Digital Experience - Team Leader Canterbury at a tech services company with 501-1,000 employees
Real User
Good performance, useful for full end-to-end user experience monitoring and profiling users, but should have better billing model and support for mobile devices
Pros and Cons
  • "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."

What is our primary use case?

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.

What is most valuable?

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.

What needs improvement?

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.

For how long have I used the solution?

I have been using Aternity for less than three months.

Buyer's Guide
DEM - Digital Experience Monitoring
March 2024
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What do I think about the stability of the solution?

It is very stable.

What do I think about the scalability of the solution?

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.

How are customer service and support?

We haven't contacted them so far.

How was the initial setup?

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.

What's my experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing?

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.

Which other solutions did I evaluate?

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.

What other advice do I have?

I would rate Aternity a seven out of ten.

Which deployment model are you using for this solution?

Public Cloud
Disclosure: My company has a business relationship with this vendor other than being a customer: Integrator, System provider
PeerSpot user
Don Dandrea - PeerSpot reviewer
IT Administrator at a insurance company with 5,001-10,000 employees
Real User
Provides excellent visibility and shrank the meantime to resolve, but asset management reporting could be better
Pros and Cons
  • "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."
  • "I want more reporting around asset management, with greater flexibility and customization ability."

What is our primary use case?

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.

How has it helped my organization?

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.  

What is most valuable?

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. 

What needs improvement?

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

What do I think about the stability of the solution?

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. 

What do I think about the scalability of the solution?

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.

How are customer service and support?

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

How would you rate customer service and support?

Positive

Which solution did I use previously and why did I switch?

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

How was the initial setup?

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.

What about the implementation team?

We implemented via an in-house team. 

What was our ROI?

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.

What's my experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing?

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

Which other solutions did I evaluate?

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.

What other advice do I have?

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.

Disclosure: PeerSpot contacted the reviewer to collect the review and to validate authenticity. The reviewer was referred by the vendor, but the review is not subject to editing or approval by the vendor.
PeerSpot user
Buyer's Guide
DEM - Digital Experience Monitoring
March 2024
Find out what your peers are saying about Riverbed, Nexthink, Lakeside Software and others in DEM - Digital Experience Monitoring. Updated: March 2024.
765,386 professionals have used our research since 2012.
IT Manager | Digital Employee Engineering | End User Product Engineering at a consultancy with 10,001+ employees
Real User
Gives us application visibility into user activities
Pros and Cons
  • "Aternity's Digital Experience Management Quadrant (DEM-Q) has been a game changer for us. While knowing your own metrics is nice, if you don't know how you compare to others or what the numbers should be, then it doesn't tell you much. This solution puts that into context (if we are doing better than others or worse), which helps us prioritize where we want to focus and do improvements versus that's just how slow it's supposed to be. It's also great in communicating what we are doing and why we're doing it to our IT leadership teams, by saying, while we're pretty far behind others in certain categories, the time and changes for our prioritizations are justified."
  • "I would like to get more granular detail. In regards to defining the applications and activities upfront, that can be challenging. Simplifying that would be a big win. One of the things that I know they are already working on is a verbose mode."

What is our primary use case?

We have three general buckets that we put things in:

  1. For ad hoc troubleshooting of individual problems that people are having with their laptops in the field. 
  2. Finding, identifying, and resolving wide-scale issues that exist in the field. 
  3. Understanding the impact of changes that we're making in the field as well as reducing the negative impact of changes made in the field.

We need to understand how many machines are experiencing certain crashes, for example: 

  • Blue screens
  • Specific applications that are crashing.
  • Specific versions of applications that are crashing.
  • How various laptop models are performing differently, either having better or worse stability than other models. 

How has it helped my organization?

By tracking the high level number of blue screens in our environment and being able to categorize them according to the specific blue screen code that is returned, we were able to focus on prioritizing the issues that are most prevalent in our environment and taking actions to reduce the number of blue screens based on those priorities. This increases user satisfaction by reducing problems, like blue screens and application crashes. 

We were able to identify certain users who were opening a certain application, but it took a really long time. We were able to see through Aternity that this affected a decent number of users. By identifying those users, we were able to use other tools on specific devices to identify the root cause, which happened to be an IPv6 configuration, then eliminate that problem. Therefore, it increases the performance for approximately 10 percent of users' devices in the field.

Aternity has given us a view into what the user is doing. For example, the applications that we have defined as managed applications will show us what they are running. It will show us any of the activities that we've predefined to get measurements of. It will give us attribute information that the user doesn't necessarily know. For example, if they have their battery on high performance or battery saver, the user doesn't necessarily know that information at the time, but we can actually see it in Aternity. So, in a way, we can see even more than a user would be able to tell us. However, in order to do that, we need to make sure that we have defined the set of applications and activities that we want to ensure that we're tracking on a user's device.

Aternity's Digital Experience Management Quadrant (DEM-Q) has been a game changer for us. While knowing your own metrics is nice, if you don't know how you compare to others or what the numbers should be, then it doesn't tell you much. This solution puts that into context (if we are doing better than others or worse), which helps us prioritize where we want to focus and do improvements versus that's just how slow it's supposed to be. It's also great in communicating what we are doing and why we're doing it to our IT leadership teams, by saying, while we're pretty far behind others in certain categories, the time and changes for our prioritizations are justified.

The ability to filter the comparison by geography, industry, or company size is super important to our analysis. We need to be able to make sure that we're comparing ourselves with other companies that are similar. Also, we get to compare other devices that are similar. Some companies, who are using Aternity, use it more on server operating systems or on desktops. We are a very mobile company, using Aternity on our laptops. It makes more sense to compare us with companies who are also similar because that can make a big difference when you're thinking about how a laptop should be performing versus a server, and also Windows 7 versus Windows 10. You need to put that in context, or you're not going to have a realistic view of where you stand.

