Alluvio Aternity Reviews

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.

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. 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

We've had no issues with stability.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

One of the things we wanted to do is we have a number of call centers that are at a disparate, some of them are partners, some of them are owned and operated, and when we have an issue reported from a call center, we could end up with forty people on a phone call trying to figure out what was going on. They're running around, w'ere reporting in individual workstation, this agent says, "Hey, I got this problem and it's over here," and you got to stop and document that. Then they have another guy who says, "I got this problem over here," so you have all these disparate pieces of information that you have manually correlate with a bunch of people on a phone call for hours and hours and hours.

With Aternity you can gather that perspective quickly, it's gathered automatically, so that slow response time or issues with the application, hung workstations or network issues, you get that perspective right away. It eliminates a lot of the time spent troubleshooting.

All of it, but it depends on who the end user is. The folks that support the applications, like the signatures that we've developed, it gives them feedback on their application performance. The folks that deal with the IT with their desktop in the call centers like it because it gives them visibility into the desktops that they wouldn't otherwise have. Then the guys that are responsible for our mobile devices like the mobile aspect. The reason they like the features is they didn't have them beforehand - it's visibility they didn't have prior to this tool.

For instance, the folks in the call centers if they wanted to look at a workstation that wasn't performing or was having an issue, they had to go to the workstation or remote into the workstation. They had an agent that kept having issues with her machine and they couldn't tell what was going on, every time they looked at it it'd reboot. With the Aternity tool they were able to see she was actually powering the thing off and then saying, "Hey, I can't do my job," so there were some shenanigans. It gives good visibility into what the behaviour is of the agent interacting with the workstation as well as interacting with the applications.

From the application owners perspective, we have real user monitors out there in the call center and we've got sniffers that capture the transactions as they come across a network, and synthetic transactions and that sort of stuff going on, but it really didn't give them that view from the call center agents workstation. It gives them a more realistic picture of what's going on than from a networks perspective. You're actually now getting it from the workstations perspective. Then the wireless guys, (the people that are dealing with the handhelds), that's just visibility we didn't have and there are a number of tools. Since we already had Aternity deployed in the call center, it was a natural extension.

Signature development process requires deep technical expertise in the application and in the use of their studio tools that help you create it. I know they're aware of that and I know they're focused on making stuff simpler. I think in version nine we'll probably see improvements. That's the biggest thing for us, and unless you're creating those signatures on a daily basis, that needs to be your full-time job to maintain the expertise to do it properly. We're still depending on their professional services to help us with that.

In v7, we had some stability issues and those all got resolved, but the first six months of being up we had some stability issues. Now we're on v8, and looking to upgrade to v9. So far, it has been rock solid. It's completely stable, I can't believe it's stable as it is.

Well we overbuild. Our environment is overbuilt, we're built to handle twice the workload that we have. Our model is you live and die by your peaks. All of our stuff is built to handle those peaks. That's just a natural for us, we overbuild it. We haven't had workload related issues.

It was good. One of the things that just for me, I came from a field service background, I worked for Digital Equipment back in the '80's and '90's, and there when you provided customer service you had a fifteen minute call back time. Nowadays you send an email or open a ticket online and you hear back in four hours and so your primary communication mechanism is by email or by updating a ticket on a website. I like phone calls, and that's just a general trend in the industry. I like a phone call back, but that's not anything anybody's doing, so that seems to be lacking in the industry. There are no better or worse than any other, as far as response time.

We didn't use a different solution.

It was straightforward. We used their professional services to do it because we hadn't been exposed to it before, and our environment is sizable. It's not like we installed the app on one box, it's broken up into six components plus an Oracle backend database, so it's a pretty sizable implementation. It's not that complex to manage and maintain. Regarding the installation - unless you're doing it every day, you probably want their professional services to help you.

We evaluated some different solutions. One that we looked at was more for agent behaviour evaluation than it was for monitoring. The analysis there was too deep for our purposes. We wanted the instrumentation that would tell us when there's an issue, and you can certainly do that with both tools, but the other tool is a lot more about understanding that agent's individual actions, and it was just a different tool. We do have other tools, there's RUM and Synthetic Transactions going on as well. This was an enhancement to that.

The first thing I would do is the application owners need to put monitoring and managing the signature set, or the monitor set, that you develop for the applications into their release process. When you do a release for an application, you need to include developing and testing the existing monitors, testing the existing monitors and fixing them if the application breaks them and if the release breaks them. You need to manage your monitors along with the application releases.

We just made an additional purchase which was kind of small. It allows us to offer various business groups and their application reaction times. We didn’t have this before as we were using stopwatches to measure and trend it.

There are a lot of great features. The detailed level of information you are able to get on the complete environment all of the way down to a specific machine.

I think the next release has what we are looking for. I guess they are working on this now, but to monitor these transactions, you need to look at it, analyze it and capture it. It requires a little bit of work, but in an environment like ours, you need it to be easier. They are making great strides to make this easier. I’d like it to still be easier yet, though it might not be possible because unless you have a background, it really makes it hard to do it on your own.

It's consistently stable with excellent performance. We are at maximum capacity. I have had no problems with the server or with the clients. If anything goes above or out of control or CPU resources are used up, it will restart that service or shut it down. It's very stable as far as the server is concerned.

It's very scalable compared to other software. Right now, we are going to 26,000 end points. It’s a common set up. We plan on going to 100,000 end points and it's as simple as adding some extra servers. It's very scalable with a familiar design.

The solution architects are great and are very knowledgeable. I have actually been up to their offices for training and some of their application developers were there from Israel. Very smart and willing to go above and beyond to make sure they are delivering.

We previously used different types of software.

It depends on what you are talking about. The setup of everything is very simple. The only time it gets complex, and it needs to be, is when you are working with home-grown applications and all of your thousands of people and developers. Your trying to isolate those transactions, but even that process is straightforward.

We used other software and we looked at 23 solutions. It very specifically meets our goals. It really depends on the needs.

Some of the biggest things I like about the software is that it’s simple to use and you can learn it in a few hours. Something this easy to use shouldn’t be so powerful. In one hour, people can be overwhelmed with the information they can get from such a simple UI. Data analytics is a simple, easy-to-use interface.

We were able to identify bottlenecks in the application code that we had. A good example would be JavaScript, as we found that we had inefficient JavaScript in some applications.

Desktop monitoring, and being able to understand the performance of applications that runs on the desktop.

The thing that I think most companies like ourselves would want would be an easier way to customize custom scripts. It does a lot of out of the box standard monitoring, but there are special applications that every organization have, and right now, creating the custom scripts requires technical resource support from Aternity.

It's fairly robust in terms of its architecture design and development.

We haven't really scaled it as we've only installed it on a customer base of about 300 desktops.

It was straightforward. Because it was a very small agent that we deployed, and did not require a lot of customization. By small agent, I mean the footprint of the agent was very small to install, and it didn't really require a lot of customization.

The product is kind of unique. We used other products in the past, I don't even know the names of them because they were old IBM products dating back to the 60s and 70s. Aternity sort of fits a niche in the marketplace. I don't know of too many tools that do what they do.

I think the nature of, and it's not only desktops, but people that are doing mobile development, that the industry is changing whereby the applications that are being developed today are using more and more of the local processing resources on the client. Because of that, it's important to have tools that can monitor the client performance and look at resource utilization, things such as JavaScript run locally on the client.

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

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

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

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

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

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

I provide technical support for multiple customers.

The initial setup is very simple and user-friendly.

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

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

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

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.

• 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.