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 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 improved our organization by giving us visualizations and measurements of what users are often doing and by quantifying how the application is performing, how persistent it is, etc.

In our current version, the user experience it provides is the most valuable feature for us. Also, the performance navigator is very valuable.

I’ve seen the version 9 demo and they have really improved the product. It starts out as a high-level view. They've additionally added some great color coding, but they need to explain better and drive down further on the meanings of this workflow. For example, how quickly can I see why it’s not showing green?

Once you get it configured with full enterprise deployment, it's stable. There are minor modifications that needs to be done so that it's all-in-all stable.

You just hold on to certain components and base this on your size. In this way, it's stable.

The only fault I would give them is that I do troubleshooting on my own. If they could simplify or skip some stuff it would be great.

The initial setup was straightforward as they did this for us. The daily operation is straightforward.

We implemented it through a vendor team.

This is the only tool we use to show us what the user is doing. It's also the quickest product for its value. I'd highly recommend the product.

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.

The dashboards and the analysis tools, especially the navigator, are great features and are very valuable.

We haven’t changed our version yet, but we are working with newer versions of operating systems. This is what we are hoping to get from it. Maybe an easier capability for monitoring and that’s what this product is going to give us. From what I understand, when we implemented Tableau into the dashboards it really worked well.

I’d like to be able to build monitors easier. That has to be an easier process, and they need to make the program less complicated. The documentation could be better. Also, I'd like to be able to download the latest version for testing.

We've used it for six months.

I think it’s fairly stable. We distribute across various different servers, we shut them down so it works properly. You come in sometimes and it works, sometimes you have to shut it down and then it works again.

We don’t have any problems with scaling. We haven’t really done much with it to be honest.

They are very timely, they get back to us quickly, and they are very good.

Complex. I read the documentation, but it's still complex.

Aternity is end-user monitoring. It can do all kinds of monitoring. All of the other APMs are web-based. This one can do it all.

• 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.