Alluvio AppResponse Reviews

The most valuable aspect of the solution is the visibility. The full visibility that you get from the backend is excellent.

The stability is great.

We really like the scalability capabilities.

I'm not sure if I see room for improvement at this point. It works quite well for us. I'm not sure what other vendors offer, so it's hard for me to look at it and see things that may be missing from the offering.

The pricing is on the higher side of things. If they could lower it, that would be ideal.

I've been using this solution for five years at this point. It's been a while.

We like the stability on offer. There aren't bugs or glitches. It doesn't crash or freeze. It's good.

The scalability is good. If a company needs to expand it out, they can do so with relative ease.

This is the only product I use. I've never worked with a different solution. I don't know what else might be similar on the market.

The pricing could be more competitive. It's a little high.

I only really know about this solution. I don't really know what else is on offer and haven't done any other evaluations.

We're a reseller of this product.

On a scale from one to ten, we'd rate it at an eight.

We are a solution provider and this is one of the monitoring products that we implement for our clients. Our customers are typically government departments, and it is also used in enterprise data centers.

The most valuable feature is performance monitoring.

We often have problems when it comes to integration with products from other vendors. With the products we sell, we are often looking to build holistic solutions.

Technical support needs to be more responsive.

I have been using this product for the past four or five years.

We have not faced any scalability issues.

Technical support has been a problem for us. We had trouble with incompatibility during the implementation phase and they were a little bit late when it came to answering us.

The price is a little bit high, especially because we have to pay an import tax.

We resell a lot of physical security systems that include cameras and access control. This product helps us to monitor performance of these environments.

I would rate this solution an eight out of ten.

On-premises

Riverbed has a few modular solutions. Some are independent but they are all part of a whole and they function as one solution. You can implement a few of these modules depending on what the customer is interested in. For example, APM and NPM, and sometimes both combined. This gives you a deeper and more complex picture than some competitors' solutions.

I have found the AppResponse, which is a packet capture solution, very good. It gives you the ability to drill down back in time. You've got all the packets there. You can troubleshoot it later, not immediately. It's very interesting.

It also has the modules to troubleshoot web applications, database transactions, and unified communications, all in one. It is something between an NPM and an APM.

There is always room for improvement. I would say improving the user interface is the most important. Also, faster support for some new security features and support for the secure key exchange.

There have been a lot of changes in the last few years with the names in Riverbed. SteelCentral used to be called Cascade. Every two years they change the name of the products. Somebody who is new, or even not so new, needs time to remember the names. This is not something crucial to do and when something is good and working well, why should they just rename it?

I have been working with Riverbed SteelCentral AppResponse for five years.

The stability is very good.

The scalability is okay.

I have been in touch with support a few times, but not for anything crucial. It was for questions about how to find something, or getting the user interface to show in an appropriate way. No problems with features or anything like that.

The initial setup is straightforward but you have to know a little about the product. It's not for everybody to just plug and play. If you know how the solution is implemented then it is straightforward.

It's very fast from our side. It usually takes some time from the customer side because they need to define it on a block of switches on a virtual infrastructure. If it is prepared properly from all sides it should be done and all set up in one working day.

The licenses are costly and are done per module. So, if you need the database or a transaction analysis, you have to pay for that module. You pay once per module and you have it forever. The same for the web transaction analysis and unified communication. You pay for the module once and that's it. But the cost depends on implementation because there are different platforms. Is it a retro-platform or it is hardware?

It is an expensive solution, it's not for everybody. It is not for small customers, but more for medium and large ones.

We require a staff of a small team to maintain the solution. They can quickly find and troubleshoot problems in the database, transactions, unified communication, etc. It's a very good tool. It is very fast and very informative. It gives you an overview where the problem is on the backend server or on the network side. Then you can focus more deeply on that.

On a scale of one to ten I would give it an eight.

The biggest problem of end-to-end Application Performance Monitoring (APM) solution is that service assurance is mapping a problem to the appropriate team. When the business units check their jobs, step by step, every single system seems to work properly but they need to check the big picture, which AppResponse does easily.

The application response time is very user friendly. With some APM solutions, it can take a long time to check a periodic report, but you can get all the necessary details quickly with AppResponse.

The admin dashboard could be easier, as it takes a little bit of time to get used to it. Also, they need to better integrate with products and solutions from different vendors.

One to three years.

Each AppResponse implementation made our stability better across our 500+ applications.

Technical support is 10/10, as they have a quick response time and are awesome.

Initial setup is really straightforward and can be completed with a couple of clicks and you don't need to perform a lot of deep dives.

The initial setup was performed by the vendor team, but updates and reinstalls have been done by in-house staff.

The licensing model is expensive compared to its competitors, but the service it gives to your business, and the data quality, means that it's worth it.

During the PoC process, we met with representatives of various vendors about different solutions and Riverbed was one of them. AppResponse and ARX showed us the red points easily and quickly. We then decided to add the product to our portfolio and now the monitoring team and application owners are happier now.

The implementation is very easy. Business application and server logic can show the root cause of issues and provide service assurance through end-to-end business relations. Every service assurance and monitoring team should try the product. It can probably improve your internal business relationships.

We see trends developing and can get a fix in place before the customers notice. The database module has helped us spot troublesome queries. We can usually find within a few clicks if a performance issue is related to a specific server, the application, web page or network device. Scheduled reports provide historical data for our application and network teams.

