SolarWinds Pingdom vs. SpeedCurve

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

Website performance monitoring:

• Setting performance targets and alerts
• Investigating performance degradation (including data stored before the issue was detected)
• Improving the team's performance awareness and knowledge

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

• Store performance checks
• User interface is great to help analyse the data
• Simple yet effective interface
• Offer some insights and other tools to help make sense of the data

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

• The interface has some confusing points, for instance aggregation setting (percentiles, median) is misleading, and doesn't do anything in some cases
• Some additional statistical tools would super charge the charts and alerts: moving average, some more useful trend lines
• The performance charts are amazing to compare many values (from different pages, multiple metrics) and find correlations. But the charts are barely usable when many metrics are shown (one cannot tell a line from the other). A simple UI improvement there could supercharge this use case

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

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

SpeedCurve actually uses many of those standard tests, and stores the information from test runs indefinitely. This is the game changer.

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.

• Speedcurve facilitates and empowers performance improvements that lead the higher conversion rates, user engagement and ultimately GMV
• Through it's interface and automation, Speed curve saves hundreds of hours in investigations around performance issues
• By facilitating performance analysis and knowledge sharing, SpeedCurve allows our teams to be more performance-aware, preventing performance issues from even happening

Incentivized