What is most valuable?

For the applications installed on the laptop, it's very customizable. So, we can get certain features out-of-the-box and add to them. Even with custom applications, we can create our own monitors and application signatures to track user activities which are specific to our company. We are measuring:

  • How long certain actions take for a user to typically complete. 
  • Before and after any particular change and do the comparison. 
  • In smaller chunks, we can compare a change group to a control group and be more confident about the impact of the change based on the user experience for the change group versus the users who didn't get the change.

Before we make a change that would impact the entire company, we do it on a pilot group and measure it then. So, we avoid rolling something out that fixes one thing and breaks something else, which can happen. Therefore, we have more confidence in our changes.

It gives us visibility into what the user is doing, i.e., the user activities on their endpoint, and the response time for any of those activities. It gives us a breakdown of client activity. e.g., what an end user's computer takes time to complete versus what's happening on the network, and if there are any network delays. 

What needs improvement?

I would like to get more granular detail. In regards to defining the applications and activities upfront, that can be challenging. Simplifying that would be a big win. One of the things that I know they are already working on is a verbose mode. 

Aternity does a great job of not impacting the device. It only sends up small bits of information at the time so it doesn't have a negative impact on the device itself. That also means that sometimes you want to get more data, but it's not giving it to you. However, being able to turn on a verbose mode so it could give us even more granular detail, at certain times, would be helpful. 

I think helping get to root cause would be really huge. One thing that Aternity is working on is its Insights and being able to inform us whether this type of model in this location, for example, performs worse. Getting those Insights automatically to the surface, which they are working on now, is a big improvement.

One misconception that some people at our company have when they first hear about Aternity, or start using Aternity, they expect it to find a root cause. If an application crashes, they want to jump right into why that application crashed. Aternity doesn't come right out and tell you. It gives you the diagnostic that gives you the information about what happened. You still have to sometimes have to put together those pieces, going farther to get to the why. I don't know that there is a tool out there that does give you the root cause of any of these issues. 

For how long have I used the solution?

I have been using Aternity for almost two years.

What do I think about the stability of the solution?

There are client entities installed on every device that are not very impactful to the endpoint, which is very important. The discovery side is stable. We only had one somewhat big outage in the last couple of years, so I would say it is very stable.

What do I think about the scalability of the solution?

Officially, on our team, there are three of us who maintain it. I'm managing the team. We have our Aternity engineer who is responsible for ensuring upgrades are going smoothly during the customization, the activities, and any script changes that we can do on our side. We have someone else as an analyst who is looking at the data and surfacing issues in the field. We also have a lot of other people who are using the tool internally, but they're not on our core team supporting it.

There are roughly 20,000 end users of the solution. It scales well.

There is definitely room to grow in terms of the customizations that we can make to managed applications and the activities of our own managed applications. Now that we have more PowerShell and remediation capabilities, we are starting to grow those as well.

How are customer service and technical support?

There is someone who supports the SaaS environment. Anything not on-prem and in the back-end that needs changing that we don't have access to, we can easily ask that of the SaaS administrators. Their responses are very good. 

The support is good. We have had to open up a few different cases here and there, but they are very responsive. 

Which solution did I use previously and why did I switch?

We switched because we needed more near real-time data. The customized, homegrown solution that we were using was not able to pick up information in a very timely fashion. It was only once per week, then we would be a week behind with our reporting. Also, it didn't give us insight into the application activities that Aternity does.

How was the initial setup?

The initial setup was straightforward. Aternity sets up the instance on the back-end on their side, then they give us access. We had to set up on our side: The integration with our single sign-on (SSO) provider, then downloading the endpoint agent and sending that out to the machines. 

To set it up, it took maybe a few people hours. For deploying it, that took a couple of weeks based on our standards. However, just getting it up and running, then installing it on a couple of machines was done within a day.

What about the implementation team?

For the deployment, we had our Aternity engineer. We needed someone from our identity team to set up the SSO side of things. We have our software packagers who put the software through our software deployment tool and send it out to the appropriate machines. There is also probably someone else who is reporting back on that. Overall, it's about four to five people.

I would take advantage of the Aternity Professional Services. We had someone from Aternity operating basically in-house with us for nearly a year. We found him to be very knowledgeable. He helped us get the most out of the tool over that first year before we were really ready to take it over alone.

What was our ROI?

Over the last couple of years, we have shown that we have improved user experience with surveys. We surveyed the environment and are seeing that Aternity improved things over the last couple of years. We are now also able to better prioritize our projects and the things that IT is working on.

What's my experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing?

It is definitely a premium solution; it is not an inexpensive product. We have to ensure that we are getting the most out of it in order to justify the cost. However, it is not cheap, especially when you want to install it on all your endpoints.

Which other solutions did I evaluate?

We looked at a lot of different solutions. We did a proof of concept with Aternity and Nexthink. 

Aternity had a SaaS model, where the solution was on-prem, which was easier to set up on our side. Also, Aternity gave us the insight into application activities and the end user's actual experience that the other tool couldn't give us. Those were the main reasons we went with Aternity. 

Aternity does give us (and other applications don't) application visibility into the activities that the user is actually performing on any particular application.

What other advice do I have?

Eventually, it will reduce hardware refresh costs by considering the actual employee experience rather than just the age of the employees’ devices. Right now, we're still on the basis of how long the machine has been in the environment. Really, it's tied to our own warranty information. When a machine's warranty is expired, then that's about the time that we get a new machine. For a particular model of device, we decided to accelerate that based on the data in Aternity, because we could see that the worst performing machines were with one particular model, which was getting older, but wasn't quite at the state that we would normally replace it. However, because they were performing so poorly, we did accelerate the removal of those devices from our environment, replacing them with a newer model that performs better.

The SaaS model has worked really well, because we don't have to manage the infrastructure. Because of COVID-19, everybody started working from home. That gave us a lot of insights around that time as to different performance and stability changes when someone is in the office versus at home.

