facilities across the East, Central and West geographic regions. The cost of the endpoint agents was quite modest and provided great functionality at this price point. In this respect our business objectives are well satisfied and the system has been a complete success.
An important aspect of our business objective was to have a monitoring system that didn't require constant maintenance and babysitting, and as such the GPM system has worked out fantastically in that we only use 1-2 staff resources to monitor all the systems mentioned earlier in this review.
