Alluvio Aternity Reviews

Within our company, we have approximately 2,700 users and around 3,000 devices. We primarily use Aternity on our mobile laptop fleet, which includes about 1,200 devices. We use it to get insights into usability and user-experience on those devices.

We use it to monitor applications, application performance, for alerting of system errors, troubleshooting, tracking changes and how they've affected the performance. We use it for all the functions of the platform to give us that visibility.

We're using the SaaS version.

Without a tool like this, that can give you insights into how things are behaving, you can't really see that from an IT administrator's perspective. Oftentimes, an IT user will call and say, "I'm having this problem," or, "I had this problem yesterday." Without having the device there in front of you, it's sometimes very difficult to get the details. This platform has given us a lot of those details. It's always on and listening as long as the device is in use. We can jump back in time and say, "What happened around this time? Oh, we can see this application crashed." It helps a lot with the troubleshooting of problems, and trending and determining how widespread a particular problem is. It helps us prioritize problems appropriately. If we see that one person is having a problem, it's obviously isolated, it's not a wider spread application problem. It gives us that visibility.

As we have problems being reported through our service desk, this gives us a way to go back and determine how many users could be affected. We can shift from reactive to more proactive and watch for certain things like blue screens or application crashes. It's helped us better prioritize our problems as a result of having that visibility.

It's making us aware of where we should be spending our time. There are certainly time-savings in the sense that we're not spending time on things that aren't unnecessary.

Also, the ability to compare benchmarks has affected our decisions about IT investments. It's something that we have used and will use as we adopt new technologies, to understand the performance hits of the application. While we haven't realized the full return in that regard, it's something that we will.

In addition, it has reduced the mean time to mediation. I can't give you a metric because it's not something we're actively tracking right now.

We've looked at the Digital Experience Management Quadrant (DEM-Q) to see how our digital experience compares to others who use the solution. We have used that to see how we are trending and it gives us some insight into areas that we might need to focus more on. That's helpful. It's a new feature. 

It gives you the ability to filter the comparison by geography, industry, or company size. Obviously, I'm not going to compare myself to another area that may not be relevant and that doesn't run similar applications to those we do as a financial sector company. I wouldn't say it's not valuable, but I wouldn't say it's super-valuable to us as a company. Others might feel differently.

The reporting is okay, but the alerting and reporting could use some more polish. We can't alert on certain things that we'd like to. For example, if an application is using a certain percentage of processor resources for a specific period of time, then alert. It's not as extensible or flexible, on the alerting side of things, as we would like. 

You have to build out dashboards for everything and the Tableau back-end, while it's okay, is unique. They could probably improve that a little bit.

If it did some additional correlation of problems, that would be helpful. For instance, capturing certain events and event IDs: If I have an application crash, it might report that the application crashed but that's about as far as it goes. It doesn't always give you event IDs or faulting module names. It doesn't go as deep as I would like it to go in correlating problems. It's not necessarily pointing you in the direction of what's causing the problem, for example, if it's a driver or, "Hey, I noticed this particular firmware was updated and followed by an increase in crashes. That could be your problem." It's left for you to be "Sherlock," but it's giving you the clues.

I have been using Aternity for about a year.

The stability has been fine. The platform is always available. Occasionally, we get weirdness with certain dashboards not loading, and we have to refresh the screen, but nothing too major there. 

We haven't had any major issues with it not being available or being usable.

There are no concerns with scalability, given that it's a SaaS platform. (I know they do offer an on-prem). 

To my knowledge, we're well below any threshold or level that we need to be concerned with. For our environment size, it's just fine.

It is only on a fraction of our devices. It's all of our laptop fleet, which is somewhere on 1,200 or 1,300 devices, currently. Beyond that, we could be deploying this within our virtual desktop environment. We could be deploying it to our physical desktops, to get that same visibility. This is just where we started, where we had the biggest need.

Our timeframe for scaling it to other devices is unknown, at this point. There isn't an urgent need, like there was for laptops, because of the nature of the device being very mobile and off-network. It could be 12-plus months before we expand our usage.

Our experience with their tech support has been good. There have not been any concerns or problems that we haven't been able to get solved through their support.

