Item: Apica Synthetic
Rating: 5
Author: Verified User

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

We had a gap in our monitoring along the lines of synthetic-user monitoring. We needed consistent availability monitoring of our web applications.

Pros and Cons

It is an easy-to-use product and you can build out checks with Firefox Selenium IDE (no longer supported). A good measure of availability.
Set the standard for synthetic checks and several APMs have copied that.

It's very clunky. Infrastructure is large and very difficult to upgrade.
SaaS and On-premise versions are different. There is an LDAP integration but users can only be assigned to one group (i.e. department). If you are in 2 departments, you need 2 separate logins.
Update: they now offer federated logins
It filled a gap in monitoring for us, but we're looking to move on.

Return on Investment

Got visibility into availability other than relying on just canary pages.
Helps better understand geographic latency and browser-specific issues

Seemed to work well, but we didn't want to do a long renewal. Other products are maturing and better integrated with our systems. It works for now, but we're looking to replace it.

Update: New Relic has caught up with Apica and seems to integrate better with the other aspects of APM.

Key Insights

Do you think Apica Synthetic delivers good value for the price?

Yes

Are you happy with Apica Synthetic's feature set?

Yes

Did Apica Synthetic live up to sales and marketing promises?

Yes

Did implementation of Apica Synthetic go as expected?

Yes

Would you buy Apica Synthetic again?

Yes

Other Software Used

AppDynamics, Splunk Enterprise

Likelihood to Recommend

It's a good starter solution, but it was difficult to maintain. Often, the vendor wanted to use us as a guinea pig for upgrades and then writing the upgrade document based on what they found/broke/etc with our environment. I prefer late adopter.

Good for simple synthetic checks. Needs some updates.

Overall Satisfaction with Apica Synthetic