Aternity gives us more device information now than it used to. Also, we can customize the solution now in a few different ways: PowerShell scripts being the newest method. While there may be other tools that get deeper into the device, Aternity gives us an advantage from the user experience side of things. 

I would rate this solution as an eight out of 10.

Disclosure: PeerSpot contacted the reviewer to collect the review and to validate authenticity. The reviewer was referred by the vendor, but the review is not subject to editing or approval by the vendor.
PeerSpot user
Director GWMS Development at a financial services firm with 10,001+ employees
Real User
Reduces the amount of time that we spend debugging issues
Pros and Cons
  • "It is a tool that helps me check users' computers really quickly without having a help desk administrator logging in and doing analysis. Anyone who has access to Aternity, including our support team, can log onto Aternity and do a quick, basic analysis."
  • "Right now, the user information being displayed by Aternity is received from AD. Ideally, we would like to see integration with other sources for user information, like other databases, so we are not limited to AD."

What is our primary use case?

We are using it for user experience analysis and troubleshooting of end user problems. Down the road, we are planning to integrate it with other systems and do data mining and analytics to analyze user experience trends, then correlate and generate alerts if there are systematic problems in the user experience. We can then correlate it to the line of business, location, and the specific software causing the problem.

We previously used version 7 and are now using version 11.

How has it helped my organization?

It is a tool that helps me check users' computers really quickly without having a help desk administrator logging in and doing analysis. Anyone who has access to Aternity, including our support team, can log onto Aternity and do a quick, basic analysis.

You cannot see their screen. However, you can see some statistics, numbers, and performance. After you implement your custom applications, it will give information about the device itself. It can also give you information about the network and the back-end computing. From my experience, this reduces the troubleshooting time by 70 or 80 percent.

What is most valuable?

The troubleshooting is the most valuable feature because we are experiencing some issues with end user computing. It is very helpful finding out what is the root cause.

Aternity provides visibility into the employee device and application transactions all the way through to the back-end. There are applications or nonstandard applications where you have an ability to extend them to add extra information, which we are doing right now. You can clarify the information that you receive on Aternity, like your custom application. If it is web-based, then you can customize it with minimal development and get extra information about personal transactions as well as the user experience of browsing between application tabs on the browser.

What needs improvement?

In version 7, there was a separate tab for certain applications where I could open five IE Explorer instances or pathways in Chrome, which I found really useful. It had memory consumption and CPU per process. We already indicated to Aternity that it would be helpful to have this again. 

Right now, the user information being displayed by Aternity is received from AD. Ideally, we would like to see integration with other sources for user information, like other databases, so we are not limited to AD. 

For how long have I used the solution?

I have used it for about two years.

What do I think about the stability of the solution?

In two years, we haven't had any problems with Aternity.

What do I think about the scalability of the solution?

We have had no problems with scalability.

We have deployed about 2,200 licenses so far. We are planning overall to have about 8,000 to 10,000 users.

How are customer service and technical support?

I have used the technical support a little bit. Usually, they are very good. They have been responsive and come with solutions quickly.

Which solution did I use previously and why did I switch?

We didn't have this type of tool before.

How was the initial setup?

I didn't set up the back-end. I only had experience with installing agents on users' machines. Installing the agents is very simple.

What about the implementation team?

Another team did the setup.

There is a small group who handles any performance tools. They are not a big team.

What was our ROI?

There is definitely a return because there is a 30 percent reduction in the amount of time we spend debugging issues.

Aternity has helped us to reduce hardware refresh costs by considering the actual employee experience, rather than just the age of the employees’ devices. It has definitely been very helpful by giving us the full picture of what needs to be done. We are in this specific situation because we are doing a refresh because of another initiative. It has told us that we didn't need to replace the hardware by at least 10 percent. 

What's my experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing?

The pricing for the users and agents is reasonable compared to other solutions and vendors.

Which other solutions did I evaluate?

The fact that other products may provide deeper visibility into device performance doesn't concern me at all since I get so much detail regarding what I need.

What other advice do I have?

It is a very powerful tool. We are still learning it.

The solution is very helpful to have. Companies look at the application monitoring and performance. Aternity gives you the ability to see end-to-end, so you just don't see applications; you see the user experience of an application. Because you could have the best application in your data center, but you might have problems accessing it. Or, if the computing devices are not optimal, they don't benefit from having fantastic applications on the back-end. So, it gives you the holistic view of your overall end-to-end journey.

I would rate the solution as an eight or nine out of 10 because of the improvements that I suggested.

Which deployment model are you using for this solution?

On-premises
Disclosure: PeerSpot contacted the reviewer to collect the review and to validate authenticity. The reviewer was referred by the vendor, but the review is not subject to editing or approval by the vendor.
PeerSpot user
Service Designer at a financial services firm with 10,001+ employees
Real User
The beauty is in the metrics, enabling our teams to improve device and application performance
Pros and Cons
  • "DEM-Q (Digital Experience Management Quadrant) is very useful. This is where they stand out with their dashboard, because it gives us a picture of how our company is doing compared to the other businesses out there."
  • "There are also built-in activities that let you measure things like preview mail, open address book, and send mail. Those are the activities that we are able to get measurements on, and those are things we have not seen in other software monitoring tools."
  • "We are waiting for the GA release of their agent. I hope they can do better when they release their endpoint agents. Right now, we are not able to measure some applications, core applications, because it's relying on a specific version of the agent and that agent has not come out yet and there's no ETA. I would like to see them speed up time to market when they release agents."

What is our primary use case?

We have a big number of devices and we use it to get a pulse check of how our desktops or workstations are behaving across the enterprise. We don't have it on every device. We have it scattered across all locations where we have a presence. We get metrics such as CPU information, memory utilization and, most importantly, the application performance that comes out-of-the-box with Aternity.