We haven't had to open a ton of tickets. We're self-sufficient in many ways. A lot of times, what we did for the concerns or the questions we had was to engage with our Professional Services administrator or a contact at Aternity who was dedicated to us, through that time period. Since then, we haven't really had any problems or anything we've had to open up tickets for.

Dealing with the salespeople, my impression is that they were very professional. They weren't overly pushy and we appreciated that. They were very flexible and ultimately wanted the solution to work for us before they were trying to just push it on us. We work with plenty of other vendors that are in there for the quick sale and then back out. I haven't experienced that with Aternity. Our sales rep was fantastic and had a good mindset. Dealing with them has been an enjoyable experience.

We didn't have any solution. It didn't displace anything. It was brand-new.

We went with it because, in our environment, we became a lot more mobile. We replaced desktops with laptops, and for a device that's not always on our network, or a device that's not even within our reach physically, it became clear that we needed something that would help us monitor for certain problems. We also needed something to help us understand the consistency of our environment and the usability, as well as the experience of the end-users from their perspective. Especially with COVID this year and having a very remote workforce because of COVID, that additional visibility was necessary.

The initial setup, as far as deploying the agents and collecting the data goes, is very straightforward. It's pretty simple. You basically download an agent and, using your other modern management tools to deploy a software package out to your fleet, it's going to start checking in. It's just what you do with the data after you've got the agents deployed and collected, that requires a little bit more heavy lifting.

Altogether, our deployment took about three months. Part of that was due to COVID, which caused us to take a break. We did a long PoC of it, and I include that in our year-long time of use. But as actual paying customers, it's only been since the end of last year or beginning of this year. Of that three months it was probably really about a month-and-a-half of actual deployment.

I had two sysadmins involved in the setup and they're taking care of the maintenance of the solution.

We used Aternity's services and engaged with them to go through the setup and configuration of the environment.

We have absolutely seen ROI. We did not have any visibility. We were completely disconnected from what was really going on in our fleet. This has really given us that visibility. We can understand problems and impact in scoping them in our environment, and we can understand how the configuration changes we're making are affecting that performance. It's really given us a very high level of visibility that we've just not ever had.

We haven't really yet realized a cost savings from the solution, but where it has probably helped us improve is in reducing the mean time to resolution, by giving us that visibility. It is also helping us to focus on the things that matter the most, that are moving the needle, and not the things that are just an island and not widespread.

Regarding cost, compared to other solutions, Aternity is pretty low. It's definitely lower-cost than others that we looked at, like Nexthink. Nexthink was a very expensive solution. The cost is reasonable. It's what I would expect a solution like this to be. It's definitely not on the higher end, that's for sure.

If you do the hosted solution, there is a hosted SaaS-type fee, per license, but it is pretty minimal.

We looked at a bunch of other products and we didn't see any other product that gave us any greater detail. The challenge with Aternity is that you have to build a dashboard for everything you do. The back-end they use is a Tableau back-end and for someone who has never worked in that type of an environment, like some of my team members, my sysadmins, it can be a little bit of a learning curve.

We've looked at AppDynamics and Nexthink. ControlApp is another platform we use internally that we looked at using here. However, these devices are Azure-AD joined and it couldn't work there.

As far as AppDynamics goes, it's really focused on a company that does a lot of internal development, developing its own applications and platforms. You have to wrap your code with their APIs so that it can collect that data for those types of activities, like load times and activity times: "I clicked on this button, how long did it take to actually get a response?" That was the negative for us. My team doesn't develop and, as a company, we don't do a lot of development work that my team supports. So that eliminated it. 

It was really about the end-user experience angle and getting visibility into how our environment is performing. How are the changes we're making affecting the end-user? We needed more of an end-user perspective than AppDynamics gives you. 

Nexthink is a similar product, but a lot of what they do is web-based activities. It's not necessarily as in-depth as Aternity. It can give you an experience score, but it's more of a web-based, HTTP call format, that it gives you the data on. It didn't have the depth that we needed to give us the visibility to really help us understand our environment and the impact of the changes we're making. That's part of the reason why we eliminated it as a contender.

Be prepared that you're going to have to build it out to fit your environment and make sure that the expertise is there to understand how to do that. My advice would be to engage their Professional Services. They were really good. The gentleman who helped us was top-notch, and if he didn't have the answers he received the answers for us. That would be my recommendation to help realize the return on investment and get the visibility and the data in the format that you want to see it. That's pretty essential.

