Alluvio Aternity Reviews

We use it for endpoint system and application performance management.

It has enabled us to be a lot more agile and proactive in troubleshooting issues on our endpoints and in our applications.

Aternity provides metrics about the actual employee experience of all business-critical apps, rather than just a few. We have used it to measure employee experience before and after a change to an operating system. As a result, we saw the prevalence of blue screens on our device fleet go down markedly after we started pushing the Windows 10, 21H2 update out to our fleet. We were able to verify that using one of the built-in dashboards in Aternity.

The solution definitely also helps make decisions about the effect of changes. It allows us to tweak and tune where our infrastructure spend goes, at the endpoint, backend server, and network levels. We can see the impact of changes that are made at every level, and that allows us to use resources effectively. A case in point is our evaluation of new VPN client solutions. We were able to use Aternity to give us really granular application and network performance data, and that data wouldn't be possible to get without Aternity. It led to our picking one vendor over another, amongst other reasons.

It's also very good for verifying what the user is saying is happening, when troubleshooting, versus what's actually happening on their machine. That's one of the key things that is very difficult to do in a service desk troubleshooting scenario. Aternity pulls the emotion or the hyperbole out of it that users tend to throw in at times, and allows you to really hone in on whether it is an issue, and then on whether it's a systemic issue or just a single-user issue. It has additional tools to actually work out, if there is an issue, where that issue lies and to help find the root cause.

There are many valuable features. If I had to single out one, it would be the UXI score. That's a proprietary Aternity score that tells you how good or bad the experience is for a user on that particular machine, for a particular app. It neatly encapsulates the pain of the user in a single score. It's very easy to find issues and then drill down further into those issues, based on that score. A lot of tools will do a similar thing, but they will do it indirectly and it's not always relevant. The Aternity score is on the money pretty much every time.

The Digital Experience Index (DXI) feature is also very valuable. We've incorporated it into the KPIs for our endpoint team. We can use that as a benchmark to improve our goals and our environment, and for ongoing life cycle improvement.

I would like to see more granular performance counters collected and viewable from the endpoints. That would be great. That is something we used to get with SysTrack.

I've been using Alluvio for three years.

We've had any downtime on the service that I've been aware of. However they're maintaining it in the backend is leading to very high uptime. It's a 10 out of 10.

We have it deployed to 3,500 endpoints across 90 branch offices and sites in Australia and New Zealand. About 2,000 of those users are work-from-home at any given time.

The scalability is also a 10 out of 10. We haven't seen any instances of slowdowns or anything changing in the backend with our use. Because it's agent-based, there's very low bandwidth overhead. If I had to scale this from 3,500 users to 10,000 users, I've got a high degree of confidence that it could be done very quickly and with no performance impact. 

As it's a SaaS product, that load is governed by how the tenants are distributed and the resources are assigned from their end, so it's out of our control. But because we haven't had any performance problems and they've kept their market share in the Asia-Pacific region quite significantly, I'm pretty confident there wouldn't be issues in that respect.

I've worked with their technical support a few times. They're fairly responsive to requests. There is local support, which is good, although most of the more technical queries will require assistance from level-two or level-three engineers who are overseas. We haven't had to log that many issues, but the ones we have logged have been floated up and dealt with successfully, for the most part. They weren't feature requests or larger bug fixes that needed to happen on the core product.

Positive

The solution we used previously was SysTrack by Lakeside Software. The reason we made the switch was that that solution had technical issues inside the Citrix PVS environment that made it untenable. In addition, the reporting and the ability to access data were not very easy. And some of the conclusions and performance analyses were done via indirect system performance measures, rather than direct ones. That meant that when it was showing issues they weren't always related to real issues. It was a bit hard to sort through that noise.

It is a SaaS solution. We just manage and deploy the agent endpoints internally. As a result, the initial setup was super easy. Aternity comes with all the parameters that it needs, pre-configured. You push it to an endpoint. Literally, all you need to do is package and deploy it using Microsoft Configuration Manager, and it just talks to the cloud and pulls in what it needs from the device. There's no infrastructure setup, very limited configuration, and it's very simple to deploy. Even if you don't have Configuration Manager, you could use just about any deployment tool to get that agent out onto your endpoints and start collecting the data straight away.