Let's say we release new hardware. We have a testing team and they want to see how applications will behave on that new hardware. They install Aternity and they look at the metrics — the CPU, memory utilization, and application response times. That's how a lot of our businesses use it. There's another area where we just focus on how our application is behaving. So the two core uses are hardware performance, based on a new release of hardware, and application performance, regardless of the hardware.

We used to have the on-prem Aternity solution, but now we are using their SaaS solution.

How has it helped my organization?

One of the features that Aternity has is the boot time. It measures how long a workstation takes from when you first power it on until the device is usable. We were able to provide our engineers and our developers that information. We've seen situations where these services are taking a longer time. These applications take up some of the CPU. We've shown them the data and they have come and said, "Okay, we can probably improve in this area."

The business or department that is responsible for that software or device can look at the actual metrics that we are able to provide and say, "Okay, this is actual data, not just anecdotal data from users who say, "My email is slow." They can act on it. That's the beauty of it, the metrics.

DEM-Q (Digital Experience Management Quadrant) is very useful. This is where they stand out with their dashboard, because it gives us a picture of how our company is doing compared to the other businesses out there. We're one of the big five or six banks in Canada. We are able to see how we are doing compared to the other financial industry companies out there. We don't want to compare ourselves to, let's say, technology companies or retail companies. We can compare ourselves with the financial industry. At the same time, we can also compare ourselves with the rest of the globe, but in our case, having that ability to compare ourselves with other financial industry companies is important.

What is most valuable?

The application monitoring is the most important feature. For example, how long does it take to open Outlook, or how long does it take to send an email or preview mail? How long does it take to open Word? When it comes to launch time, how quick is the application?  We use that for a lot of our Microsoft applications. The ability to measure response time is the best feature.

There are also built-in activities that let you measure things like preview mail, open address book, and send mail. Those are the activities that we are able to get measurements on, and those are things we have not seen in other software monitoring tools.

Aternity enables us to see exactly what employees see as they engage with apps. That means we use Aternity in a reactive mode. When we get a call to our help desk saying a machine is slow or acting up or not behaving as expected, we monitor the device for a couple of days, and then we make our diagnosis based on the reports. We use Aternity to troubleshoot user complaints.

What needs improvement?

We are waiting for the GA release of their agent. I hope they can do better when they release their endpoint agents. Right now, we are not able to measure some applications, core applications, because it's relying on a specific version of the agent and that agent has not come out yet and there's no ETA. I would like to see them speed up time to market when they release agents.

For how long have I used the solution?

We've gone through many iterations of their software. We have been using it for at least five years.

What do I think about the stability of the solution?

We haven't had any outages of the SaaS environment, but what we're struggling with now is the stability of the agent. We've been using a GA version. They came out with a beta version and another beta version only to scale back and remove the beta version. Now we're back to the GA version. The back-end of the SaaS is solid. It's the connector, the agent piece, where we are struggling. I have been opening tickets with Aternity because we are not getting, rather we're losing data. Our endpoints are not reporting data the way they did before when we had a more stable version.

What do I think about the scalability of the solution?

Because it's a SaaS version, it can easily adapt and scale. If we have 2,000 agents, we can easily scale to 10,000 and to 50,000 without having to consider the back-end. Scaling is very easy. I trust that their back-end will support when we scale up.

We are licensed for 2,000 end-points and we are currently using 1,000. We are waiting for the GA version of the agent before we can utilize the other 1,000. I don't want to use the remaining 1,000 on an unstable agent.

How are customer service and technical support?

Aternity's technical support is excellent. When you open a case, you get a response right away. I find their technical support very responsive.

Which solution did I use previously and why did I switch?

We did not have a previous solution.

How was the initial setup?

The initial setup was very straightforward. We signed on with our Microsoft Azure environment and had access to the SaaS version. We got the metadata. We integrated this metadata with our Azure, set it up on our Azure side, and off we went. It's very simple.

Deployment took about two weeks, including deployment of agents. It's not just a one-day task to deploy the agents. There were multiple deployments. That included setting up the single sign-ons and the dashboard.

To manage the environment we have two people involved right now, managing the console. But when it comes to the tool for getting reports and metrics, there are about 15 to 20 people doing so in different lines of business. 

What about the implementation team?

We did it ourselves, in-house.

What was our ROI?

We have seen return on our investment with Aternity. We've seen how our applications behave, especially the core applications, so we are getting a very good return on our investment.

Which other solutions did I evaluate?

We looked at a competitor, Lakeside SysTrack, but I found that Aternity gave more bang for our buck and it was going to give us the information that we need.

What other advice do I have?

Evaluate it, look at the pros and cons, define what you're looking for and, if it fits your needs, go for it. It's a very helpful tool to have in the bag. I would highly recommend it.

The biggest lesson I have learned from using Aternity is how our core applications behave. Before, we did not have any sort of metrics. Now, we have visibility into how our applications behave so we can actually tell the owners of the applications how to improve their applications.

Aternity has its own calculation for measuring user experience. Out-of-the-box, it does measure the user experience for Microsoft Office suite and the browsers that are out there:  Microsoft Edge, IE, and Chrome. It gives you a number, and it's just a good number to see, but it doesn't really tell you the whole picture. If it gives us a rating of nine, what does that really mean?

User experience is very hard to quantify because it's an aggregate score of different measurements, but it does give you an indicator of how your applications are performing. But for me, the true metric is the response time, the actual numbers that show when the user opens Outlook that it takes three seconds. For me, that's a better definition, than a rating of one to 10, for user experience. I'm not discounting Aternity's user experience metric because that is the way their competitors do it as well.