The biggest lesson we've learned from using Aternity is that a tool like this is absolutely necessary for you to understand your environment. If you ever want to be a proactive company that is trying to get ahead of problems, then you have to have something like this. It gives you that visibility. Without it, you're going to be in the dark and left to people reporting problems through your service desk. That's the biggest learning experience from having this platform.

Aternity doesn't currently provide metrics about actual employee experience of all business-critical apps. It's something you have to build out. It's not "canned" that way and there is a lot of configuration that you have to do to the environment to collect the data you want to collect and that is important to you.

We plan on growing that side of it. We've only had it for about a year, and since a lot of those things are very unique and specific to an environment, it's not an easy thing where you just click a couple buttons and say, "Now, start looking at this." You have to build it out, and that's one of the pluses and minuses about the platform. There is a basic set of applications that it's monitoring. It's looking at specific activities, such as time to open an application or a certain activity to create a new message or an email within an application. That basic, canned stuff is there, but it requires you to build those out and it's something that's unique to their product, the way that they work it. It's a positive and negative.

Aternity doesn't enable us to see exactly what employees see as they engage with apps. There's a little bit of heavy lifting to build out those activities. It's not like, out-of-the-box, it's going to show you everything. It collects a lot of data but presenting the data is up to the administrator and how you use the data. It's not going to necessarily point you to problems, but may help you correlate problems. It does gather the data, but it's not always in a format that's going to make sense to you. The key there is that it's extensible and it's flexible enough to give you the data that's important to you. But it requires the administrator to have a fairly in-depth level of knowledge, using their tools, to build these activities.

In terms of visibility into the employee device and into application transactions, all the way through to the back-end, it's really more end-user facing. It's from the perspective of the end-user. Think about it in terms of on a laptop or desktop and the things that users might do within there. You have to build that out.

Overall, I would rate Aternity an eight out of 10. It's looking at things from the end-user's perspective, not from a specific application's perspective, although you can do that too. But you try to understand how the applications and things being used are affecting the user's experience. It's all about the end-user experience, where other platforms are not necessarily there. They might just be helping you troubleshoot problems as they come up. It's not higher than an eight because there's still room for improvement. There could be some additional things built for you, out-of-the-box. Certainly building those dashboards is not the most intuitive thing. There's a little bit of a learning curve there.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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

We did not have a previous solution.

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. 

We did it ourselves, in-house.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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. 

I have used it for about two years.

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

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.

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

We didn't have this type of tool before.

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

Another team did the setup.

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

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. 

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

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.

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.

We use it for end-user computer performance monitoring and troubleshooting.

In short, Aternity gives us the actual user performance data. This is very different, because typically a lot of the end-user device performance was handled by experience. The client service engineers would base their evaluation on their experience, and of course, typically they would say that the secret of IT is "restart." When they would troubleshoot a user's computer problem, they would tend to go with restart or reinstall or reimage, which is the ultimate step. If they could not solve all the problems, they would just reimage the whole thing. 

Aternity gives us the capability to troubleshoot, to find out exactly where the problem is. It enables us not only to fix the current problem, but it gives us the knowledge to prevent similar problems in other computers. That gives us the capability to provide proactive end-user support.

The most valuable feature is the application performance troubleshooting because Aternity is able to provide the performance from the end-user perspective. It doesn't just give the standard application logon time, etc., rather it's also able to measure the performance inside the application, the performance of specific transactions in the application, and break it down into three elements: the client time, the network time, and the server time. This gives us a lot of insights into what we need to focus on to improve the performance of an application.

Another area is the before and after comparison. Before and after any change, we can use Aternity to compare the performance. For example, when we implement a big application on our infrastructure, or even let's say when they moved the office, we had the user performance benchmark in the previous office location. Once they moved to a new location, we could look at Aternity and the overall performance and see if there was any change. We find that's a very helpful feature. 

The new office was supposed to have newer hardware, bigger than what we had, so the performance was supposed to be better. And it turned out, after the move, that user feedback was mixed. They couldn't really spell out what the real issue was and we didn't know if it was based on their feeling. But from the Aternity data we could tell that the network performance actually dropped. Then we started to look into what could be the problem and what we found out that the network equipment was misconfigured. That led to the correction of the error and we could see from Aternity that the performance was getting much better. That was one of the experiences we had using it for the before and after comparison.

