AppPulse Suite [EOL] Reviews

It increased the customer satisfaction for the usage of my smart apps, and it reduces the number of crashes, proactively, so I know before the issue happens. I do the testing, and during the QA and the pre-production environments.

It provides a lot of customer insight, understanding the customer's needs, understanding the customer's issues, and it gives me a more proactive approach to solving a customer problem before it happens.

It has many features in one solution. For example, crashes, customer behavior, it's predictive. It helps predict the behavior before it happens.

This is a new solution by HP. It's less than two years, we're among the first to implement the solution, so I'm sure that there is a lot of room for enhancement and continuous improvement in the future.

They have added a new feature, which was not part of the solution, which is they support what they call hybrid apps; before, it was only supporting native. That is something they work with your R & D, whereby they support this feature in the parent version of AppPulse.

I've only been using it three to four months at this point, so I really can't tell right now. But the solution should be scalable.

I would say on a scale of one to five, it's three and a half. I think the product was premature. The time to providing solutions should be faster, and they need to have local presence. The time difference and everything was an issue.

We did what we called a benchmark, or survey, and we found this solution fit our needs and requirements, in particular its ability to help in understanding the customers. 

Go through the experience I did, and then you will know it yourself. But I recommend it.

Customers are seeing the benefits immediately, mainly in the back office. They are able to develop more quickly versions in which users can see the application to correct and monetize it. This is the most important thing of all.

We are trying to monetize the customer's user experience to help them define it. In Mexico, we have many customers with a huge development demand for mobile applications. For example, the last case in which we worked was with a retail banking company. They have approximately 20 applications for the end user. We've been working with them to sell the benefits that they will have with an application which monitors and provides feedback for the user.

It could be better if you had any of the reports that the customers asked from us, for example, punctually. Unfortunately, the reporter is not that practical.

Like all solutions, you have to develop special reports.

Yeah, it's very stable. This is a web-based application, a web-based solution. You only have to put in the APK for Android, a couple of codes, lines, and you're up. So, this is a solution which sells very fast. It's very practical, because it's web-based, and you can have results in just a couple hours.

It's not a problem. The scalability is huge.

I worked with HPE in hardware when defining the Cloud. I have worked with HPE the organization when it started. We have been seeing, back in Mexico, the whole enterprise reduced a little bit. But we have much support from them as we are one of their best partners in Mexico, we have the platinum level with HPE. Now, we are expecting the same thing with Micro Focus

The application is very practical.

It really gives us the feedback in order to be sure that we have built and tested apps appropriately. These are the apps that we are releasing to our public domain or internal user.

We collect data about the user experience with real life data. This does not come from the testing part, but rather from the user part. We want to be sure that what we have tested and designed is really used as expected by the user.

We can collect data about the user experience and see how the user is behaving with the app, or check the behavior of the app itself. This is done in the context of the device that we are targeting.

It is interesting to check if the app is well-designed regarding the user's expectations. For example, we check if we have too much data transfer, or if the consumption of the battery is okay. We take into account the number of actions that you being done.

There are two levels of feedback coming from the solution. One is the user experience, which is really important. The other part is the design regarding the usage of this app in real life.

I'm working with a pharmaceutical company and that means that we have to instrument the app. This is a little bit similar to "big brother". In the context of a medical collection of information, we are facing some issues about regulation for data privacy. For example, localization is quite a sensitive issue for us. We are using AppPulse, but not as extensively as we expected, due to the limitations and the regulations that we have to meet.

The regulations should be better customized for the kind of data that we cannot send to the SALs environment. Certain things can't be sent to the SALs environment, otherwise we in breach of one of the legal regulations in the FDA.

We know that we do receive this kind for information. There is a white paper coming from HPE ensuring that the data will be anonymous. This information is new, so we need to be sure that we are not putting personal details or better privacy at risk, in terms of compliance regulations.

Sometimes the user does not really use some of the functionality, or he extensively uses other functionality, which for us is not so important.

I have no concern about the stability of the solution. It works well. There are no major issues related to that. The behavior of the solution is as expected.

In terms of scalability, we are not using it extensively. From a scalability point of view, we do not have an extensive number of applications that we are monitoring through this solution. I cannot really answer that question.

Technical support was good for the installation and for the support of the initial support of the software. This stage is quite simple, smart, and easy to use.

