Micro Focus Diagnostics (discontinued) vs. SolarWinds Pingdom

I would say on 90% of our agent installs everything works without any modification. If the application however makes a large use of memory based cache and analysis that classes will need to be excluded from instrumentation or it will impact performance.

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

• Agent level customization - For highly performant applications we can easily exclude instrumentation, yet still receive the benefit of historical tracking on common data points like CPU, Heap and GC cycles.
• Support - In the 5+ years working with the product any HP solution engagements have been quick to provide a needed configuration solution.
• Agent Diversity - Have used the product across 6+ differing middleware technologies comprising dozens of version (both middleware and java) combinations.
• Agent installation - With its ability to support a silent type install, automating was a simple task.

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

• The product does offer a lot of functionality - This can lead to a cluttered user interface and does take some time to become comfortable and proficient in its use.
• Data Volume - We have had some issues in balancing the desire to keep all data and consuming infrastructure storage.

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

While it has been several years since using BMC Patrol I like that HP doesn't require me to have a custom module added for every different type of product I would like to instrument.

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

• Performance Tuning - Product is fully integrated to provide baseline and drift across releases.

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.