Heap vs. Mixpanel vs. SolarWinds Virtualization Manager (VMAN)

Scenarios when Heap was well suited: It is when a user claims that he encountered a bug without giving us the details of the error message. Scenarios where it is less appropriate: Its when we try to capture user interaction in our mobile app

Incentivized

As a worker in the sales area, I see closely how complex it can be to evaluate the commercial funnel and Mixpanel has been an indispensable guide to prioritize above all what customers expect to receive from our company, and thus be able to determine the main service we offer. Without a doubt, Mixpanel has special functions to be the one that guides the route and marks the objectives much more clearly.

Incentivized

On the whole, Solarwinds Virtualization Manager (VMAN) is an excellent product which gives us a single point to monitor our virtual environment. After our initial trial I was sold on the product and what it had to offer. Immediately after implementing VMAN, we were able to spot virtual machines with old snapshots which were never deleted and no longer needed, we could spot virtual machines which either had over allocated resources or under allocated resources meaning we could make changes and fine tune them for best performance. We could also monitor virtual machine latency, IOPS, and show us where our bottlenecks were.

Incentivized

• Realtime interactions which are captured automatically is a unique feature which no other product offers.
• Low code implementation is a big plus for marketing teams, as there is less dependency on engineering
• Detailed customer behaviours can be studied with captured replay sessions
• Due to all the above points - it helped to improve customer experience

Incentivized

• Mixpanel is a daily use application for everyone in my organization; it helps us have a better flow of information and interaction between work teams.
• The user interface of this platform is simple and has a wide variety of functions and resources to help us work in the most organized way, have better team coordination, and keep efficiency high.
• I love that it is so easy to program our calendar to our liking, so we can prioritize our activities and know what is pending, and the best thing is that I can update the calendar if necessary.
• The chat function is great to improve the interaction between colleagues and share work schedules and any information with third parties.

Incentivized

• I created custom dashboards, to view the different elements of the virtual environment. For example, you can view the number of online VMs and those off, or disconnected. You can also choose to see the status of every virtual cluster, the storage disk usage on every VM, the RAM usage, CPU usage.
• I used this application to see the growth of virtual memory in each cluster and accordingly do forecasting for future growth. A capacity planner included in this application would help in doing accurate estimations and setting a future upgrade budget.
• Another powerful tool was the customized reports, where i could generate reports on any element of the VM or cluster. Reports can be exported to Excel or PDF and are very useful for sharing information with colleagues and management.
• Alerts can be customized. For example, you can set a rule to get an email alert if any virtual server RAM usage exceeds 85% and send a text message if RAM usage exceeds 90% for more than 10 minutes.

Incentivized

• I think Heap can improve its onboarding; I would love to see some info that is helpful for someone who isn't in Heap every single day.
• Sharing dashboards can be tricky, it feels like a huge learning curve that I already have forgotten how to do.

Incentivized

• Mixpanel requires an explicit setting of events from your app. This means you need to be very thoughtful in the design of your events because missing one means you aren't collecting any data from it. Inserting it into the process later on then brings challenges in tracking when certain events came online.
• A tool like Mixpanel comes packed with features that sometimes are harder to discover. It's very easy to get sucked into one part of its toolset and not be aware of other tools which may be very useful.

Incentivized

• We did have issues during the setup, with successfully connecting to some of our hosts and vCenters and we found support were just sending us back to articles we had already read, it was also taking long periods before getting a response. The issue is still ongoing, in fact.

Incentivized

It's a great platform. I'm glad that one of our product managers introduced it because it has allowed us to create all kinds of new functionality. We're not only able to create a better product experience from our communications because of Heap, but we're also able to generate all kinds of helpful analysis.

Incentivized

It's not an all encompassing solution like Google Analytics tries to be, but MixPanel offers much easier to use and understandable data insights. That's valuable when juggling many responsibilities as startup life demands, so a renewal would be easily justified.

Currently, there is no other tool that gives us what we need to monitor a geographically disperse environment with multiple non-related instances of VM clusters. In addition, the level of reporting, historical data trending, and alerting that VMAN provides is essential for our business process. Lastly, the effort to customize and set up any monitoring system is not trivial. This makes switching to any other product very difficult without being able to clearly demonstrate a ROI.

Incentivized

On a scale from 1-10, I find Heap to be incredibly user-friendly and easy to use. I enjoyed the training videos available and was quickly able to pick up how to create events and reports to track user interactions on our product. I would recommend Heap for its usability first and foremost.

