Apica Synthetic Reviews

Apica is used to perform availability checks of our IT services. We put what we call synthetic checks in place, and these are mainly used to check if a specific application is running correctly, or if it is not available.

Because it is a platform that allows us to check the availability of our services, we have a process in our company that allows us to open an incident when we receive an alert that is raised by Apica. It is really critical in our company to have a tool like Apica, because every time we have an alert we know that there's a real problem in our system and we can forward the problem to our internal team so that they can take charge of the problem and solve it as soon as possible.

We are very satisfied with the flexibility that is offered by Apica. In our opinion it is much greater than in other products, even more expensive products. We found a good balance between the cost, after our spending review, and the features that it offers. The alerting is very reactive as well as very accurate. We are really confident in the alerts that we receive from Apica. The alerting accuracy has absolutely saved us time because we can minimize false positives and that means that we don't have to spend the time dealing with them. On a monthly basis it is saving us about 20 hours of work. That is the amount of work we did on false positives that we received before adopting Apica. That might seem like a low number, but trust me, when we have a critical issue, 24 hours are a lot.

We decided to move from another provider to Apica because it offers, from our perspective, more features and more advanced use case coverage. For example, it has a feature that allows us to set up business logic on the availability of our services. We can apply multiple criteria to trigger an alert. We have availability checks that allow us to check two different services at the same time and, to trigger an alert, both of them have to be down. One of the very difficult things with this kind of product is the possibility of false positives. Thanks to the flexibility that Apica provides, we are able to minimize the false positives, and that means that when we take charge of a problem opened by Apica, we are very confident that it is a real problem.

We are also using some JMeter scripts. At the moment, the platform itself is not using JMeter scripts, but they provide a converter that allows you to convert a Jmeter script into another language called ZebraTester. Thanks to that, we are using our JMeter scripts without any problems. And that means we can implement automation in the scripting and, obviously, that adds up to spending less time and effort on these automated activities. It's quite critical to have a tool that provides you this kind of automation. Apica also provides public APIs that allow us to run these kinds of scripts on demand. That is a good thing when you have to develop some automation to achieve very specific needs and tasks that are very frequently executed.

Overall, Apica has definitely saved us costs involved in managing monitoring, although I can't put a number on it.

There are several features that are really good. The first one is the flexibility and the advanced configuration that Apica offers when it comes to configuring synthetic checks. It provides the ability to customize how the check should be performed and it is very flexible in the number of synthetic locations that it can use. It allows us to run scripts from different locations all over the world, and they have a really good number of these locations.

There is also the ease of use. The user interface it provides is really advanced, but at the same time, it is really easy to use. That's a really good feature when it comes to daily use and our daily processes on the platform.

It is also very good in terms of the range of protocols it can monitor. Even if, at the moment, we are only using the HTTP protocol and browser synthetic checks—it's mainly the emulation of the end user browser—they also provide other protocols, such as DNS verification.

The first thing that I would suggest they improve is the user interface. Not from the point of view of how to access the features, but how they are presented. The user interface is very clear, but there are some components of the user interface that are not up to date. Just to give you an idea, today we have web applications that are called single-page applications that are much faster than the old style of web application. If we can move faster into the flow of the graphic user interface, and in a more effective way, it will save us a lot of time.

Another feature they can improve is related to how easy it is to set up what they call on-premises locations. Apica offers locations all over the world, but they also offer a manual to install a location on-premises to check the availability of services that are not public. This process, at the moment, is not so easy to achieve. The last time we did it, we were forced to contact their support to set it up. The automation of this kind of setup is not good. It should be something that does not require human involvement to follow the deployment. The possibility of being totally independent in installing and using an on-premises location would be much better.

I've been using Apica Synthetic for about one year.

The stability is absolutely excellent. We haven't had any issues so far. And when there was some kind of unavailability of the service, because no software is perfect, they advised us before or, if not before, as soon as possible, to let us know about the problem. This is definitely a good approach since if you tell us the platform is under maintenance for a problem, we can change our internal processes to take the unavailability into account.

It's very flexible in terms of scalability. At the moment we have about 2,000 scripts running on the platform without any problem. It's absolutely critical, since we are quite a big company, and moving from a software that is quite famous—because CA Technologies is a famous vendor—to another vendor, Apica, that is smaller, could be a risk. But after the PoC, we really trusted the Apica product. We are very happy that the platform is reliable and very scalable.

We used CA Nimsoft Monitor and Dynatrace Synthetic.

