OpenText Business Process Monitor vs. SolarWinds Pingdom

It is really good to have Business Process Monitor for being proactive with monitoring critical business services. And it is even more recommended along with APM. However, you will still need some training in order to configure them as they are sophisticated tools.

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

• Being proactive in monitoring critical business services.
• Uses pre-saved scripts using Vugen.
• Almost all protocols are supported by it.

Incentivized

• 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 depends heavily on Vugen so it would be great to give more courses on writing scripts in the Business Process Monitor trainings.
• When issues arise, we don't have insights into if the issue is from the script itself or if it is a real issue. Here you lose trust in determining which is right until you interfere personally. As an example, one day I got an alert from a business server and the issue was that the script didn't finish successfully and thus it kept the session opened. So the next schedule of the script will fail, not because there is a real issue on the business service, but because you need to go yourself open the application, close all pages, then log out so that the script will continue to monitor.

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

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.

Incentivized

Interface is unnecessarily complicated and frequently responds slowly.

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

We didn't try anything else as we are satisfied with Business Process Monitor.

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

• Proactive.
• Monitors critical services by simulating every step you could use and get alerts for performance issues and availability issues.
• Has almost all the needed protocols to write a script.

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.