Incentivized

Relativity easy to use. Once you get the hang of it, very easy to create dashboards for different use cases. I split my dashboards between customers or use cases

Incentivized

SolarWinds VMAN is easy to use for everyone. When I say everyone which literally means anyone e.g. Virtualization Environment SME, Consultant, Support Team, Management Officers etc. Anyone who have worked on IT technologies could easily deploy SolarWinds by reading videos, Thwack posts or Virtual Classrooms (Custom Success Centers) - this makes this application easy to operation and for maintenance support is always there.

Incentivized

I've never run into any issues with Heap's availability, Heap is always there when I need it. I haven't run into any issues like application errors or unplanned outages during my 2+ years of using Heap. Each and every time I log in to Heap I have a completely functional experience

Incentivized

We have yet to enconter any issues in terms of availability. We have a highly available SQL cluster running Orion.

Incentivized

Heap doesn't affect page load times considerably nor has a large impact [on] our overall score, as far as page loading times inside of the tool its pretty reliable to retrieve data as much as "instant" that it can be the delay seems to be on data getting tracked into the servers to be read but it's not significant.

Incentivized

We find page load times to be quite slow at times. Flipping between tabs can also be very slow.

Incentivized

Heap support has allowed us to troubleshoot and test a lot of different items. Their support team is always helpful and friendly, even when we come to them with the most complicated questions. I think this greatly improves the value proposition of the product because their support team is knowledgable and friendly.

Incentivized

We have only ever had to use their support once, when we were setting up the account, but their responses were prompt and the solutions were well documented. The people who solved our issues were helpful, even to non-tech people.

Incentivized

SolarWinds gives good support. I have never had a time when i was working through a support case where I did not get the support I needed for the required issues to be resolved. I have always had resolutions from SolarWinds support. They are top notch. Issues once had are no more.

Incentivized

Mixpanel has a great resource about their product, with videos on how to use it and real world examples from other companies on how they integrate Mixpanel into their business processes.

The implementation was smooth and easy. The Heap team helped us with implementation and it went great! Within a few weeks, we were fully up and running and utilizing the platform to its full capability. This is an additional thing that has made this platform so great and we couldn't recommend it enough.

Incentivized

Again, somewhat annoying to be charged based on data points when many other analytics providers have one flat fee. Implementation was good, but I might have tracked a few more detailed points if I had the option.

Its really the best product on the market for someone looking to have total control over their VM environment. anyone interested should download a demo and try it, I know you will buy it after you do. It changing the way you have to manage on a daily basis

Incentivized

Heap offers a ton of functionality on a single platform.It also has an smart data science layer to offers suggestions for next steps in the analysis, allowing us to explore alternative paths we may not think to take. The low-code option for updating data is appealing, and there is a lot of automation with minimal engineering effort.

Incentivized

• There was not really any other competitors for this specific use case that had a chance
• We used Google Analytics for some things but obviously, GA is anonymous data so not useful for product teams with users
• Other solutions out there seemed to be too expensive and this was the most recommended
• Heap seemed to be the best OTHER option but didn't take the time to evaluate

Incentivized

The operation began using Nagios XI, after a year of use, and based on the results obtained, we realized that what our client wanted was not fully met. Our client asked us to use WhatsUp, however, SolarWinds covered in a more efficient way what was required by our client (IT) and even more.

Incentivized

The most challenging part of using Heap in a growing organization is the naming and structure in which reports and dashboards are organized. I work within the marketing department and our Heap leader internally works within the IT/Product department, which makes it challenging because we often don't speak the same language, so the learning curve has been steep without any specific use-case examples to leverage online.

Incentivized

Purchasing the correct license allows the platform to scale with your environment.

Incentivized

• It has helped us make decisions on what products to scope for our MVP based on the usage data.
• It's allowed us to measure success with our beta product.
• It's helped us view our conversion rates in an easy and usable manner.

Incentivized

• We've been able to increase the funnel conversions of one of our new product funnels from a 1% conversion rate to a 5% conversion rate.
• We've been able to increase the CTR on another of our main product pages from ~3% to ~10% (so far)
• We've been able to segment out how users from different traffic sources behave, allowing us to eliminate thousands of dollars of wasteful spending on advertising campaigns that weren't working.

Incentivized

• VMAN has been used for reports provided to executive-level meetings. These reports showed our growth patterns, allowing for easier decisions on purchasing additional hardware.
• VMAN has provided a positive impact on allowing for near real-time monitoring of resources, able to pinpoint when services are using more memory than expected, not running at all, or other options as defined.
• VMAN was purchased to help monitor our VMware platform, the added abilities for AWS allowed us to migrate clients from on-prem to cloud-based with the same views.

Incentivized