Of course, there are elements that are a little bit more complex for us to understand the functionality of the solution. Afterwards, when you are looking at the different layers, such as consumption of the battery, or about user experience and so on, it is quite intuitive.

We did not evaluate alternatives. We actually purchased the Mobile Center Suite, so this solution's mobile app came with it. In the first mode, we actually demonstrated it to the mobile developers, the guys responsible for mobile management of the apps.

I know that they already had something in place. And we were quite amazed with what is possible without changing the code. That is a very important thing in regulated environments.

If you deploy an app in production, it should be identical to the same app that you are testing without any code changes. If you test an app and afterwards, you change the source code just to allow monitoring, then you are going against the regulations.

I work in a pharmaceutical environment which is highly regulated. Our corporate users are using applications and software following procedures and guidelines which are predefined, to maintain compliance.

However, users using mobile apps (company/internal app or public/patient app) and the associated device are not intended to strictly follow the rules and guidelines for regulated apps. Most of the time they are trying to use them not exactly as expected: skipping steps, not using the app for what is was designed to do, using functionalities which are considered less important. So, initially we did not extensively test all the various network conditions.

Having the real/user pathway is helping us to adjust what is important for the user and develop appropriate testing strategies.

Our business marketing and technical aspects have improved.

The thing that I like about AppPulse is that it's easy application to install and an easy application to use to provide information for our customers. They have a different views, some technical for us, and some technical for the customers. We are able to create different dashboards within AppPulse for business information. It's a great tool for different companies as we can create different mobile applications.

It needs compatibility for Windows Mobile, because I think AppPulse doesn't have Windows Mobile. I have a wish list for AppPulse, but I can't remember now,. I've spoken to AppPulse about improving the tool, and it needs better reports, better dashboards, and HPE should know that it is a business tool. AppPulse needs to provide business information, not technical information. Nobody cares about crashes and the battery consumption. All the information that we need is what happened to our customers or their customers when navigating the application.

AppPulse is just great.

It's not a problem with scalability, but the size of the services and I think the scalability is from HPE and me.

We are the first step of the technical support for our customers. We escalate all the tickets and we don't have problems.

You don't really need too many skills to use AppPulse, or to implement it. It's easy to set up in a customer environment. We spent two two and a half months in a POC and then we implemented it across four individual channels. For electronic banking and the mobile channels, it only took us two months to implement, with three people to make sure that the service is continually working.

We've had a very quick return on our investment as far as being able to monitor applications that we hadn't been able to monitor before, and then able to catch problems that we previously had not been able to catch. For example, with the way we have AppPulse deployed, we were able to catch a problem at a particular call center where the application was running roughly 10 times slower than other call center sites. We were able to catch that and help remediate that. It affected a lot of call takers with very slow-running application and we were able to help resolve that quickly.

AppPulse Active allows us to very quickly produce synthetic monitoring for our applications, for some applications we've never been able to monitor before, some older Legacy applications. It gave us a set of tools that we could use to create the transactions and to play them back flawlessly on applications that we previous hadn't been able to. It was very quick.

It can monitor multiple types of applications. We monitor an old client server app, our mobile application, our external-facing web application, and internal sites that we use, like Skype for Business. Very quick and easy, and covers a big breadth of applications that we can monitor. It's very important to us because we're a regulated utility and we're required to have certain response times to calls from our customers.

One of the applications we're monitoring through AppPulse is our call center application. We want to make sure it's performing well and available so those numbers are good and we're in compliance with the regulations from our governing bodies, from the commissions. That's extremely important to us. We need to know our applications are performing and performing well.

For our external-facing websites, it's not regulatory-bound, but our customers are getting to demand better performance as they use other people's websites, they buy stuff from big sites such as from Amazon. They expect our site to perform equally as well. Also, if our site performs well, some basic questions could be answered online saving on calls. We need to be able to do that on our website to keep our call center volume down. It's all about keeping the customers happy and making sure that we're in compliance with our regulatory bodies.

The one that sticks out in my mind is some flexibility to do recurring downtime. Right now you can schedule downtime on a one-off basis. I'd like to be able to schedule application downtime if I know the application I'm monitoring is going to be down, and the one I'm responsible for needs to go down every night for a scheduled recycle. I have to schedule it everyday manually, but I would love to say, "Every night at 2:00 in the morning it's going to be down, so don't monitor it for an hour." This would prevent false positives saying that the application's down. That's one thing I would really like.