In terms of the solution providing visibility into the employee device and into application transactions all the way through the back-end, it's "yes" and "no." The solution does provide workstation performance matrix — CPU, memory, I/O read, I/O write, and network information. For all the way to the back-end, they have another solution, an APM that we are not currently utilizing. If we integrate our Aternity with APM, that's when we'll see from endpoint all the way to the back-end. But because we don't have the integration with the APM, we only see the front-end. We don't see all the way to the server side.

Aternity hasn't helped us to reduce hardware refresh costs by considering actual employee experience rather than just the age of the employees' devices because we've always had some sort of logic for when we refresh our device. It's a three-year cycle for our desktops and a four-year cycle for our laptops. Aternity has not changed that model.

The fact that other solutions may provide deeper visibility into device performance comes down to a few factors. Price — how much that other solution costs; ease of use — how easy it is to deploy to our fleet; and the quality of data. I'm sure that there are other tools out there that can do what Aternity's doing, but in our case, we are happy. We are satisfied with the data we're getting from Aternity, with its ease of use and how agents are deployed.

Disclosure: PeerSpot contacted the reviewer to collect the review and to validate authenticity. The reviewer was referred by the vendor, but the review is not subject to editing or approval by the vendor.
PeerSpot user
IT Technical Specialist at a financial services firm with 10,001+ employees
Real User
Helps us know where the problem is with fault domain isolation, but granularity of alerting and reporting needs work
Pros and Cons
  • "As a financial institution, we have a lot of applications that are either written internally or bought from a vendor and customized for us. Having a tool that lets us monitor specific transactions in those applications allows us to focus on the transactions that are important to the business."
  • "The other place for improvement, as an on-prem, non-SaaS customer, is that the system administration and management in Aternity are very difficult. They've even told me that most of their support calls come in due to configuration and system administration on their on-prem. Their on-prem solution is not easy to use."

What is our primary use case?

As a bank we have a lot of retail branches, and we especially rely on Aternity for helping us do fault domain isolation across our infrastructure and in the end-user space. We can understand relative performance between different remote locations, and we can understand, within a user profile, when there are hardware issues and when there may be software issues. We use it in our corporate offices as well, but we really see the focus being around when a branch user is having a problem. 

We're not as mature as some organizations so that we don't have a full, proactive reporting and alerting built through Aternity yet, but that's on our agenda for the near-term, in the next three to six months.

We deployed it in our own AWS space. It's not on-prem, but it's also not SaaS.

How has it helped my organization?

When we converted Windows 7 to Windows 10, we were able to isolate some issues. Aternity pointed out that there needed to be changes in the VDI. We needed more memory to be allocated. It wasn't necessarily clear just from the specs from Microsoft, but it became clear as we migrated people over, with a before-and-after view within Aternity.

When employees complain of trouble with applications or devices, Aternity enables us to see exactly what they see as they engage with apps. That allows us to focus our troubleshooting. Fault domain isolation is the difficult problem. Knowing where the problem is 75 percent of fixing the problem, or even more than that. Aternity helps us know where the problem is. We can compare different branches, we can compare different users, and we can compare different applications to help us determine what the common factors are.

What is most valuable?

The most valuable features are the ability to 

  • separate machine issues from software issues 
  • build custom monitoring of our own homegrown or non-standard applications.

As a financial institution, we have a lot of applications that are either written internally or bought from a vendor and customized for us. Having a tool that lets us monitor specific transactions in those applications allows us to focus on the transactions that are important to the business. We find it valuable to be able to see what's going on with the hardware and look at standard applications like Outlook or Teams or Office applications. Those provide a comparison point and let us separate out hardware versus software issues. 

The custom monitoring is where we really do see a lot of value.

What needs improvement?

We don't feel that we get the back-end transaction details from Aternity. We have other tools that do that.

Also, there is room for improvement in the granularity of the alerting and reporting. We would like to be able to alert on a defined set of users for a given application, for example, that all users in this group who are using this application are seeing low performance. And we would like it to provide comparisons of that to other users in a similar group that are not experiencing the issue. We would like the ability to alert and report on those types of specifics. I don't necessarily know what all the parameters are that I might want to use to slice that data, but our experience has been that within Aternity it's not always as granular as it needs to be. 

Version 11, with the Tableau reporting, offers some promise there. We're only a couple of weeks into Version 11, so we haven't fully implemented it. But that's something we're looking to improve with our new version, moving forward. 

The other place for improvement, as an on-prem, non-SaaS customer, is that the system administration and management in Aternity are very difficult. They've even told me that most of their support calls come in due to configuration and system administration on their on-prem. Their on-prem solution is not easy to use. I know it's not their focus, but for now they still have us and a lot of other customers using it, and they could improve that, rather than forcing wholesale, brand-new builds.

For how long have I used the solution?

We've had Aternity for six years.

What do I think about the stability of the solution?

The stability has been good. When we were running version 9, we did not have a lot of problems. We've run into a few applications that were affected by the agent so that we had to not use the agent on some of our very specific, custom-built apps. The Aternity agent somehow interacted with them to the point where the application did not work. But stability-wise, in general, nothing has changed.

What do I think about the scalability of the solution?

Their design is pretty scalable from what we've seen. Before I was involved with the product, people did take it from just a couple of thousand agents up to 10,000, and now we're over 20,000 agents, without too much trouble. It does scale. I've talked to other companies that have hundreds of thousands of agents.

We do not have all our business-critical applications in there. It's also not just a few. We were waiting because we just upgraded to Version 11. We are looking to now go more broadly into other applications. Certainly, the most critical applications are in there.

We have plans to increase our usage. We have a mandate to start using it more for proactive monitoring and to increase the footprint, the number of applications, that we're looking at.

How are customer service and technical support?

Aternity's technical support is average. We had to push to get the right people and resources engaged from the back-end technical. I found that a lot of the support required us to wait for an email response. We've pushed our account team and they did respond and help with that somewhat, but in general I've seen better and I've seen worse than the Aternity support, in the tech world.

Which solution did I use previously and why did I switch?

