Alluvio Aternity Reviews

Having data from the user perspective has helped us target our activities. Otherwise, we're operating off of a lot of anecdotal evidence. Users would say things like, "Oh, my computer's slow or it's crashing a lot." We wouldn't have that actual, quantifiable data from that user. We also wouldn't have it from the high-level perspective to understand.

There are two most valuable features:

• The ability to monitor crash and health event issues at a user level
• The ability to get performance data, customized performance data from our enterprise production apps, third-party apps, specifically like Microsoft and HP and so on

Most of the other APM solutions don't really monitor third-party apps as much. They can't go in and do the normal monitoring of, for example, Microsoft Word, or something similar.

I think they need to focus more on ad-hoc and customized reporting. They also need to allow the users to be able to create their own dashboards, rather than only be able to use what's out of the box. I do know that this is on their development roadmap, but those were the two things, from our perspective, that jump out.

I'd like to be able to pull data out of Aternity a little easier. It all comes in pretty nice looking charts and things, but we have a hard time pulling out hard data, which is usually what you'll need if you're trying to be actionable.

To deserve a higher rating, we would need some additional data, access to additional data around crashes, and they would need to add more robust reporting or ad-hoc reporting module and customizable dashboards.

I did not have any stability issues in this time span.

I have not had any scalability issues. It's an awesome solution. From a performance perspective, we haven't seen any issues. The agents on each machine sometimes will start eating up too much CPU, but they have a self-moderator and if they do that, they shut off. We haven't had any issues there. From a data perspective, it gets more effective the more data you have, the more you scale up. No, there aren't any scalability issues.

We have run into some issues and we have contacted technical support, which has been adequate. However, because it's such a short time frame, we're still often dealing with the implementation support team, rather than their standard support team. So I don't really know what their support would be like in a normal function.

We have a tech assigned to us, since we're still in the implementation phase. I can't really speak to what their standard support is like.

We were looking for the ability to get some performance data from our third-party enterprise apps, like our Microsoft Office, our internal document management system, and so on. We wanted some data on, from a user perspective, how long it was taking to open, how long it was taking to do specific tasks within the applications. We wanted some data to be used internally for SLAs and to develop KPIs and items of that nature. We have pictures from the backend, from a network or a server perspective, but we didn't have any user data. Collecting that data manually was pretty time-intensive and relatively inaccurate. With Aternity, we now have the data.

I think the next steps, since it's essentially a net new function, we have to start integrating the data as far as developing how we're going to handle SLAs and how we're going to handle the KPI reports and things like that. Immediately, we're using it also as a secondary function to assist with problem and incident identification and resolution, using it there as well to monitor crash data firm-wise and so on.

Initial setup is pretty straightforward for the actual install. We used SCCM to deploy. That was pretty easy; it came in a pre-packaged MSI. I think the more difficult part is training and having your team members understand how to utilize the tool. Their training programs could probably use a little work. I'd say that was about it. From a technical perspective, the implementation was relatively seamless. But from a process perspective, especially if you're not replacing something, it was difficult. So we're still working through that.

Make sure that you have a well-developed plan for integrating it with your existing processes before you roll it out. Other than that, I wouldn't say much. It's pretty easy to roll out and it's really just leveraging it as effectively as possible is what I think you want to make sure you focus on.

Because we can proactively see the productivity and performance of employees and people working on behalf of the company, we're able to see degrading performance and address the root cause prior to business impact.

The most valuable feature for me is being able to monitor the productivity of every employee in the company as well as third-party, outsourced companies that work on our behalf.

And I also monitor cloud services. It can take that much workload.

I would improve the dashboard, the presentation player.

I did not encounter any issues with stability.

We have it right now pretty much enterprise-wide, so it's very scalable.

Technical support has been top-notch.

We evaluated other companies such as a product from a company called Lakeside Software.

Initial setup was straightforward.

I'm rating this solution as high as possible because of the unique insight that it provides and the dynamic nature of the product.

It improved our connection to other teams when performing troubleshooting tasks. This is huge when dealing with a large organization with multiple tiers of support, and having an end user utilizing an application that could have number of things go wrong. This deep dive can help mitigate the problem and help align escalations.

The dashboards of this platform are the most valuable, especially the Desktop Health dashboard. This gives you the ability to see the trend in health of all desktops in a historical view.

