Alluvio Aternity Reviews

The main use case for Alluvio Aternity is end-user activity monitoring, which is the process I'm mainly using currently.

The most useful function in Alluvio Aternity is that it allows the customer to easily track and get visibility of whether the application an end-user is accessing is performing well or not.

Regarding Alluvio Aternity and user monitoring on operation efficiency, it will provide visibility to determine whether the operation is smooth or not, and it will help.

Regarding device performance monitoring, it is useful for my IT team.

The reporting part of Alluvio Aternity is good; it is granular, user-friendly, and easy to use.

Regarding network diagnostics in Alluvio Aternity, I don't think it is useful for network diagnostics, but it is useful from an endpoint perspective. Alluvio Aternity agent would be deployed at the endpoint machine, so an end-user's particular endpoint device can be easily monitored when accessing any application. I don't think it is useful for network-related issues.

In my opinion, Riverbed can make Alluvio Aternity better by having the same Aternity agent help in security, such as antivirus or EDR, which would be useful, allowing customers to avoid having multiple agents installed on their endpoint machines. Deploying multiple agents can use the processor and utilize memory, so it's better to go with one agent. If one agent can do end-user activity monitoring and act as an EDR, then it would be better for the end-user, allowing easy avoidance of installing multiple agents on their machines.

I have been working with Alluvio Aternity for more than 10 years overall.

I would rate the stability of Alluvio Aternity as nine; it is deserving of a nine.

I would rate the scalability of Alluvio Aternity as nine out of ten.

I would rate the technical support from Riverbed as nine out of ten.

Positive

The setup for Alluvio Aternity is simple.

Riverbed is costly in the Indian market; I would rate the pricing for Alluvio Aternity as a higher price.

There are multiple competitors in the market for Alluvio Aternity regarding network, application, and infrastructure visibility.

In the visibility market, SolarWinds, ManageEngine, and Gigamon are present. Dynatrace is also there, but I will always suggest Digital Experience Monitoring. Versa and Cato are also coming into Digital Experience Monitoring, but Riverbed is good.

I am Akhilesh Mishra, the Technical Lead for the company M.Tech, and my email is akhilesh.k@mtechpro.com. I am a global distributor for Riverbed and sell Alluvio Aternity to our clients. I would rate this review as a nine out of ten.

Positive

We use it for endpoint system and application performance management.

It has enabled us to be a lot more agile and proactive in troubleshooting issues on our endpoints and in our applications.

Aternity provides metrics about the actual employee experience of all business-critical apps, rather than just a few. We have used it to measure employee experience before and after a change to an operating system. As a result, we saw the prevalence of blue screens on our device fleet go down markedly after we started pushing the Windows 10, 21H2 update out to our fleet. We were able to verify that using one of the built-in dashboards in Aternity.

The solution definitely also helps make decisions about the effect of changes. It allows us to tweak and tune where our infrastructure spend goes, at the endpoint, backend server, and network levels. We can see the impact of changes that are made at every level, and that allows us to use resources effectively. A case in point is our evaluation of new VPN client solutions. We were able to use Aternity to give us really granular application and network performance data, and that data wouldn't be possible to get without Aternity. It led to our picking one vendor over another, amongst other reasons.

It's also very good for verifying what the user is saying is happening, when troubleshooting, versus what's actually happening on their machine. That's one of the key things that is very difficult to do in a service desk troubleshooting scenario. Aternity pulls the emotion or the hyperbole out of it that users tend to throw in at times, and allows you to really hone in on whether it is an issue, and then on whether it's a systemic issue or just a single-user issue. It has additional tools to actually work out, if there is an issue, where that issue lies and to help find the root cause.

There are many valuable features. If I had to single out one, it would be the UXI score. That's a proprietary Aternity score that tells you how good or bad the experience is for a user on that particular machine, for a particular app. It neatly encapsulates the pain of the user in a single score. It's very easy to find issues and then drill down further into those issues, based on that score. A lot of tools will do a similar thing, but they will do it indirectly and it's not always relevant. The Aternity score is on the money pretty much every time.