Also, I would like more granular reporting capability, and a larger breadth of a time period that I can run a report for. I'd like to get more granular with the data points that I'm capturing as far as what my performance metrics were. Right now it's averaged, so I get an average. I think I get some standard deviation from the average. I would like the actual data points if I need them. I would like to have that data broken out by the machines that I'm monitoring and not rolled up into one data point. This would enable me to see trends with actual data as opposed to just averages.

We monitor applications, for example, from five different machines. I'm running the same transaction on five different machines, but when I run the report it's aggregated, but I want to be able to split that up. That would help me know how one site is performing over another. I can get it at a high level but then I like to be able to use the granular data to maybe back into when exactly things start going awry, which I might not get from just an average and standard deviation. Having these data points maybe helpful to our development team with some analytics, from a transaction standpoint, maybe starting to know when a transaction trended towards bad.

It's a cloud-based application, so I can only remember one time where it just was unavailable. The actual AppPulse application was unavailable once, and it was for a short period of time. The other bugginess could occur in the external points of presence that they provide us. They give us a list of 50 or so locations where we can run a transaction from. We use those for out external-facing websites. There in different cities on different networks, AT&T and Verizon primarily. Sometimes those points of presence will become unavailable. For example, we use Chicago AT&T and Chicago Verizon because we're in the midwest, those are midwest sites, and two pretty big carriers in our area. We'll see occasionally one of those sites for one of those carriers just stop running the transaction, stop working and become unavailable. That happens occasionally.

We were able to say, "Wow, this site is so much slower than all the other four call centers that we're monitoring. Something's going on." Then we were able to actually use the sniffer tool at our machine at that site to figure out what the problem was.

To us, scalability is irrelevant as it's cloud-based. We're not hosting it, so it makes it easy for us. Performance-wise, I see no issues on performance. The way we're licensed is we buy a certain number of transactions, so if we need to scale up we just buy more transaction licenses.

Prior to me being part of the team, I know that IBM tried to create synthetic transactions for our call center application, and they weren't successful at it. What HPE provided was a toolset that works across multiple platforms. We found a tool that worked for our particular platform, we were able to create the scripts to perform the synthetic transactions that other vendors weren't able to do. They were trying to customize something for a particular application, to be able to record a transaction as it was being made, and they couldn't do it and have it played back successfully. Before that, they tried to use WinRunner. Then the attempt with HPE, we were able to do it, and do it quickly.

Deployment's easy. The way it works is that we create a script using one of the tools that they provide, zip it up into a file, and then we go to the AppPulse application, and we create a new application, and upload the file, and it's there. We tell it where we want it to run from. It's very easy. It's very easy to download the script so we can make changes to it. It's a URL we log onto and just create our user ID. We can have a site monitored within minutes.

From my understanding it's relatively cheap. I didn't go through the negotiations of what it cost, but it was a no-brainer from a cost perspective compared to the other tools that we buy as an IT organization.

The first thing I would tell you is to do a trial. You can do a free trial, HPE will give them a temporary license and you'll be able to monitor an application for free within minutes. Especially with web applications. It's very easy. Just give it a try and see how easy it really is and see the data that you're going to get back and how quickly you're going to get it. The only surprise I think you're going to find is that they're going to be surprised at what they uncover about your apps.

There's really not, in my opinion, that much of a downside to it. However, false positives is definitely something you will need to watch out for. Before we automatically send an alert to the operations center, we watched it for months to make sure that we weren't setting the threshold too low. We were able to set thresholds for performance and availability right within AppPulse. If we set the threshold too low, you could generate a false positive because saying that apps not as well performing as it should be when you don't have enough data to understand how the performance is really supposed to be. I think you really need to know your application to set those thresholds.

This product has many valuable features. It is very important for us to identify the response time, identify the different operating systems, the brand of the smart phones, and where customers are using them - not only in Mexico, but in different parts of the world.

Another feature that is very important for us is that it identifies transactions and flows of the operations that our customers use with our mobile application. We can improve the tool to make it faster and more adaptive to the needs of our customers.