Previous to this, there wasn't really a tool that gave visibility into the end-user device experience at this level. We had related solutions from Dynatrace that would look at the back-end system performance and the front-end user experience as users connected to the servers in the data center. But they didn't look at what was happening on the desktop and how the end-user really perceived that webpage loading or that Outlook item coming in.

How was the initial setup?

The initial setup was complex. There are multiple servers involved in the management system and getting those servers to interact properly — getting them configured so that the management system, the aggregation servers, and the database all communicated properly, all shared certificates properly, and had the proper certificates installed for the API — all of those pieces were difficult. There was a lot of stuff that was not straightforward in our implementation.

Our upgrade from version 9 to version 11 took three months to get the new servers built and configured correctly, tested, load balancers built, etc. That was with Aternity support, so it was not a straightforward implementation.

In terms of an implementation plan, going to version 11 we built a development environment in AWS, completely separate from our existing version 9 production environment. We got that working and then replicated it into production and then deployed part of the solution alongside the current version 9 before we finally upgraded the full system to version 11.

Internally, on our admin side, there are three IT folks who work on Aternity.

What was our ROI?

What I'm spending versus what I'm getting is a little high, especially as I explore the possibility of moving into their SaaS solution. But I think we have had return on our investment. We had some struggles under the older version, struggles that version 11 seems to be fixing. If we get to the place where we are proactively alerting and where we're giving better reporting, both of which are available in the new version, then we'll absolutely be getting return on our investment from our on-prem.

What's my experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing?

In my opinion they are asking a lot for their SaaS solution, but I also know that that's the direction they're going. They seem like they're on the high side for what they're providing, but we're not fully implemented. We've got some room for growth. As we grow into using Aternity more, I would hope that we'll be able to do that with costs staying flat. Then it would become more of a return on investment.

Their pricing is a little high. Their pricing model has changed from the old style — and all companies are doing this — the older perpetual license plus maintenance, to more of a subscription-based service. They're pricing their subscription a little high right now.

The current, on-prem solution is probably a fair price. I need to get more value out of it, so that's where I hesitate a little bit. But especially in the SaaS world, when I looked at some of the pricing, I was a bit taken aback.

Which other solutions did I evaluate?

At the time, we did not look at other solutions. I wasn't managing the team that runs Aternity at the time Aternity was chosen. I don't know for sure what else they looked at. We have looked briefly at other solutions in the past, after having already had Aternity in place, and have not chosen to take it out, at least not yet.

What other advice do I have?

My advice would be to push the support people to help you. Engage the vendor early in the process, via Pro Services or via the support, to help with the implementation. Aternity support requires you to press a little bit to get what you want. If you want to get support, you have to engage them strongly and be very assertive.

Have a solid list of objectives for what applications and what activities you want to have monitored. It's easy to get lost in "Let's look at everything" without understanding what your key, business-critical functions are. Have a top-10, top-20, top-50 list of activities and attack them that way. That's been a bit of a weakness in our implementation.

The fact that other products may provide deeper visibility into device performance does not concern us. We've had very few cases, to date, that have required any deeper level of device performance metrics.

Right now I would rate Aternity at about a seven out of 10, and with the potential to go right up to an eight-and-a-half or nine if we get our version 11 implementation completed the way we're planning.

Which deployment model are you using for this solution?

Private Cloud
Disclosure: PeerSpot contacted the reviewer to collect the review and to validate authenticity. The reviewer was referred by the vendor, but the review is not subject to editing or approval by the vendor.
PeerSpot user
Team Lead - IT Collaboration at a retailer with 10,001+ employees
Real User
Provides us with real-time monitoring and covers desktop applications
Pros and Cons
  • "The most valuable feature is the alerting. As soon as we click on an incident, it takes us directly to the problematic PC. It's a direct solution. We click on an alert and it takes us to the incident details. The details show in different colors, in a graphical representation, and I like that the most."
  • "When it comes to what is called creating signatures, it's not easy for a non-coding person for desktop applications. You need to run the recording and you need to have some exposure and knowledge. That is an area where they can improve. For web applications, they have the Web Activity Creator and that's an awesome and easy tool. Anybody can use it and capture the signatures. With the desktop applications it's a little more cumbersome and difficult."

What is our primary use case?

Because we are in retail, we have a lot of store-facing applications and they have some performance issues. We really want to know how an application is behaving at the endpoint, from the end-user perspective. We support Microsoft Teams, SharePoint, and all the Microsoft SaaS products.

How has it helped my organization?

If a user was having any issues they used to call us. After we installed Aternity it helped by sending advanced alerts so we can proactively look at the issues, whether it's an issue with the PC, the network, or the back-end. It's a nice tool.

The solution provides metrics about actual employee experience with business-critical apps. We have used this feature to measure employee experience before and after changes to applications, in a few cases. Microsoft products are in the cloud and Microsoft releases a lot of changes. Teams is an example, as is SharePoint. They release a lot of patches and we were able to see them, before and after. We chose a nice graphic to show the before and after for the response time. I like this response-time graph. It's very useful and beneficial for any code changes.

It also helps to reduce hardware refresh costs by considering the actual employee experience, rather than just the age of employees' devices. In our teams, a lot of people are complaining about an issue with device memory. The recommended amount is 8 GB to 16 GB. People who have 8 GB are complaining. But looking at the PC, it's not just a RAM issue. It may be due to other challenges, issues with the back-end or network. It depends, in each case. But we can really see, if we run a report on those running 8-GB-memory PCs, whether there is good performance or not. Maybe one or two of those PCs are not doing well, but the remaining ones are good. I don't have details on how much it has saved us in refresh costs, but we have around 200 PCs and upgrading all 200 PCs' memory with 16 GB or 32 GB could cost a lot. It's not viable for any company to upgrade each and every PC's memory.