A third valuable feature is the end-user device troubleshooting or the performance monitoring. For example, when we look at a computer that has slow WiFi connectivity, we are able to see what is the actual transmission speed, what the WiFi signal strength is, etc. We are able to find out what the possible causes are of the user performance issues. This gives us great insights.

Also, all the way to the back-end from the server, Aternity provides visibility into the employee device and into application transactions, in the SaaS version. We haven't fully tested that yet. But Aternity has the capability of analyzing the server side and to break it down further into different processes and different procedures that have longer lead times.

In addition, the Digital Experience Management Quadrant (DEM-Q) to see how our digital experience compares to others who use Aternity, has gained a lot of attention, not just from IT staff but also from management. We are looking at it and trying to understand what the numbers mean and, more importantly, what the costs are. It tells us we are in a certain quadrant. Why are we there? What can we do to improve? It's very interesting. I wouldn't say it's helpful yet, because we haven't fully understood it, but we are very interested in it.

Aternity does provide performance numbers, the data. However, it doesn't tell you what you can do about it. It just presents the facts. How to interpret the data, and how to draw conclusions from a lot of the data, requires knowledge and experience. That's the part that I would hope Aternity can continue to explore and give us that kind of capability.

I understand it's challenging. A lot of things may not be due to a single factor or make it easy to draw out an action plan. If, for example, we look at the stability index and it's low, there could be many factors involved. Right now, Aternity doesn't tell you that maybe by doing this or that sequence you can improve your stability next. Not yet. That's the area I'm hoping for. For the time being, I'm developing the team who will have the experience and knowledge and provide that part of the capability.

It is an area that I would love to see Aternity make more progress in, but I also understand it's challenging. There's definitely the room to continuously explore it. It requires very good experience with the hardware and also requires a lot of intelligence. It's going to be very exciting if Aternity can make more of a breakthrough in that area.

We are also trying to integrate it with ServiceNow. We are still learning that process. It would be easier if they had more configurations or the capability to inject the logic into the interface. For example, right now Aternity creates alerts that can turn into ServiceNow tickets, but there are a few areas that can be improved.

First, the alert is pretty much defined by Aternity. An alert has to be created to be converted to a ticket. But if I don't need to create an alert, can I make a dashboard and create certain parameters and convert from those parameters into a ticket? That would be very powerful. Right now, only alerts can convert to tickets.

Second, when they convert to tickets, it would be helpful if they put in a lot more logic which we can easily configure. For example, when a user is from a certain region, it would be good if we could automatically assign the issue to the specific IT group in that region. We are still working on this. Right now, the scripts for the integration are still rather complex and we are still trying to understand this part.

On another topic, if they had an easier way to claim back a license, that would be beneficial to us, but it may not be very beneficial to Aternity, because we might not need to buy so many licenses. For some computers, once we finish troubleshooting, we probably don't need Aternity on them all the time.

I have been using Aternity for at least the past five or six years. We were using on-prem Aternity for many years, and only this year we've migrated to the SaaS version.

Generally, it's quite stable. 

There have been some incidents where the agent was deployed but didn't report back the data. In those cases, redeploying the agent typically resolved the issue. Overall, the stability is good. I don't have much of a concern about that.

I do notice, in terms of the timeliness of the data, it may not be what I expected. I was expecting data for what happened 10 minutes ago, but that may not be there. So the timeliness may not be real-time.

Scalability is mainly the cost side of it. To roll it out to more users, it's pretty straightforward. You just deploy the agents.

Currently, we have about 1,000 devices in the solution. Whether we will increase our usage depends on how well we can prove the value of Aternity to the users, to IT, and to management.

Most of the time we get quite a good response. The people that we have worked with, from our collaboration with their accounts team and the presales team, are excellent. We met a number of the people and they are extremely friendly and helpful, and they're very patient. I'm very impressed by the people.

We didn't use any other similar solution. Aternity is the one that we have used for the end-user performance, monitoring, and troubleshooting, all these years.

The SaaS version is pretty straightforward, there's not much of a set up, per se. The setup is more about the client deployment. 

When we switched to the SaaS version, the deployment took at least one month. The reason was not just the deployment. The reason was more about the internal process, because we don't have enough licenses for every computer. That meant we had to identify the end-user devices to which we would push the agent. That took time. It's not the complexity of Aternity, it was our decision on whom to push it to.