I think they can improve the feature that identifies the operating systems, the brand of the devices, the response time, geolocalization. Security is also important because we also use Fortify, another HP tool, to identify whether there is any security breach.

We have not experienced any downtime. In our case, we didn't contract the tool, we have a licence. We contract the monitoring service with an HP partner. They have implemented the solutions of the licence and they provide us the service to host to the bank. We have online access to the tool, receive reports and receive some other alerts in case a problem is identified.

We don't have any problem with the performance of the tool. For our customer, it is transparent, including the infrastructure we use in the bank, and also for the application. It is just a couple of lines that they insert in our mobile application and then our customers use it. They don't know that we are monitoring their experience, it's transparent.

I think compatibility is one of the reasons we choose AppPulse Mobile. It complements the other HPE tools we also use. This gave us end-to-end monitoring testing, so that's why we chose AppPulse Mobile.

We were not using any mobile application monitoring solution before. When we deployed our mobile banking application, we didn't know if we were having trouble with specific devices or with specific operating systems, or if the problem was critical or not. Unfortunately, it was not pro-active. We deployed to production and then we implemented the monitoring, but the idea was to know exactly the user experience of our customers and then take actions to improve the service.

I think it is important to compare this HPE tool with other tools in the market. Also decide the proper time to implement it. In our case, it was about what was not proactive, unfortunately; what was reactive. I recommend doing that before deploying mobile applications, even more so at this time of digital transformation. I know many companies will be deploying mobile services. It is important to have from the beginning a tool that measures and monitors the user experience, before deploying it in production. That is my recommendation.

We can understand why an application crashes, and this helps us to reduce corruptions in an application and to make it easier for a client.

 The application is easy to use, as it is friendly and graphic. I don't have problems.

Currently, the information for management teams and technical teams are in the same view, but it would be useful if we could separate these views.

It's good. We don't have problems.

Now, we have only one application with AppPulse.

A mobile app froze, and we have another application which we use as well. We want to integrate these other applications into AppPulse to help improve the quality of the applications and it's data.

It's good. People respond quickly and make it easy to understand.

For us it is easy. It is friendly and it has information that is important for the business. The most important is the GUI and interpreting the information is easy to learn.

It is the application that helps us fix crashes and improve applications further.

We use AppPulse to look at two of our most important applications. Our contact centers that take calls from our customers, and our website that our customers use to pay bills online, etc.

We have a lot of quick wins. I call them quick because AppPulse has only been in the environment for a short time. We've been able to find misconfigured network segments, we've been able to find data we've never had before, like our logo transfer from our content delivery network, and how long it took to move over. We've found issues around daylight's savings time, and customer portals that we probably would not have found on our own without AppPulse.

For me, it was the speed in which we were able to deploy it. We bought AppPulse, and within a week we were able to have it fully integrated with our existing applications and have it monitoring them. It was just a really fast ROI. The speed that you can get AppPulse out there was the brightest spot of this whole process.

We typically lean more towards on-premise solutions for a host of reasons, so we had some trepidation about going into the cloud and a SaaS offerings. There was some leeriness around that, but it's been a very pleasant experience. It lowers my total cost of ownership, so that would have been one of the scarier points, but now I would tell colleagues that it's not something to worry about. It's done very well.

I don't know about future releases, but we're definitely looking at AppPulse Trace. We're probably going to take a hard look at AppPulse Mobile as well.

The only other thing that would come to mind is the ability to get CI information from AppPulse into OMi.

One other thing I should probably throw out there is that AppPulse integrated into OMi for us, so all the alerts that we have configured in AppPulse are now watched 24/7, so that was a great thing for us. However, I know there's some difficulty around CI information moving from AppPulse to OMi.

Since I have nothing to say about it, I'm assume that it's extremely stable because it's just there, and it just works.

Haven't had any issues yet. We ramp up extremely fast. We bought a handful of extra licenses with our original deployment. We can deploy and monitor our website in hours.

I haven't yet had to use it for AppPulse. We have ArcSight OMi, in our environment and we have it all under one support contract, but we really haven't had to call for AppPulse.

So far, it's been fine. My good experiences around the support is the fact that they help me consolidate all my SA ID's. So I had a lot of multiple SA ID's, they consolidated it into one, so I can start to have just this ease of interaction there, so I've been very happy with that part of it.