I would say the reporting capabilities of this product could use room for improvement.I would say the reporting capabilities of this product could use room for improvement. The standard reports that are given are not the greatest, and no custom ones can be created; however, I am told that the latest version of Aternity offers this!

Our only issue with stability was with our previous version, 6.0, and being upgraded to version 8.0.5 was a massive improvement.

I don’t foresee any issues with scalability. We are well aware of the current load that Aternity has on our current infrastructure and we'll monitor how big our environment grows so we can set aside budgets to increase the infrastructure if needed.

9/10. Their technical support is very customer-centric and professional. Their determination is to resolve the problem fast without hindering quality.

We have always used Aternity for end-user monitoring.

It's complex in someways, and our fix to this was to have the vendor perform the installation. We paid a premium for this service.

If the scale of your monitoring will be to go everywhere in an organization, a site license is key.

I would rate this product a 10 because of the way it is able to dive down into the application and report everything that is going wrong with a certain application functions, helping give a full view of the end user’s experience.

Be sure to have a PoC done in a test environment with 100-200 users, if possible, to validate all means of the platform. This will come in handy supporting the tool as an administrator.

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.

• Proactive application monitoring that is application-architecture independent.
• Advanced dashboards.

• The advanced dashboards allow operations teams the ability to focus on outliers.

• Overall reduction in mean time to repair (MTTR).

Schema is difficult to work with when constructing custom dashboards.

The data we have collected from monitored applications has shown that the problems we thought we were having were actually completely different in nature. We have been able to pinpoint performance issues related to certain activities, and because the monitor-writing tools are so extensible, we’ve been able to break activities down and see exactly which part is causing bottlenecks. We can then take that information to the app teams to discuss what can be done to make things better (i.e., optimize the queries that certain actions initiate, etc.).

The data collected by the agents on each end point is the most valuable feature for us. There is so much valuable information that the agent can send back to the Aternity platform, and even though the dashboards that come out of the box with the installation aren’t always the most intuitive, we have been able to use the data itself for our own custom visualizations and reporting.

The dashboards and navigatability of the platform could use improvement. It often takes five or six clicks to drill down to exactly what you want to see, but many of our stakeholder groups have refused to use the tool because they perceive it as “too cumbersome” to get the information they need. As a Tableau developer myself, I’ve been able to provide certain customizations that have helped, but overall this is the biggest area of opportunity for improvement that I see with Aternity.

We had no issues with stability.

This question isn't really applicable to us. We purchased 1500 licenses and currently don't even use 1/3 of those.

Customer Service:

Customer service is the best I have ever encountered from a software vendor. They're responsive, courteous, thorough, and share our sense of urgency in getting issues resolved.

Technical Support:

I'd rate technical support through the roof. There was one issue we were having with a certain .dll file that wasn’t working properly in our Citrix environment. It took over a month to finally reach resolution (it turned out we have some settings configured incorrectly within Citrix), and during that time the support team thoroughly and diligently investigated every piece of information we sent. They also connected us directly with the R&D department, who spent an hour with us doing a screen share, looking in our environment and explaining exactly why this problem was happening, and proposing several solutions (one of which worked, and we were able to fix it). They were professional, friendly, and knew their stuff!

Yes – we used CitraTest, which was a tool that allows you to generate and conduct synthetic transactions on a schedule. Tools like this have their place, but it wasn’t accomplishing what we really needed, which was to understand actual user experience and pain points. Additionally, this particular tool didn’t work the way the documentation stated, and their support team was rude, condescending, and actually in denial of the issues (even though I provided screen shots, timestamps, detailed documentation, etc.).

The initial setup was mostly straightforward. The Citrix setup was a little more complicated, but that was partly because our Citrix admin left in the middle of the process and hadn’t completed all of the pre-installation checks.

We implemented it in-house. An implementation engineer from Aternity came and spent four days with us, and we installed and implemented together. Then our team handled it from there.

I’m honestly not sure and I don’t know how we would even quantify that, because the process of analyzing performance has been so disorganized and touched by so many hands. We’ve had different tools, different teams, and no real protocol for handling any of it. But Aternity is helping a lot with that end of it.