In terms of selecting the users, we went by different categories. Every company can certainly make its own decision about whom they want to deploy to. We wanted to deploy to some of the VIP users, and we also wanted to deploy to users who had more frequent use of certain key applications. We also wanted to deploy to the users who tended to have more issues. And we also deployed to the Citrix users.

For deployment of Aternity we don't require much staff, but we do for support. We definitely need people to constantly look at it, to analyze it, and to generate the reports. We have a team to support Aternity. The core team is about four people but we leverage the client service team as well. We are trying to develop the client service teams in the different regions to be able to analyze the user performance data for that region and for other regions, and to take care of the device issues in their region. For us, Aternity is a tool to give out the information. As I mentioned, the action part still needs to be taken by our IT folks.

We did it ourselves.

I'm trying hard to justify Aternity, but sometimes it's very hard to come up with a return of investment for it. It's hard to calculate the value of, for example, the performance improvement of your competitor. I haven't come up with a good way of calculating the return on investment yet.

Pricing and licensing is pretty standard.

Ever since I have been using it and have been the main advocate of Aternity, I haven't evaluated other solutions, even though I do hear about other solutions. I look into some of the comparisons, but I haven't really done a thorough comparison.

I do recommend the SaaS version, which has a lot of very good features. And I recommend the team, it's very friendly and helpful. But I would also caution that you need to put in the effort to learn the tool. It's not something that, when you have the tool, all the problems go away. It only tells you the data. How to use the data, how to derive the action and how to improve, still relies on the people who are reviewing the data. It's like the weather forecast. They tell you the weather forecast, but it's your decision, whether you still want to go out or you want to climb a mountain. 

Aternity does require effort from the IT team. They need to spend time and learn how to best use the tool. There is definitely a lot of reward from doing that.

The solution hasn't yet helped us to reduce hardware refresh costs by considering actual employee experience, rather than just the age of the employees’ devices, but it's an interesting point. I would like to explore it more. Even though we have been using Aternity for a few years, we were not able to justify the value very well in the past, when it was on-prem. This year, with the Aternity SaaS version, we are paying a lot of attention to it. 

I hope we can derive all the value from Aternity, including reducing refresh costs. It makes sense that if we analyze the user's performance and it is still functioning very well, we probably don't need to replace it based on the number of years the device has been in use. But we are talking about the end-user device as the primary focus. Their failure is not just in application performance alone. It could be the monitor having a problem, or it could be the battery having a problem, or it could be the motherboard having a problem. I would like to see whether Aternity can help us to reduce and avoid unnecessary refreshes.

One of our use cases was to cover some gaps in our current monitoring. We have visibility into the flows and the traffic coming from our branch routers. We have visibility into the infrastructure, SNMP monitoring for our servers, but we never had anything previously to tell us what the end-user is seeing.

The biggest use case we have is identifying the scope of issues. We get tickets all the time saying, "The network is slow at this location." Being able to see and compare the performance of the applications at different locations is huge for us. And when we have an application that's having issues, it will let us know the scope; if it's just one site or all users or one user on VPN.

We have relatively large operations. I'm responsible for North and South America and although we're part of a global network as well, that's currently my scope. We looked for a solution to help us improve end-user performance monitoring. We have about 8,000 workstations distributed across about 500 locations in the U.S., and in South America, we have 3,000 machines in roughly 200 locations.

I was looking at it more from the point of view of the performance of the applications. But our service desk has gotten a lot of value out of it because it really can pull all the details from the workstation side. That was a whole separate piece that is actually a very big piece, now, of the use case that really wasn't even something we had planned for.

In terms of cost savings, there's a piece in Aternity that shows application usage. For licensed software, things like Visio or Microsoft Project, a lot of people say they may need that software, but you can run reports and see who's actually using it. If they're not using, you can reassign those licenses which results in actual hard savings.

If we see issues on the network side, it will help guide the troubleshooting process in the user experience. We actually had a call yesterday with our developers to introduce them to the application and see if it is something that they could start using in their QA and validation testing. We haven't gotten to that point yet, but we are starting to look at it.