There is almost no maintenance. You just have to update the agent occasionally, which is super simple and not very frequent. It's all hosted by the provider.

We did it all internally.

The pricing is reasonable for the value that it gives because it does allow you to measure the cost ramifications of direct productivity loss for spends in both your infrastructure and on endpoints. Even though it doesn't produce direct savings, the information and the analytics you get out of Aternity have the potential to have a massive impact on your IT budget and help drive efficiencies there.

Aside from the SysTrack software we used, there weren't really any other players in the space that actually had the key activity and application performance measurement capabilities that Aternity does. Aternity is fairly unique. That may have changed by now, but back when we evaluated it, that was certainly the case.

The key feature that Aternity has over competing solutions is the ability to build very relevant and custom signatures for activities inside your core apps. This is something that other products don't do or don't do well. You're getting direct measurement of things inside your core apps and that's very relevant and very useful.

Do a proof of concept. It's one of those rare, genuine products that does what it says on the tin. It delivers, and quickly, without a lot of configuration or anything needing to be done during a proof of concept. Because it's all SaaS, you can do a PoC very quickly: push agents out and start collecting data. The dashboards are mostly pre-configured so you can see the value of that data instantly.

It's a good product. More people need to be aware of it, to see how well it works and how much value this can bring to a business. My number-one recommendation would be just get it in and PoC it. There's very little time investment involved in doing that, compared to some other products, and it will pretty much sell itself.

It's easy to get excited about a good product, but sometimes it's hard to convey that value to other customers who may have been jaded with vendors making similar claims in the past. But in this instance, you can verify it straight away with no obligation and no real effort.

Diving into an application, if you want to pull apart how it is actually performing in the code itself, can be done with an additional module called APM (previously called AppInternals). We don't have that module because we don't develop apps internally using the programming languages that it supports. But even without that module, we can still see very useful granular performance data inside an application. For example, we can see any slowdowns or any performance issues on the client side, the network side, or in the backend. But the APM add-on gives you deeper visibility into the application stack if you have applications that are supported.

Aternity hasn't yet helped us reduce hardware refresh costs by considering actual employee experience, rather than just the age of the employee's device, but we predict it will, based on the existing data we've got and when our next hardware refresh cycle is due to happen. Those cycles are quite long. But it absolutely can help reduce refresh costs and we will be using it for that.

Our primary use case is in the instance of our service desk, and we use the solution primarily for troubleshooting and visibility into the performance of remote and on-site employees.

We have physical and virtual PCs and monitor both Windows and Mac devices while our applications are across the board. We have desktop apps, cloud apps, on-prem apps, and stat solutions.

The tool improved the meantime to resolution, though I need data to back that up. It provides more visibility to our service desk; callers often exaggerate issues, but Aternity takes the guesswork out of the equation. We can see precisely what happened.

We are constantly in hardware refresh mode, and Alluvio Aternity helped increase employee productivity in that respect because it allows us to pinpoint problem devices and replace those first.  

The data the solution provides is valuable to us; we can see the health of the machines, how they are performing, and what might be causing issues on a particular machine.  

We can monitor the usage patterns for desktop applications, showing us which are performing and which aren't.

We use the Digital Experience Index (DXI) feature. It offers customization options, so we can decide what we want to improve and what can stay the same and prioritize specific improvements. 

I want more reporting around asset management, with greater flexibility and customization ability.

The solution is highly stable and always available. It never went down, and the only issue we had was when the dashboards didn't report any data for the first hour of the day, but that was quickly resolved. 

The solution is entirely scalable; Riverbed manages the infrastructure, which makes scaling much easier for us. All we need to do is push out the agents to wherever we need them.

I'm very satisfied with the technical support; they always respond quickly and are highly competent.

Positive

I did not, but the organization previously used a different solution; it didn't have all the capabilities of Aternity, which explains the switch.

The initial setup was great, as Aternity is very straightforward to deploy. The most challenging part was pushing agents out to the PCs, and we used Microsoft's SCCM solution for that. Once we do that, all the management takes place within Aternity.

