AlertSite vs. SolarWinds Pingdom

AlertSite is used in our organization to monitor our website and web applications in real-time to collect the super important metrics reflecting web page load time but from the user end (E2E) and that approaches helps us to understand what our website is experiencing in real-time.

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

• The Deja-Click Recorder is an excellent tool.
• Good UI that translates to large NOC screens well.
• Easy Alerting and Reporting.

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

• Tool is complicated for Alert creation
• AlertSite GUI need improvement. As compared to Datadog, it needs improvement in GUI
• While using AlertSite, many times we faced false alerting, they need to take a look at it to improve performance.

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

Reviewing other cost saving options

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.

Pretty good product only issue was cost

Incentivized

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.

I've been unable to contact support after several attempts.

Incentivized

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 moved all of our services to Site24x7 after several years with AlertSite. We looked at Uptrends and Pingdom to name a few whilst evaluating options. Pingdom lacks functionality and Uptrends we found to have quite a steep learning curve. AlertSites platform and in particular the Deja-Click recorder is a standout tool against the other platforms. Sadly the upscaling costs of multi-location transactions can quickly add up.

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

• A negative thing is Monitoring locations would have issues and cause false-positive alerts and due to that monitoring team's repetitive work has increased.
• A positive thing that I have noticed so far is the fact that the AlertSite customers support team is trying to build relationships and go the extra mile to make sure we can overcome any occurring issues and they are quick to respond and provide sufficient guidance for implementing efficiently, and fix products issues.

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.