It also provides visibility into the employee device and into application transactions all the way through to the back-end. That lets you see what the users are actually spending their time working on. We have in-house applications, but it lets us know if they're using them. If we roll out an updated piece of software and we see users are having problems with the new version, we'll stop, for sure, and review and see how we can improve it.

Something else it has is the "smart refresh" dashboard. It's something that we're looking to review further when we start our next refresh cycle. We've already used it to validate performance improvements by increasing memory on some machines before we actually do a full roll-out of a memory upgrade. It's one of the sweet spots for the product.

Aternity provides metrics about actual employee experience of all business-critical apps, rather than just a few. It does some out-of-the-box monitoring for the Office suite, but you can create custom monitoring for any of your applications, whether a web client or a desktop application. There's a process where you record the transactions and then you feed that into Aternity in an XML file. It then looks at what you're clicking on and what the URL is and, if it sees that on other clients, it can start recording the transactions for those applications.

We've used that feature to measure employee experience before and after changes to applications, devices, or operating systems. That's something that is really interesting. One of the dashboards can tell you, when an application is having issues, when the issues started or when we had a change window. It will baseline the performance before and after that change window.

The process of doing the application recording is a bit cumbersome. It would be nice if there were a friendlier way to do that, or more predefined applications. 

Being able to add custom monitoring to dashboards would be nice. Right now, if you want to monitor the value of a registry key on your systems, to get that added into the dashboard you have to reach out to Aternity so they can start looking for that value. It would be interesting if that were more of a self-serve function.

We bought licenses for Aternity at the start of this year (2020).

The stability of Aternity has been really good. We have not noticed any issues from the client side in terms of causing a problem with the additional data it's collecting. It's been very solid.

It's SaaS-based so we haven't had any issues with scalability at all.

Their tech support is very good. I haven't had any issues with them. We have project hours with them for the implementation and they're very responsive.

The initial setup was very simple. I was shocked, honestly. We just installed the agent on a couple of machines, logged into our portal, and it was already reporting data. Literally, within two minutes of getting the app installed, the machines were checking in.

Our deployment is still ongoing because we're looking at expanding the product. We're doing some demos for other business lines, globally. But for North America, we rolled it out in about three weeks, which is our normal cycle in terms of product deployment.

Our implementation strategy was to start with our pilot users, 100-plus folks, and then just roll it out to our offices.

I was the only one involved in the deployment, on our side, and I'm the one who maintains and, more so, uses the solution. As a SaaS platform, it doesn't really require much maintenance. It's really just the user account administration around who we want to give access to and, occasionally, updates to the clients. For that I just submit changes to our packaging team and they deploy it.

The only thing we really had to consider for our global testing is that we had to run the agent installer with the PAC file, the proxy config settings. But that's defined on their website, so it's not really an issue.

We have seen return on our investment, for sure. The software licensing piece alone, those reportings, wasn't even part of our initial use case, but it's a way that tool provides hard savings.

For what it is and for all the different use cases, it's well worth the price. We did some negotiation with Riverbed, so we got a decent rate.

In addition to their standard licensing fee, initially there was the project implementation cost, to have the support from the Aternity project team.

I launched the investigation last summer into about 10 vendors, and started out looking at how to improve our network service monitoring. The focus, initially, was on players in the network performance monitoring. 

But I ended up coming to the conclusion, with Aternity, that it was probably going to give us the most bang for our buck. It was also one of the few solutions out there where we could actually see what the users were experiencing when accessing on-prem applications as well as SaaS-based applications, and when they're on the network or off the network and going through VPN. That was pretty key for us because when you start looking at monitoring solutions, there are packet analyzers and stuff that comes into the DC and there are things that you put out in your branch offices to monitor the connection back. But because where applications reside now is changing, Aternity was a really good fit for us so that we could get that insight regardless of where the user is and where the application is.

We narrowed it down to four, including Aternity. The others were AppNeta, ThousandEyes, and NETSCOUT.

It wasn't so much that we chose Aternity over ThousandEyes or AppNeta. They perform two different functions. The result of the review was that we needed two sets of tools: one that monitors the end-user experience, what they see transactionally and how the applications are performing, and a solution that could look at the health of the actual routing and the network, end-to-end. We ended up with two recommendations for solutions.