We were migrating from another product to Apica, so the main task that we performed was to migrate all the scripts that we were using on the old platform to the new one. We were able to do that thanks to the professional services support that Apica provided us. They offered us exceptional help in performing this task. It was mostly implemented using the APIs that Apica offers, since migrating data from a platform to another one requires some automation. You couldn't think about doing it manually. The Apica platform was made ready for our use cases because they provided the API that we needed to perform the migration.

The second task that I performed internally was to let the company know about the new processes to be implemented using Apica. The technology is the "engine," but then you need to build the "car" around the engine. That meant we needed to develop processes to let the people who were interested in using the platform know how to do so.

In summary, the first technical task was to migrate all the scripts from the old solution to the new one and the second step was to develop new processes, based on how Apica works.

Overall, our deployment took one year. But the level of support we received from Apica during our deployment helped reduce the time and costs involved in switching to their product. Without them, it would have taken double the time. Thanks to them, the time needed was reduced by a factor of half. They anticipated our needs, meaning that every time we asked them something specific, they replied right away, "We can do that. Don't worry."

It's not possible to provide ROI numbers for a simple reason. Last year we only performed the migration of the platform from CA to the new platform, so we have only been using Apica officially starting this year. We need more time to collect this kind of number. But the perception that we have after the assessment that we performed at the very beginning, is that it will halve our cost and double the performance of the processes that are related to the adoption of Apica.

We checked the new Dynatrace Synthetic platform. We decided to dismiss that and move to Apica after we performed the PoC, since we found that Apica was much more flexible than Dynatrace Synthetic.

Another main difference between Apica and the other products was the cost. We really thought that the balance in Apica between the features and costs was the best among all the products on which we did a PoC. 

There is also the support and the innovation that they bring. One of the reasons we decided to leave CA and Dynatrace is that they are bigger companies, but they are slower when it comes to solving a problem or when it comes to implementing a feature that we request. Apica is smaller, but being smaller means that you are even more flexible and more available when it comes to solving a problem. For example, Apica provided us with a totally new feature that we requested, before we moved to them. That feature was not in the Apica platform and it was critical for us. In about one month, they were able to develop that specific feature for us.

If you are looking for a product that offers a huge technology modernization, and quick support, you should take Apica into consideration, for sure. It is a small company compared to others, but they are really quick in answering your needs and providing you modern technology. If your company is growing and is looking to add new monitoring that is up to date, I would warmly suggest Apica.

We decided to use the SaaS version because we are trying to change the model of services that we are using in our company. We are trying to minimize the on-premises products because we don't want to be in charge of the management of the infrastructure of things that are on-premises. We are absolutely confident that Apica respects our security needs and that we can use Apica safely.

We have an eCommerce company. so we manage a lot of online stores. Our main usage is to make sure that our store web pages are different types of web pages, so there can be a homepage, search page, or product list page for each online store that we manage worldwide. We leverage a lot of Apica Synthetic probes to make sure that every store is available and responding as we expected worldwide. This is to ensure that there are no outages in specific parts of the world. Also, we collect some performance metrics, like response time, time to first buy, etc.

We are using the web-based service. While we do have some on-premise probes installed, we use the service on cloud the all the way. We installed the probes two or three months ago.

We see the benefit almost every day. It allows us to be alerted whenever there is a store that is not responding properly around the world. We do have a network operation center (NOC) who receives these alerts, immediately checking if everything is okay. There are some false positives, depending on the website configuration that we are checking. Other times, the alerts are real. We receive a very quick alert through our NOC so we can immediately check and try to find the root cause. This is our biggest benefit. 

Another benefit that we leverage is the creation of reports every month, regarding the availability of all our stores. This is something that is needed by the executives of our company. They want to see this report with the SLA availability of the stores. We are able to do this straight away with Apica Synthetic.

We don't have a lot of very complex monitoring cases because most of our checks are basic HTTP checks. However, in some cases where we use the solution with ZebraTester for scripts and monitoring, we have been able to properly import the scripts used on other platforms, reworking them so that they would work with the platform and have no issues.

The features that we use probably 99 percent of the time are the HTTP and HTTPS checks. We set up a lot of them. This is 99 percent of our current usage of Apica Synthetic as well as some full browser checks, but this is a lower amount. We also use some scripts that utilize the platform, but our usage of them is very small. 

An very important point for using Apica is the ability to have Chinese probes, which is not common among these types of tools. Other important things were the Grafana native integration and PagerDuty integration, which are all tools that we use extensively.