Ability to see end to end user, application, server, and network response time and throughput data. Good reporting and alerting mechanism. Easy interfacing with Wireshark or Riverbed Transaction Analyzer to view detailed packet data. Easy to organize web page families, network device interface, and server response time and throughout into real-time or historical views.

Need to bring back the NetFlow module for AppResponse.

No

Not at all.

Customer Service:

Sales and Sale support have been very responsive

Technical Support:

AppResponse Support is excellent.

BMC TrueSight. Easier to use and better functionality.

Setup was very easy.

We used a combination of in-house and Riverbed PS. Expertise was good.

Creating a functional network map before implementation will insure you are getting the correct view of you network and applications.

End User Experience Monitoring: conversations, protocols but first of all the web transaction analysis feature with waterfall capabilities is now a fundamental tool for our NOC/SOC team.

Any potential issue is now discovered by our NOC/SOC team before it impacts the end-user experience. We are currently monitoring the performance perceived by the end user accessing and using the strategic applications of our worldwide customers. Usually, a problem is analyzed from a variety of different viewpoints but never from the most important: the End User. Thanks to the Riverbed Steelcentral AppResponse technology our remote services are now focused on monitoring the End User "satisfaction" instead of watching only the infrastructure.

We are working to improve SAP transactions monitoring capabilities. This feature will give us a great differentiator to our monitoring and managed services.

1 year

No. As any monitoring tool, the deployment is a process and it never ends.

Absolutely none.

The 1200 and 2200 models are sufficient for any PMI. If you want to scale in terms of performances and features you have to consider the 3300.

The support we had as of now is excellent.

No, we didn't use any other NPM/APM solution before Riverbed, but we tested some competitors.

Again, the setup is easy but it has to be considered a never ending process as the infrastructure is, at the end, dynamic.

In house

AppDynamics, Fluke Networks

It's a great solution and we think it could be used in many different ways.

End-user experience monitoring for web and non-web applications at the user transaction level.

Simply moving the focus from the IT infrastructure components to the end user with the result that it drastically reduces the time spent on troubleshooting performance issue.

It's not able to monitor SAP transactions.

I've used it for two years.

Absolutely not and it's easy and fast. Within a few minutes you can see what you didn't see before.

No, we haven't gotten any problems so far.

No issues with the hardware/software, but the licensing did cause some issues.

Customer Service:

Good.

Technical Support:

Good.

No we didn't.

As I said before the initial set-up was simple and fast.

We implemented it in house.

We chose Riverbed for its complete solution portfolio that can help monitoring and solve performance issues.

Appliance passively monitors network traffic. Ability to group transactions, great charts and correlation capabilities. Excellent for strategic metrics and as a troubleshooting/analysis tool. Thresholds and trap generation. Excellent protocol analytics out-of-the-box. Traffic capture warehouse. Good integration with AppTransaction Xpert (transaction analysis like wireshark) and Wireshark. Publishes reports. Some data accessible though API - can be integrated with existing management systems.

I began using ARX in 2008. I use it frequently as an APM analytic tool.

I've found these appliances to be very stable

Although the Director provides some centralized management and RPM Dashboards provides some degree of integration, each appliance stands alone in collection and analytical ability. The appliances come in rather large sizes, but if you have a large enterprise and you're looking to bring data feeds in from several locations, it will likely have to be served on several appliances.

Opnet probes (AppResponse Xpert), now part of Riverbed, capture network traffic and calculate automatically many applicative and network KPI. AppResponse Xpert can trigger alerts on KPI.
Captured traffic can be analysed in AppTransaction Xpert to find network or applicative issues. AppTransaction Xpert is a powerfull tool permitting to focus quickly on problems and freeing the network engineer from fastidious and time consuming calculations / research.

Provides quick feedback on day to day applicative and network issues and permit to quickly break the tie between applicative teams suspecting the network and network teams suspecting servers or applications.

It avoids long time discussions by providing quick results and reduces dramatically time to repair / fix the issue.

4 years

Disks are heavily used for traffic capture and may break times to times but RAID feature avoids any production pause.

No

Customer Service:

Medium.

Technical Support:

Medium.

Very easy to use and gather value from the start. Easy to deploy on servers with little impact. Easier to gather information from the Server than from the Network Switch when there are multiple servers to combine for an application study.

Marketing is complex and not well understood, so often this product is not considered a good fit just for a surface look. Applications are getting more complex as there are islands of services that are combined to provide value to the customer. The response time delay is hidden within service calls that are being made. This family of tools provides the insight needed to know where that response delay is happening. It also provides insight as to the number of service calls that are being made. While each service call may be short, doing 1,000 of them, brings major delays to the overall response time. Finding where that delay is happening is key to improving the application. These tools provide that insight and provide the ability to show the total response time that is taking place. As a side note: Often I used the Capture side of the product more than the Analysis side of the product. The ability to do captures without having to use tcpdump on each system is very helpful. This ability takes the grunt work out of gathering the basic information that is required for deeper analysis.They (Opnet) also use Wireshark in their analysis phase and then add even more analysis for some deeper dive information. This is helpful for general analysis. Also some of their decodes have been helpful as well.

Use Cases: SOA brings a whole new meaning to the word distributed processing. Finding where work is really happening when an application is using SOA concepts is a challenge. In some cases, multiple traces are required as each trace reveals other servers and services that are engaged that were unknown to the original calling program of the SOA service. These are buried within the process of calling the first SOA service.