But in terms of choosing Aternity over the other solutions that were more closely aligned with it, like the NETSCOUT agent, it had a lot of functionality out-of-the-box, which is good, and it was fast-paced, which is a good model for us. They put out new functionality every month, which is great. For me, it made sense to monitor the performance from the client itself and not from some point in the network that could potentially change in the future. We've had a lot of offices closed or move based upon COVID, and we were lucky that it didn't impact us. We didn't go out and buy a bunch of probe devices to put on the network and then have a huge shift in how users are working. It worked out well for us.

The fact that other products may provide deeper visibility into device performance doesn't really concern me. That wasn't even our first use case for the product, so we look at all the value we're getting out of the service desk side as icing on the cake.

Getting the most value out of it depends on your use case: if you're using it more for service desk agent support or if you're using it for business-level reporting on application performance. My advice would be to learn about all the different use cases there are because it continues to find ways to generate new value for us.

Understanding user behavior is probably one of the most enlightening things that we've gotten from the tool. We're seeing that there are certain applications they spend a lot more time in than we may have ever realized, and certain periods when they're active that we may not have realized before.

The solution’s Digital Experience Management Quadrant (DEM-Q) to look at how your digital experience compares to others who use the solution is a relatively new feature. They just rolled it out a couple of months ago, so we've taken a peek at it. I've shared it with my upper management to show that we're actually in the good quadrant. We're running above other industries. It's useful to give you a "sanity check," but there's not a whole lot of information out there; it's pretty high-level. It's good to see where we are versus other corporations.

In terms of seeing the employee experience, it doesn't do screen recording to see what they're experiencing. It gives a representation of the transactions that they're doing and what the performance for those transactions was. In some cases, but not in all, it provides a good enough picture to understand what they're going through. Sometimes we have to do a screen share to really understand what the user is trying to accomplish and what issues they're having. But the good thing about it is you can always go back in time with Aternity. If the user has an issue, by the time they call the service desk and get a hold of an agent and start to troubleshoot, they may not have the problem anymore. But you can always go back and look at the history of those transaction metrics.

Something else we're starting to work on now is the automated remediation actions that the service desk can do. Those weren't even part of the initial review, but because of the value of having all that data together, it's been very beneficial for them. There are scripts so that if a user runs into an error on the screen, we have a fix that we know we can deploy. The help desk can just right-click and run that auto-remediation script. We've done some initial testing with it, but it's next on our list.

Overall, I would rate Aternity a 10 out of 10. It's such a powerful tool with so many different uses. We don't have an infinite budget for IT. A lot of times, investment in tools is really something that's at the bottom of the list. So to get one that has so many capabilities built into it and that is so flexible — we can even convert, and we have converted, some of our extra end-user licenses over to the server-side monitoring piece — is incredible. It's like we were going for one product yet we could roll it into a completely separate product which is comparable to Dynatrace. For sure, it's quite impressive.

I'm a huge fan of it. It's definitely a great product and it sets the stage for some advanced capabilities in terms of the metrics that they're collecting. They're starting to look at more of the machine learning and AI side. I have a lot of hopes that the product is going to continue to grow into something new in the future.

The introspection into the desktops, there's nothing else that we have that will do that. While it also provides desktop metrics, the main thing we use it for is monitoring our applications. I would say we use the application side of it the most.

The biggest improvement would be the ease with which you monitor applications. It's a little clunky right now; it takes a little bit of time. It's very manual right now; maybe it can be automated more. I’m not even sure that they can make it better, but they have started to. There's a weakness, but it's kind of due to the type of tool it is; it's going to be there. It's probably always going to be there, no matter how easy they make it.

Also, when you call in to support, a couple of times they haven't had the best of luck as far as getting the answer right away. It has taken a little time. I don't think it's any worse than any of the other tools we have, but there's always room for improvement there.

Some of the dashboarding and reporting on the analytics side could be improved. I think they realize it. Obviously, some of the desktop monitoring metrics always can be improved.

We had one conflict with a version of an application I believe we were using. We had a conflict with one of the variables that Aternity didn't anticipate a variable getting wiped out, and it did. It would actually hang one of the applications, but they corrected it very, very quickly. To completely solve it and get us an actual fix for it, it took maybe a couple of weeks. They actually figured out what it was and knew basically how to mitigate it, how we could avoid it, within a day or two, it wasn't very long.