Four of us carried out the deployment. There was a project manager, myself, a business analyst, and the SCCM admin.

We implemented via an in-house team. 

That isn't easy to measure as we operate on the expense side of the business; we don't use the solution to generate revenue.

We always try to reduce costs and purchase the Alluvio Aternity Essentials license.

We made a comparison between Aternity and uberAgent, which reports to Splunk. We chose Aternity because the user experience is much better; the UI is friendly and easy to use, and the solution focuses more on improving technical issues and user experience. However, uberAgent focuses more on ensuring employees are doing what they're supposed to do, such as logging in on time and not using applications they're not supposed to.

I rate the solution seven out of ten. I want to rank it higher, but I need to see more capability from the tool.

The solution provides metrics about the actual employee experience of all business-critical apps. For our purposes, many of our applications are customer and agent-facing, so we don't get metrics on those. However, we can get metrics for our employees' interaction with apps. We used this feature to measure employee experience before and after changes to our software and hardware, though not with a change in OS. An example of a change we were able to gauge is the performance of staff working remotely versus onsite; most of our remote employees don't have company-provided internet and the equipment that comes with that, and we can see a difference in their performance. 

We used the capability to measure the employee experience of apps to prioritize which equipment to replace first during an upgrade. 

The product can provide visibility into employee devices and app transactions all the way through the back end. Still, we only have an Essentials license, so we cannot monitor many application activities. We don't subscribe to Aternity's APM solution.

As far as the DXI feature helping to perform root cause analysis and remediation, that's done more at the individual PC level. From a machine perspective, however, the DXI works well for replacing and configuring equipment. 

Regarding the level of Aternity's visibility into device performance metrics versus competing solutions, I would tell an engineer that all the tools measure the same items. Still, Aternity's UI is far superior to the others we looked at.  

I advise anyone planning on using Aternity to get to know PowerShell.

I work for a managed service provider, and we offer Aternity as one of the main solutions for any customer who needs applications and full end-to-end user experience monitoring.

The main use case is around application performance. Another main use case is related to Teams. Our customers like to know what's happening with Teams when they call in. Is it a performance issue at the backend or within their desktop environment? 

We have its SaaS-based service version. It is deployed on the cloud, but the agents are deployed on-premise. So, I needed to buy stuff.

It is useful for working out whether there are any issues in the network or between the endpoints. It is also useful for working out any performance issues. It has been useful for a lot of stuff around Teams. Our customers like to know what's happening with Teams when they call in.

It is helpful for easily profiling users. It records all the applications that are being used for each user, and you can see what users are doing.

It is very good in terms of performance. You don't have to wait forever to try and get reports or results. It is quite quick to get everything that you need out of the software.

For me, the biggest problem is the price. It is not so much about how much it costs. It is about Aternity only giving you 12 months upfront. So, you got to purchase it for 12 months. A lot of our customers are on a per-user-per-month type billing. They are all OPEX rather than CAPEX. It would be a lot better for our customers if there was an option available for OPEX so that it is billed on a monthly basis than a yearly basis.

They've got only Windows agents. They don't actually have mobile agents. It would be a lot better if they could also integrate Android and iOS because then we can start pulling steps and performance management out of users' mobile devices. That's the biggest addition I would suggest at the moment. A lot of our customers have desktops as well as tablets or mobile devices. We should be able to monitor that stuff as well.

I have been using Aternity for less than three months.

It is very stable.

It is very scalable. We've got several enterprise customers using it, and we provide it as a managed service with the SLAs and stuff wrapped around it. 

We plan to increase its usage. I don't think we would switch at this point. It already ticks most of the boxes. We've only been using it for three months, and we're signing a lot more customers down that path. It is hard for us to change the application or software internally because it requires a lot of internal training and other things. You can't just cross-pollinate. You will have to change every one of them.

We haven't contacted them so far.

It is pretty straightforward. Anyone should be able to do that. 

It is all SaaS-based. You order it, and they set up the backend on their service. You just download the agent and install it on the desktops. It doesn't take a long time at all.