When we started using Apica Synthetic, we lacked a very important feature that was readily available in the following months. The alerting is usually very good - it allows if any websites or web pages are not responding properly. What we missed was the ability to aggregate alerts. This means that if we were monitoring one website with multiple probes worldwide, like Tokyo, France, and London, then Apica Synthetic would initially alert us if any of these three probes were responding with errors. We wanted a less sensitive alerting. For example, we could be alerted if the website was unavailable from all three probes, not just one. However, an aggregated check was not initially available. 

We do have two main open topics with them, regarding the features that we would like improved or added. 

1. The reporting part that we use for our executives needs a bit more customization capabilities. Right now, you can use only the three main templates for reporting. We would like to be able to customize them. 
2. The management of their single-sign on authentication does not 100 percent fit our requirements.

I have been using this solution for around two years.

The stability is very high. We had probably one outage in two years. I am very happy with its stability.

It is very scalable. Of course, scalability comes with a cost. If you need to scale out, that means you would need to use more of your licenses. However, that is reasonable.

There are mainly three to five administrators of Apica who check the platform, configure things, etc. These administrators are all part of the monitoring team. Plus, there are another 40 to 50 users who access the tool to check the collected data. Sometimes, they will also add some checks, but most users only check the outputs.

Right now, we are around 80 percent adoption. We would like more people to use it on our side. On the Apica Synthetic side, we would like to cover some additional checks that we haven't had time to add.

Their support team is very helpful. If we miss something, they make sure this is easily taken into consideration in the future. This is very important for us, because we tend to evolve pretty quickly. Also, in terms of requirements, they are very responsive, which we really appreciate. On a scale from zero to 10, I would say that they are very close to 10. I would probably give them a nine. I am not giving them 10 because 10 is perfection. I am leaving some room for improvement, but it is a very high rating in my opinion.

For now, the coverage is 100 percent of what we need. We were using another tool before migrating to Apica Synthetic. So, we made sure that all our needs were fulfilled and Apica Synthetic was covering all those needs. 

The reason that we switched was mainly because the previous solution that we were using did not have all the features that we needed. It was not really well-maintained. Often, it had some outages, which were unplanned. Overall, its usability was very low. So, it looked like a very old, not updated tool. So, we needed to find a better tool for our purposes.

We were using Broadcom ASM. I know they changed the name a few times, but initially it was owned by CA, and now it is owned by Broadcom. 

The initial setup was very straightforward. 

The solution went through our InfoSec review, which is something very important for us. The fact that we can deploy the service in a hybrid way is very useful because we do have some web pages available that are only using our internal network. We used to have two separate kinds of solution in order to monitor Internet-facing websites and internal ones, but thanks to this hybrid solution with the on-premises probe, we are able to use only one tool for both use case scenarios. This is very good for us.

We did use the professional services provided by Apica to help us with the migration, since we were migrating from an existing tool. Therefore, it was not from scratch. So, we leveraged them, and it was a very straightforward process. I would rate the level of support that I received during the migration as a nine (out of 10). This level of support helped reduce the time and costs involved in switching. Without the support, we would have had to do that entire job on our own. This means a lot of man-hours, and we couldn't afford that much because we don't have a lot of free capacity.

A few times, they solved some issues or problems with what they were importing or moving. They notified us, providing us with a better option. So, they anticipated our needs.

The migration took around four to six months. 

One person from our company was involved in the migration. This person's role is as an application performance specialist. His main job is to manage our application performance and availability tools. During the scope of the migration, he supervised that the checks were migrated properly as well as responding to Apica in case they had some issues or suggestions.

Apica Synthetic is used to avoid losing money, rather than make money. 

Our JMeter script is loaded into the Apica Synthetic platform. If Apica Synthetic didn't have this feature, we would have been forced to either choose another solution or add an external service to adjust for this purpose. In this case, they saved us money by allowing us to use only one tool.

The aggregated check has since been implemented by Apica, and now we are using it. Thanks to this, we are seeing when there is really a problem instead of just seeing some glitches and issues with the alerting. This has saved us time in operation costs because instead of having to check every time for just one probe that is failing, now our NOC center is able to focus on the important ones. We are saving a third of the alerting, e.g., if we were alerted and had to check three times a day, we are now doing it only once. 

Apica Synthetic reduces the time required to fix issues. If our website is down for hours, then we lose money. So, the less time it takes for us to be alerted of a problem, then the less money we lose.