I have not encountered any scalability issues. We're right around 7-8 thousand desktops right now. We're just now getting ready to scale that up a little bit. We're probably doubling that soon. Aternity should be able to handle that many users eventually. I don't see any issues there.

I'd say technical support is an 8/10.

We didn't really switch from another product to Aternity. We actually added Aternity because it's a niche product with it being able to introspect in the desktop. We have tools that will do application monitoring, just not from the desktop, to provide the desktop perspective. It's actually an add-on for us.

Initial setup was very straightforward.

Before choosing Aternity, we actually looked around and we didn't really have anything that met the need. We couldn't find anything that met the need that Aternity does.

Definitely plan on monitoring the application. If you're doing a lot of customer applications, you'll definitely need to have that relationship with your app teams already in place, or it's going to be very difficult. You probably need to have that plan in place before you buy a product like this.

On your side, in your IT team, you need to integrate your application developer teams into the process right from the beginning. You need to have that in place. If that's not in place, it's probably not going to work well.

The application response time. That's what our business has been having a problem with.

It hasn't improved the way it functions. It has improved the ability to troubleshoot on the backend.

When maneuvering between certain applications, it might have been slow, but it was actually not the system. It was the associate that was slow. It's caused a little bit of a training change for us.

• Dashboards and reporting features: They are not user-friendly
• Reports were a lot easier in the older versions
• They need to revamp their whole sales, management, and technical support. Their technology is fine. It's the associates around it that make it not worth my while.

I have been using Aternity for two years.

We have not had stability issues.

Scalability is fine.

We have had a little bit of help from them. I am not too impressed, to be honest. I would give them a rating of 2/5, because they don't respond very quickly.

We've talked to sales reps and we've talked to managers. We didn't talk directly to a technical manager, but we had problems with communication as a whole from the company, whether it's technical support, sales, or management.

We didn't have a previous solution.

The implementation was pretty straightforward. There were no problems.

Pricing is a bit high. Don't take that as the "be all, end all".

I have not had any training yet, so I really can't commit to that. The newer version is a lot harder than the older version. We didn't need training with the older version. That's why we didn't do it. That's why I'm saying training is key for this.

The training that I think everybody should take on creating signatures. Don't rely on them to create your signatures. It takes way too long and costs way too much.

I can't remember the name of the product we evaluated. There were only two out there at the time and Gardner recommended one of them.

Have the right training upfront. That's really about it.

• We can solve problems before they grow to be a larger problem
• We can identify trends
• We can assist a user with a problem that they haven't told us they have yet

It's all about being proactive and solving problems before they're big. It's also a customer service perspective, too. If we know someone's hard drive is about to blow up and they haven't even called in the service desk yet, it's pretty cool that you can go and say, "Hey, your hard drive is about to blow up." They respond, "Well, how did you know that? I've been having problems." It's pretty cool.

Being able to proactively identify issues on user systems.

When they moved from Version 8 to Version 9, the customers lost so much control of what they could do with the product. They need to give back what they took from us. In the previous version:

• We could create our own monitors easily
• We could set incidents easily
• We could look at the thresholds for our configuration and change them accordingly

We can't do any of that now.

Scalability didn’t seem to be a problem.

Their technical support structure is terrible. I would give them a rating of 2/5.

We did not use a previous solution.

The setup was what we expected. We had to configure the product to work and to detect things in our environment. That took some time. It wasn’t just come in, install it in one day, and you are done. It's come in, install it, and then, let's really configure the product to meet your needs. That took some time.

It's very expensive. I think it's overpriced. If they want to get the full value out of the product, they need to be able to dedicate people to train, to learn how to create monitors themselves, and have people assigned to look at the data. That takes time. Depending on the size of your organization, you must have one or two people just doing this. In some cases, that could be a lot of money.

You also have to develop systems and processes around reacting to that data. For example, if the solution detects that someone has low space available on their computer, it is not going to call that user and help them automatically delete some files so they have more space. There has to be a process in place to have somebody view that data and to take action on it. That's my point. It gives you good information. You have to build processes and take the time to look at the data. That just requires people, and people are money.

I don't remember if we looked at other options. I don't think there's another product on the market quite like Aternity.

This is a product that needs to be managed and monitored. To really pull the value out of it, you have to use it. It's not magically going to fix everything for you. It does a lot very well, but it takes people to look at the data and to react to what the tool is telling you.