I advise that you buy more endpoints than you think you need, unless you’re already buying enough for the entire organization. One point of frustration for me has been the fact that we are only collecting a sample of data, and I’m not convinced that it’s completely representative of all problems a user could have. As for pricing, our management squeezed Aternity pretty hard on the pricing, in my opinion a little too much. I advise negotiating for sure, but I do think it left kind of a sour taste in Aternity’s mouth that we were being so pushy despite the fact that we were only purchasing a small number of licenses.

We didn’t – we did a cursory search for other tools to vet, but couldn’t find anything else that did what Aternity does, so we decided to test only that one.

Do it. You won’t regret it. And when you do it, make sure there’s someone in-house who is excited and willing to learn the product inside and out, because you will have SUCH a better experience with implementation and analysis.

It's a monitoring tool. Specifically, it monitors very well the ability to sort large amounts of data into something that is actionable. Once you know how to use it, it's very good at identifying trends underlying in large amounts of data.

It's used to monitor our application performance. Desktop health, network health, things of that nature. We have used it to identify issues impacting large amounts of end users with applications, issues with our network, issues with our group policy setups or exchange, all sorts of stuff.

We've built a task force that I was the head of to resolve some longstanding issues with our existing Windows 7 image. The Aternity application was a key product in helping us not only identify the issue, or at least quantify the issue and begin to narrow down the likely causes of it, but it also allowed us to measure how successful we were at implementing changes, moving the needle in the right direction. It's helped us stabilize our exchange environment.

The latest thing we did with it, specifically, was track down an issue in which our end users were disconnecting from Exchange on a alarmingly frequent basis. It allowed us to figure out what was going on, implement a solution, and then validate the solution was in fact working.

The product itself is actually extremely solid. The support of Aternity, specifically their client success management and after-sales support and training leave a lot to be desired. They've gotten better with my last engagement with them, which was beginning in May.

We're still ongoing with a little bit of training. We recently switched from their on-premise Aternity 7 version to their cloud SaaS-based Aternity 9 product. Largely, once you get the product and you have it set up and get it installed, the relationship management after-sales leaves a lot to be desired. The product itself is actually really, really fantastic.

Between the Aternity 7 and the Aternity 9 version, they've made a whole repolish of the UI. They rethought the entire UI to make it usable for folks that haven't spent 40 to 60 hours training in the product, like I have.

We're getting a lot more value out of the product from every single level of IT, all the way from our service desk up to our executives and back down. They've done a very good job at innovating on the product. It's more so the support and professionalism of their client success managers and after-call support that leave a lot to be desired.

Their product is a 10. The support is a five. I'm going to average them out to about a seven and a half to an eight. I hope they're able to continue to improve. I want to make clear they have improved and I've been much more impressed with their support recently than I was over the last three years.

I hope that's not a function of an ongoing engagement and additional large sum of money that we've tossed at them in order to set up the new product. If they can improve on their support, then they would be in a really, really good position.

I have been using this product for close to three years.

We did have some issues with the SQL database side of the product, when it first stood up, and the application server would lock up. Not always, but there was a period of maybe six to eight months when the application server - or the IAS services specifically - would stop functioning, or we would get some deadlocks on the database. It was a task to deal with Aternity support to really identify those particular issues, but overall, the stability of the product was pretty good. I think we'll have less of those issues now that we don't have to maintain our own servers. It's all handled in the cloud. I imagine that since it's a high-availability service, considering it's a cloud-based application, that we will likely not see those issues moving forward. If we do, I won't have to fix them.

I have not had any scalability issues at all. The deployment of the actual monitoring agent is probably the easiest thing we've deployed through SCCM in years. It's very, very simple. It's easy for us to upgrade. It's silent. It doesn't impact the end user when we install it. It's extremely scalable. We currently have it monitoring all of our end user workstations, which is approximately 1,600 computers.

We do have it on some of our servers, but not all. We're looking to scale that up in the new environment, which will equate to roughly 800 servers, as well as another 12 to 15 for our Citrix infrastructure. Overall, we're close to 3,000 total endpoints being monitored by the product, and it's extremely easy to install and configure. We package it. We put it in SCCM and it installs. It's really, really simple.

Recently, technical support has been fantastic. Prior to us being involved in an ongoing engagement with them, it was a little rough. We had to constantly follow back up with them. My calls and emails, depending on urgency, were not necessarily met with what I believe would be an acceptable SLA, especially considering the expense of the product. It's not a cheap product by any way, shape for form. Recently, the engagements that I've had with them have been far improved. We had two particular issues with the product when we moved to the Aternity 9 environment.