When employees complain of trouble with applications or devices, Aternity enables us to see exactly what they see as they engage with apps. In fact, we get advanced notice. So rather than the user complaining, we get to know in advance and will see what the hiccups are. We can correlate the user experience. It makes troubleshooting easy. At a high level, the application support teams who don't know much about coding can tell if it is an issue with the data center or the back-end network. It can tell them the root cause at a high level. And if there is any outage it will also tell them that. If the application is down, they'll know how long it's been down. It mainly plots out a graph and shows what time it started, what time it ended, how many users were impacted, and how many business locations were impacted.

We can look into a lot more details about Microsoft Teams, specifically the audio or the video, and we can look at network stats on it.

What is most valuable?

The most valuable feature is the alerting. As soon as we click on an incident, it takes us directly to the problematic PC. It's a direct solution. We click on an alert and it takes us to the incident details. The details show in different colors, in a graphical representation, and I like that the most. 

To give an example, we have a SharePoint portal and we configured about 15 banners. If any one of them is breaching the threshold of the number of users, any support person can easily click the incident and nail what the root cause is by looking at the graphical representation. It may be the network or another issue.

There are a lot more features for troubleshooting and monitoring and a few other tabs are available, nicely presented. 

The beauty of this product is that it does support desktop. I've seen a lot of products and they have synthetic monitoring, but they're not real-time. Aternity is real-time and it covers desktop applications. An APM may not help, but a real end-user solution like this is helping us with any issues on the desktop. The thin client is running on the local machine, so we need to know what's happening at the end-user machine. This is another one of the features I like. 

Another nice feature is that we can customize a lot of dashboards using Tableau.

What needs improvement?

Maybe they could extend coverage. Right now it is only for mobile, desktop, and web. If they could extend it to point-of-sale devices, that would be helpful. For example, your local floral shop has a scanner. I want to know what the performance of that device is like. It may be slow. Or when you go to pump gas and the screens are slow, these are the kinds of point-of-sale that we could start troubleshooting. That would be a nice feature.

Also, when it comes to what is called creating signatures, it's not easy for a non-coding person for desktop applications. You need to run the recording and you need to have some exposure and knowledge. That is an area where they can improve. For web applications, they have the Web Activity Creator and that's an awesome and easy tool. Anybody can use it and capture the signatures. With the desktop applications it's a little more cumbersome and difficult.

Aternity provides visibility into the employee device and into application transactions all the way through the back-end, but it does not support that at a high level. It's not really detailed, but for support people it is helpful so that they can tell if the problem is with the end-user PC, the network, or maybe the back-end. But when you talk about the Waterfall details, it's not providing any. If they could include that, it would be great.

For how long have I used the solution?

I have been using Aternity for about one-and-a-half years.

What do I think about the stability of the solution?

It is stable. I haven't seen any issues, other than a few outages. They were able to fix them on-the-fly.

What do I think about the scalability of the solution?

Scaling is very easy because it's a SaaS product. If you want to add more endpoints, it's easily achievable. In terms of increasing deployment it all depends how you're going to handle it: manual or automated. On a scale of one to 10, scaling is a seven to eight. It's easily scalable.

We currently have 200 users, meaning 200 stores. But we have about 3,000 stores. Even if there are only two or three pieces per store, that would be around 10,000 endpoints.

Maintenance is very minimal. One person is more than enough for maintaining 1,000 or even 10,000. The development is a one-time effort, and after that it is all maintenance. It's just administration: installing the endpoints, making sure endpoints are talking to each other, and configuring any new applications.

How are customer service and technical support?

Their support is good. They respond on time.

The transition from Riverbed was smooth. Aternity was acquired by Riverbed and now it's a different entity. But we didn't see any difficulty or hiccups. The transition was easy and I haven't seen any difference in the support, other than that the support portals were all changed. Riverbed has its own URL.

Which solution did I use previously and why did I switch?

We used AppDynamics, but it's purely for application performance from the data center, not the end-user. We did not have any tool and we had a lack of end-user visibility.

We tried synthetic monitoring. It's like there is a PC sitting and running a few scripts at several intervals. But if there is an issue and we want to get real-time stats, synthetic monitoring lacks that. For example, if the network seems to be good at 10 o'clock and the back-end and PC seems to be good, but at 11 o'clock the network is slow, you only know the 10 o'clock stats. At 11 o'clock you don't know what happened. Aternity has 

  • real-time monitoring
  • very good alerting 
  • ServiceNow integration. 

How was the initial setup?

Setting up the process is very straightforward. All you need to do to install is double click a link. The user does that. And from an admin perspective, it's very easy for web applications. You directly punch in a URL and it can monitor based on the thresholds.

The complexity is only with the desktop application configuration and we need to do that to capture business activities. It requires some expertise. It's not as easy for someone from the support team. You need some development knowledge.

Because this is SaaS, it's not on-prem, all you need to do is procure the license. For the endpoints you can do it manually or use automation. The time it takes to deploy depends on the number of endpoints. We use Radia to deploy to 200 endpoints and do any upgrades. It's a straightforward process. It also depends on the number of applications. For one application and between 100 and 500 endpoints, it might take four weeks or so.

Some customization may be needed and that has to be done by Aternity's SaaS team. For example, if you want to do location mapping or fast tenant configuration for Microsoft Teams, there is a process for talking to any external SaaS tenant. We had to do some customization on this, importing certificates.

What was our ROI?

We have not seen ROI on a large scale because we are planning to go with this on a large scale. We are just doing 200 endpoints. But it is definitely helping us.

What's my experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing?

Pricing depends on the number of endpoints. With only 200 endpoints, which is what we have, it may be a little expensive. But I think pricing is negotiable; that's what I heard from sales.

Which other solutions did I evaluate?