The Digital Experience Index (DXI) feature is also very valuable. We've incorporated it into the KPIs for our endpoint team. We can use that as a benchmark to improve our goals and our environment, and for ongoing life cycle improvement.

I would like to see more granular performance counters collected and viewable from the endpoints. That would be great. That is something we used to get with SysTrack.

I've been using Alluvio for three years.

We've had any downtime on the service that I've been aware of. However they're maintaining it in the backend is leading to very high uptime. It's a 10 out of 10.

We have it deployed to 3,500 endpoints across 90 branch offices and sites in Australia and New Zealand. About 2,000 of those users are work-from-home at any given time.

The scalability is also a 10 out of 10. We haven't seen any instances of slowdowns or anything changing in the backend with our use. Because it's agent-based, there's very low bandwidth overhead. If I had to scale this from 3,500 users to 10,000 users, I've got a high degree of confidence that it could be done very quickly and with no performance impact. 

As it's a SaaS product, that load is governed by how the tenants are distributed and the resources are assigned from their end, so it's out of our control. But because we haven't had any performance problems and they've kept their market share in the Asia-Pacific region quite significantly, I'm pretty confident there wouldn't be issues in that respect.

I've worked with their technical support a few times. They're fairly responsive to requests. There is local support, which is good, although most of the more technical queries will require assistance from level-two or level-three engineers who are overseas. We haven't had to log that many issues, but the ones we have logged have been floated up and dealt with successfully, for the most part. They weren't feature requests or larger bug fixes that needed to happen on the core product.

Positive

The solution we used previously was SysTrack by Lakeside Software. The reason we made the switch was that that solution had technical issues inside the Citrix PVS environment that made it untenable. In addition, the reporting and the ability to access data were not very easy. And some of the conclusions and performance analyses were done via indirect system performance measures, rather than direct ones. That meant that when it was showing issues they weren't always related to real issues. It was a bit hard to sort through that noise.

It is a SaaS solution. We just manage and deploy the agent endpoints internally. As a result, the initial setup was super easy. Aternity comes with all the parameters that it needs, pre-configured. You push it to an endpoint. Literally, all you need to do is package and deploy it using Microsoft Configuration Manager, and it just talks to the cloud and pulls in what it needs from the device. There's no infrastructure setup, very limited configuration, and it's very simple to deploy. Even if you don't have Configuration Manager, you could use just about any deployment tool to get that agent out onto your endpoints and start collecting the data straight away.

There is almost no maintenance. You just have to update the agent occasionally, which is super simple and not very frequent. It's all hosted by the provider.

We did it all internally.

The pricing is reasonable for the value that it gives because it does allow you to measure the cost ramifications of direct productivity loss for spends in both your infrastructure and on endpoints. Even though it doesn't produce direct savings, the information and the analytics you get out of Aternity have the potential to have a massive impact on your IT budget and help drive efficiencies there.

Aside from the SysTrack software we used, there weren't really any other players in the space that actually had the key activity and application performance measurement capabilities that Aternity does. Aternity is fairly unique. That may have changed by now, but back when we evaluated it, that was certainly the case.

The key feature that Aternity has over competing solutions is the ability to build very relevant and custom signatures for activities inside your core apps. This is something that other products don't do or don't do well. You're getting direct measurement of things inside your core apps and that's very relevant and very useful.

Do a proof of concept. It's one of those rare, genuine products that does what it says on the tin. It delivers, and quickly, without a lot of configuration or anything needing to be done during a proof of concept. Because it's all SaaS, you can do a PoC very quickly: push agents out and start collecting data. The dashboards are mostly pre-configured so you can see the value of that data instantly.

It's a good product. More people need to be aware of it, to see how well it works and how much value this can bring to a business. My number-one recommendation would be just get it in and PoC it. There's very little time investment involved in doing that, compared to some other products, and it will pretty much sell itself.

It's easy to get excited about a good product, but sometimes it's hard to convey that value to other customers who may have been jaded with vendors making similar claims in the past. But in this instance, you can verify it straight away with no obligation and no real effort.