The first one, the installation of the agent itself removed a couple of registry values on our end users machines that caused a piece of our Citrix to not function for our entire environment. They not only identified the issue, provided me a solution I could deploy over group policy within less than three hours, but they also delivered me a new agent version the next day that had the issue resolved, which I was extremely impressed with. I had a four-hour down time. They did a really, really good job of taking care of that for me.

Then I had an issue where the application was not displaying fully correctly in Internet Explorer. Once I submitted the ticket for that, and it was a lower priority, they contacted me within 24 hours, and we had a solution implemented within 48 hours. I would say they're definitely trending in the right direction. My hope is that it doesn't fall off once we're done with our active projects.

Previously, we had several monitoring applications, but nothing that really is able to draw a large picture the way that Aternity is. Did we use other products? Yes. To any level of success? Definitely not. There's really not anything like it on the market that we've been able to find. The algorithms that it uses and the ability to aggregate such a large amount of information in a way that make it really, really easy to use for every member of IT. I use this product every single day. I'm probably the most knowledgeable user of the product, and it's extremely powerful. I really don't know of anything on the market that's like it. The product is phenomenal. I really can't speak highly enough about how powerful the product is, and recently they cleared the one major hurdle with the product in that it wasn't very user friendly.

The on-premise setup was relatively complex. The transition to the cloud platform was really easy. Really, really, easy. One, because the professional services team did all of it for us, but just by the nature of the product and how it functions, the setup of it is always going to be somewhat complex. Specifically, in designing the signatures and the monitors for very specific activities and actions that are undertaken within an application, or on a server. There's always going to be a level of complexity.

Once you set it up, it's very, very easy to maintain. It's considerably easier to maintain when you don't have to maintain your servers, which is where we're at now. There is always an inherent level of complexity, but the upgrade from our on-premise environment to the cloud-based was extremely easy. They were able to import all of our existing settings, with a few exceptions, into it. The training on it has been absolutely fantastic. It's pretty easy. They even gave us training on how to author and signature the monitors themselves, which has allowed us to expand our ability to support and customize the application in real time in a way that allows us to get more out of the product then we were already doing. We were already getting a very large amount of value out of the product.

Without a product that can store this type of data and give you a front end for analysis, you don't really have a lot of statistical knowledge about a problem. You might get user complaints about this or that, but this solution can tell you that there is an actual problem. It also tells you exactly what time the problem started happening and where it started happening.

Without a product that can do this, you don't really have eyes into that and you're just relying on help desk tickets and some guessing. Putting a time frame on when an issue started occurring is really helpful, then you can look at what changes were deduced in the environment at that time. You can really start analyzing the issue quickly.

The most valuable feature for us is trend analysis, particularly with device-help type of events and computer help events, such as blue screens, application errors, and application crashes. It also gives us the ability to correlate that with different attributes, such as location or the Internet Explorer version or whatever comparisons we'd like to try to make to analyze our environment.

They have a lot of features built into the product, but it would be nice if they had some additional features that I think a lot of organizations would benefit from. For instance, I can see the location and computer model and I can see a bunch of different attributes. But one thing I can't see is the Internet Explorer version.

I'd also like to see some more use interface upgrades to make it easier for people to utilize. I think it's easy for a person like me, who uses the product daily, but it's not so easy for somebody who only intermittently uses the product to interface with it.

It has been stable, but I know they're planning some updates in the future to version 9, and that might really spin it around the other way. Future upgrades might really impact us.

For us, yes, it has been scalable, because we started off with a fairly small user base on a very large platform hardware-wise. We've never had to upgrade our hardware yet as we increased our user base.

As with most vendors, if you're troubleshooting a difficult issue, you have to break through the levels of troubleshooting to get to the really high-end engineers, and that can sometimes take some time.

The big trigger for us was that we have a lot of small offices. They don't have any IT presence and we wanted to really try to validate users' concerns and performance in those remote sites without actually having to send a tech there.

It's pretty straightforward.

Try to get implementation correct right-off-the-bat. Try to get some training sessions scheduled with Aternity and lock them down into helping you utilize the user interface.