There are other products for this kind of functionality, but for our use case there is no such tool because we are directly looking at the user PC, rather than comparing how much detail someone else might give us. If you are having an issue, I am looking directly at your PC and seeing what happened during that time frame. I can see resource consumption on the PC for that process; Aternity's resource consumption data is very good. And it also has basic remediation, such as restarting the process, emptying the recycle bin. We haven't done much, but there are so many features available.

We tried Microsoft monitoring itself and AppDynamics synthetic monitoring and there was one more product that we did a PoC with as well. Other solutions we looked into were not real-time monitoring solutions and that's the primary reason that we selected Aternity.

What other advice do I have?

I would definitely recommend this product if you're looking to get on-time, real-time alerts from the end-user point of view. Your application may be good with hosting in Azure or AWS, but when it comes to the end-user, it's important to know how your application is behaving. What is the performance like? What is the user interaction like with your application?

It is not only for monitoring. At an enterprise level, the 10,000-foot overview, we can see a lot more details. We can generate a lot more stats for the enterprise. We can see the software inventory and how long it has been in use. For example, if anybody is using Microsoft Visio or Word, the licensed products, we can decide to move them from inventory and save some money. We can also look at how the Macs are performing compared to Windows. We can run queries and it can generate a lot more data about the end-user.

We are dependent on Aternity. We get daily alerts and they help my administration team and my support team a lot. They get to know things in advance and that way they can isolate the problem and start working on it.

I would rate the solution at eight out of 10. The two points that I'm not giving it are because a little development knowledge is required for configuring desktop applications, and to create some dashboards you need some Tableau knowledge. It doesn't require much scripting; it's easy, drag-and-drop, but people should be aware that some development knowledge is required for creating advanced dashboards.

Disclosure: PeerSpot contacted the reviewer to collect the review and to validate authenticity. The reviewer was referred by the vendor, but the review is not subject to editing or approval by the vendor.
PeerSpot user
it_user382059 - PeerSpot reviewer
Senior Advisor, IT Operations at a healthcare company with 10,001+ employees
Real User
The most valuable features for us are the ​Incident Management dashboard, Application Status dashboard, and Activity Analysis UI​.
Pros and Cons
  • "The most valuable features for us are the Incident Management dashboard, Application Status dashboard, and Activity Analysis UI."
  • "The only thing I can say which has been frustrating are the Tableau workspace/dashboard options out-of-the-box, at least prior to version 8."

How has it helped my organization?

The overarching value of the tool is its real-time accuracy, down to the user/host level. We use it for the front-line aspect which is so often discussed in the Aternity videos, or more specifically, to triage issues as they occur and determine whether the main problem is application, host, or network related.

What is most valuable?

The most valuable features for us are the Incident Management dashboard, Application Status dashboard, and Activity Analysis UI.

What needs improvement?

The only thing I can say which has been frustrating are the Tableau workspace/dashboard options out-of-the-box, at least prior to version 8. A simple example: the US map can be ¼ of the dashboard, but there's no out-of-the-box full-screen US map which can show minor/major data points for business locations. And the ¼ screen widget of the US map is, of course, not by default expandable to the full screen. A trifle for sure, but annoying. I think

What do I think about the stability of the solution?

We've had no issues with stability.

What do I think about the scalability of the solution?

We've had no scalability issues from a pure agent-volume standpoint. However, the memory and CPU requirements of the Tableau server (also hosts the Tableau Aternity Gateway daemon) cannot be underestimated. 12GB of RAM and quad-core CPU was not sufficient.

How are customer service and technical support?

We go through an Aternity business partner -- J9 Tech -- who is absolutely outstanding. In the cases where they have to open their own internal tickets with Aternity, the support is truly the best I’ve seen in my 18 years traveling, consulting, and fixing complex software issues across many different vendors. The degree to which Aternity customer support is proactive is off the charts. And the skill, speed, and precision of the technical support from both their implementation services team as well as their development team in Tel Aviv is simply par excellence — the best by a mile and in a class by itself.

Which solution did I use previously and why did I switch?

We use NetIQ (base Windows host resource monitoring), HP’s BPM (synthetic trans scripting), and some of IBM’s ITCAM for Robotic Response Time, and we actually continue to use them for various business units which are accustomed to them. None have the level of granularity possible with Aternity for event/end-user monitoring or the level of real-time precision.

How was the initial setup?

The initial setup was very straightforward -- three-tier arch with all communications occurring upstream (Management Server implements agent config changes by touching a file to the aggregation servers -- tier2 -- which is then picked up not by a downcall to the agent, but by an upcall from the agent to the Agg server). Thus, network and firewall issues are vastly simplified.

What about the implementation team?

We did both with J9 Tech, the aforementioned Aternity business partner, as well as some in-house help from yours truly and a few colleagues.

What was our ROI?

Our ROI is not nearly as much as it could be as we’re only now getting our internal customers to use it for more than just triaging incidents or real-time problem analysis. Alerting, incident management, and reporting are woefully under-utilized as of yet for us.

What's my experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing?

It’s a little on the costly side, but if you license intelligently, accounting for your various hosts connecting in through VDI or terminal servers, you can make it well worth your money. The product quality will speak for itself.

Which other solutions did I evaluate?

I wasn’t involved before the P.O. was signed, but I hear we narrowed very quickly to Aternity based on recommendations like this one which we received from other prior customers.

What other advice do I have?

Definitely ensure your internal customers/constituents are fully on board before rollout—network route and firewall issues can plague what should otherwise be a smooth deployment. Once deployment is complete you will be amazed how quickly valid, actionable data comes out of the UI.

Disclosure: PeerSpot contacted the reviewer to collect the review and to validate authenticity. The reviewer was referred by the vendor, but the review is not subject to editing or approval by the vendor.
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Updated: March 2024
Buyer's Guide
Download our free DEM - Digital Experience Monitoring Report and find out what your peers are saying about Riverbed, Nexthink, Lakeside Software, and more!