We had some custom in-house built things that weren't part of a centralized monitoring strategy. This was kind of new territory for us. "Greenfield," as we call it, so this is kind of our first foray into the true customer experience, the user experience space, and it's been a good one so far.

It's not complex. I'm kind of amazed when I see AppPulse do what it does. For instance, the original setup. Like I said, it went really fast, but our web team will change something on our site that will break our script. Our script is predicated on this button being here, that button being there, etc. We're trying to get our change management practices in order so that it doesn't happen, but our team can fix those issues in under an hour.

I know there were some other conversations with other vendors, but what we want to do is make sure the support costs stay low, so I always want to be very mindful of how much internal labor I need in order to run an application. I went to a few Vivid events, got some input from other users and we just kind of took it from there.

The benefits are the ease of integration into OMI, the speed of the deployment, and the quick ROI in value that it adds in a space where we were kind of flying blind before we had it.

My advice to a colleague would probably be around all the areas that I discussed. It's a very user friendly product, it is fast, it's stable, and it just flat-out works, and gives you views in data that, or valuable insights into our customer experience.

You can test your app all day long. If you don’t know where to search and on what device, you will lose precious time. We launched the Take It app in France last June, and we had 10,000 active users. Five percent of our users experienced crashes, so we decided to add AppPulse Mobile to our app, and crashes dropped from five to 0.44 percent. During the same time period, our users jumped to 120,000.

Another example, Take It is a social photo sharing app, and we noticed that some of our users needed more than 20 seconds to upload a photo, and we were losing customers who were also leaving poor reviews. Through AppPulse Mobile, we were able to identify this issue and address it. Now, our app takes only two seconds to upload a photo and the UX is much stronger.

It took me less than 30 minutes to integrate it, with no additional development needed. As a start-up, that’s really important because everyone is doing five jobs. Before AppPulse Mobile, we used Google Analytics, but we didn’t have a global vision.

With Google Analytics, you choose what performance metrics you want to have reported, but with AppPulse Mobile, you have a global vision of what is really happening inside your app.

I would love if AppPulse delivered more details about my users, for example, age and sex. It could split up the users into categories based on how frequently they use my product.

Right now, as we have grown there are some metrics that I am lacking with AppPulse. I know that there are other HP products that can complete that picture for me, but I have not used them yet.

I’ve never seen a failure in my app caused by AppPulse Mobile and since I’ve been using it, I’ve never experienced any crashes.

Right now, we have 120,000 users and our version only reports the first 25,000 users because we are part of the HP Start-up Program in Paris and have a free trial. Should we choose, we can upgrade our solution and it would scale to as many users as we need.

7/10 - As part of the HP Start-up Program, we have access to all the support we need. We’ve used them and found them effective. Every time I’ve had a question, they have been great at answering, but when my developers ask more technical questions, I can see that they didn’t have all the answers they were looking for.

I was using Google Analytics where you have to choose where you put your tags, whereas AppPulse Mobile gives me a bird’s eye view.

It was a very simple and quick setup.

I looked at Crashlytics and a few others, but we went with HP because we were already in the HP Start-Up Program and had a direct contact there who made the process simple.

It helped me a lot at the very beginning of my community to solve crashes and performance issues at a very critical time for my company.

• FunDex
• Slice and Dice

It immediately enables us to see all the versions that our customers use, and helps us manage the different ones available. It helps us to figure out the day-to-day usage and preferences of our customer. There are features that we have been working on for years and we need to know if our customers are using them to determine their value.

I've used it for two years.

There were unique challenges, but HP was able to help us with them.

There are some cases where the product cannot perform an analysis initially, and this may be a stability issue.

No issues at all.

We work directly with HP R&D, which makes it much more comfortable and responsive.

They immediately helped us with every ticket we opened. They’re very strong.

We are also using One4Mobile at the moment.

Generally it was straightforward.

We’re a consulting company, so we are the ones who implement it for our customers.

It’s as fast as it can be.

The price charged depends on the amount of users.

I tested other products but HP offers the best bang for the buck.

In order to do a good deployment, do things in small steps and think it through, don’t do it all at once. You need to choose the right app to invest in, and you need to pick your battles.

Feel free to contact me, I’ll be happy to help.