The pricing is very reasonable, but it is not cheap.

We did some PoCs with other tools before selecting Apica Synthetic.

I would recommend it to get in touch immediately with Apica Synthetic support to have a chat with them and discuss best practices. They are usually very helpful since they are knowledgeable about the tool, so they are able to suggest the best way to implement checks.

I would rate this solution as a nine (out of 10).

Apica Synthetic is definitely one of our core pillars on the synthetic side. We also use synthetics as a measure of external customer application availability. So, we do a daily report internally, which goes out to the tech leadership team, showing how their applications are performing and how available they are. So, it is an integral part of our monitoring tools, and the synthetics are huge.

These are complex multi-step synthetic checks. The intent is to mirror as closely as possible the points and clicks or API/system-to-system calls that our customers are using. So, if anything is not operating properly, then teams are alerted who can triage and ultimately resolve the issue.

The primary use cases are SaaS, but we do have an on-prem environment for Apica Synthetic as well. That option is very helpful because we do have a number of applications that don't have external endpoints. For those use cases that are only accessible internally, we do leverage the Apica on-prem model. This allows flexibility when monitoring applications that we couldn't with a strictly SaaS deployment.

Apica Synthetic provides insight on our application availability at the enterprise level.

What is huge for us:

• The availability of reporting.
• Finding issues before our customers do.

Our application SREs do script checks in such a way that closely mimic our customers' actions using the platform. Because there are so many different ways and options to be able to configure checks to closely mirror your applications' capabilities, it provides a lot of optionality for teams to create the right type of check that can notify when there are any issues. At the end of the day, we want our monitoring tools to be able to catch any outage before our customers do. This is where Apica Synthetic does a great job.

There is definitely a lot of flexibility. I haven't run into any issues or heard of any issues from our SRE teams that said they weren't able to get Apica Synthetic to monitor or script in such a way where it monitored their applications effectively from a synthetic perspective. 

We have had some use cases come up, like when we have teams logging on through a VDI or multi-factor authentication where we have to think about things a bit differently. We are still working through how we might leverage Apica for those types of use cases. However, generally speaking, it has enough flexibility to be able to monitor the complex apps that we typically use it for.

We have been focused on reducing polling times for synthetic checks. We have gone from 10 minutes down to five minutes for a pretty broad swath, but there is some appetite to reduce that further, which could be an improvement. 

We have been using Apica Synthetic for close to three years now.

Stability overall has been pretty good. We have had some isolated issues with a node going down here or there, but generally speaking, it has been good.

Check frequency has been a scalability challenge for them. Other than that, scalability has been good. As far as geographic distribution of nodes, there are no issues.

They have fantastic, outstanding technical support as well as outstanding account support in general. I can't say enough good things about the responsiveness from these teams. Whenever we have an issue, there is fantastic support.

The initial deployment was relatively straightforward, though it is very different between SaaS and on-prem.

There is certainly reputational impact when applications go down and customers find that before you do. There is obviously revenue impact when an application is down and customers are not able to use it. Pick your favorite MTTX number, e.g., Mean Time To Detect or Mean Time To Repair, and having strong monitoring capabilities from a synthetic perspective is a big part of that.

Our ROI on Apica Synthetic is risk reduction. It has increased revenue due to improvements in the mean time to detect and mean time to repair that the solution brings to the table, minimizing downtime. That certainly all goes into our return on investment. At the end of the day, we wouldn't be using the tool if we didn't feel that it is providing a significant benefit to the organization.

License management is another area that Apica could do better. We have already had these conversations with our account teams. This is something that they are looking at largely improving in upcoming releases. I believe that this is already on their roadmap.

Frankly, there are other tools in the space, but we have subject-matter experts on Apica Synthetic now who know it well. We have a good relationship with our account team and have had it for multiple years. So, it is a fairly sticky platform. Where if we were going to a different tool, we would have to learn it. We have established relationships from business and contractual perspectives, and Apica Synthetic has met all our requirements from a synthetic perspective.

We do some load testing internally on JMeter. I know that capability exists, and we have advertised that internally. I am just not sure how much traction that it has gotten just yet.

At the end of the day, it is a tool. You need to have teams using the tool correctly. That is just part of the onboarding and training, which is another thing that my team does. Generally speaking, if the script is instrumented correctly, then the results are correct as well.

We look at three broad strokes from a monitoring perspective: end user monitoring synthetics, application performance monitoring, and infrastructure monitoring. We look at those as three very separate pillars.

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