You have to purchase it for 12 months, which is an issue because a lot of our customers are on a per-user-per-month type billing.

There are a few additional costs. A lot of customers only get the essential licenses, and then they get what they call the application add-ons on top. They have to pay depending on how many customers and applications they want to monitor.

We evaluated Dynatrace. The cost of Dynatrace was about two or three times more, and it wasn't giving what we needed it for. Dynatrace has got some aspects, but it was not what we were looking for. We were looking for end-user experience monitoring, not just application monitoring or application performance.

I would rate Aternity a seven out of ten.

It has helped to identify several problems and performance bottlenecks in different applications through the code-level instrumentation and its features, and sometimes also through the detailed infrastructure metrics in one-second granularity, including memory, heap, and GC statistics.

This is a review of Aternity APM (formerly "AppInternals") on-premises version 10.21 only.

The infrastructure metrics, especially the CPU and memory data etc., are available in per second granularity, and this for quite a long time, which makes it outstanding as compared to other solutions. Its licensing cost is very low for us. For the use of the agent in infrastructure mode only (without code-level instrumentation), no licence is consumed. A license is only consumed when code-level instrumentation data is harvested, or downloaded from the agent to the Aternity APM server.

The code-level instrumentation has been quite helpfull in many cases, including the ability to record and analyse database SQL requests with bind values, and exceptions.

Its user interface and features should be improved. They don't support new versions of certain Linux editions. That is one of the reasons why we have to move to another solution.

In terms of a new feature, it would be good if we could restrict a user to a specific application or server. We have several customers, and we have to set up one or two servers for each customer. We have to set up one server for production and one for the test environment. Each user at the customer level can see all applications and the data of all applications, which is not really useful and good. We should be able to restrict user access at the application level or server level.

Their technical support should be improved in terms of response time. Its stability should also be better. We are currently using version 10, and its stability is not so high. The server crashes from time to time and needs to be restarted. Sometimes, you also have problems with applications.

Version 11 only allows for one AD/LDAP server to be connected to. Version 10 can connect to several LDAP servers, a feature we need; that's why we did not upgrade to version 11.

The on-premises version lacks some features compared to the SaaS cloud solution of Aternity APM.

I have been working with this solution for two and a half years.

Its stability is not so high currently. We are still using version 10. We have not switched to version 11. The server crashes from time to time and needs to be restarted. Sometimes, you also have problems with applications. Once they are instrumented, they have to be fine-tuned because of the problems. 

We are not satisfied with their technical support. If there is a problem, you have to wait for several days to get a response.

Its initial setup is relatively complex.

Its licensing cost is very low. That's one of the reasons why we have kept it for so long. We get more than a 70% discount on the maintenance licenses. Its cost is very low for us, but if you buy it new, it would be much more expensive at the retail price.

We are currently evaluating Dynatrace, which has a lot more possibilities. It has a better user interface and fewer errors or problems with instrumentation features.

I would rate Aternity APM a five out of ten. We are not very happy with it, and we are considering a new solution.

My clients use the solution to access user activity reports. They primarily use it for endpoint monitoring purposes.

Aternity easily provides visibility of all the endpoint machines to my clients. They can monitor the operating systems of their users, check the CPU and memory utilization, etc. They can also monitor the applications that users are trying to access so as to analyze the reasons for delays after accessing the application.

The solution provides enough options. They should include database monitoring activity as well.

I have been working for Riverbed since 2008. I deployed Alluvio Aternity a month back.

I would like to rate the stability of the solution as a nine out of ten.

I have clients working in medium-scale to large enterprises who use this solution. I would rate its scalability a ten out of ten.

I provide technical support for multiple customers.

The initial setup is very simple and user-friendly.

The solution is available at a higher price than other solutions.

Alluvio Aternity's competitors, SolarWinds, and ManageEngine work only on the basis of SNMP’s port number 161. Whereas, Aternity takes the log from multiple sources like WMI, SNMP, AMP, and many more. Thus, it is much more reliable and better than other solutions.

It is a good product, and I would rate it as a nine out of ten. I advise others to use this solution.