Diving into an application, if you want to pull apart how it is actually performing in the code itself, can be done with an additional module called APM (previously called AppInternals). We don't have that module because we don't develop apps internally using the programming languages that it supports. But even without that module, we can still see very useful granular performance data inside an application. For example, we can see any slowdowns or any performance issues on the client side, the network side, or in the backend. But the APM add-on gives you deeper visibility into the application stack if you have applications that are supported.

Aternity hasn't yet helped us reduce hardware refresh costs by considering actual employee experience, rather than just the age of the employee's device, but we predict it will, based on the existing data we've got and when our next hardware refresh cycle is due to happen. Those cycles are quite long. But it absolutely can help reduce refresh costs and we will be using it for that.

We have over 1,00,000 users. Alluvio Aternity gives us some visibility into applications that may be impacting our end users where our end users are getting low-performance scores. It allows us to go in and start troubleshooting the potential issues.

The most valuable feature of Alluvio Aternity is the compiling and displaying of end-user data so that we can utilize it to troubleshoot proactively. Alluvio Aternity is a very good product to utilize. It is a pretty stable, reliable, and user-friendly solution.

The solution's downloadable reports could be improved.

I have been using Alluvio Aternity for two years.

I rate Alluvio Aternity a nine out of ten for stability.

I rate Alluvio Aternity a nine out of ten for scalability.

I rate the solution's technical support seven and a half out of ten.

Neutral

We previously used AppDynamics. We switched to Alluvio Aternity because we're able to scale up a lot easier with Alluvio Aternity.

The solution's initial setup is pretty straightforward.

The solution's price is pretty comparable to the industry.

Overall, I rate Alluvio Aternity a nine out of ten.

Our primary use case is in the instance of our service desk, and we use the solution primarily for troubleshooting and visibility into the performance of remote and on-site employees.

We have physical and virtual PCs and monitor both Windows and Mac devices while our applications are across the board. We have desktop apps, cloud apps, on-prem apps, and stat solutions.

The tool improved the meantime to resolution, though I need data to back that up. It provides more visibility to our service desk; callers often exaggerate issues, but Aternity takes the guesswork out of the equation. We can see precisely what happened.

We are constantly in hardware refresh mode, and Alluvio Aternity helped increase employee productivity in that respect because it allows us to pinpoint problem devices and replace those first.  

The data the solution provides is valuable to us; we can see the health of the machines, how they are performing, and what might be causing issues on a particular machine.  

We can monitor the usage patterns for desktop applications, showing us which are performing and which aren't.

We use the Digital Experience Index (DXI) feature. It offers customization options, so we can decide what we want to improve and what can stay the same and prioritize specific improvements. 

I want more reporting around asset management, with greater flexibility and customization ability.

The solution is highly stable and always available. It never went down, and the only issue we had was when the dashboards didn't report any data for the first hour of the day, but that was quickly resolved. 

The solution is entirely scalable; Riverbed manages the infrastructure, which makes scaling much easier for us. All we need to do is push out the agents to wherever we need them.

I'm very satisfied with the technical support; they always respond quickly and are highly competent.

Positive

I did not, but the organization previously used a different solution; it didn't have all the capabilities of Aternity, which explains the switch.

The initial setup was great, as Aternity is very straightforward to deploy. The most challenging part was pushing agents out to the PCs, and we used Microsoft's SCCM solution for that. Once we do that, all the management takes place within Aternity.

Four of us carried out the deployment. There was a project manager, myself, a business analyst, and the SCCM admin.

We implemented via an in-house team. 

That isn't easy to measure as we operate on the expense side of the business; we don't use the solution to generate revenue.

We always try to reduce costs and purchase the Alluvio Aternity Essentials license.

We made a comparison between Aternity and uberAgent, which reports to Splunk. We chose Aternity because the user experience is much better; the UI is friendly and easy to use, and the solution focuses more on improving technical issues and user experience. However, uberAgent focuses more on ensuring employees are doing what they're supposed to do, such as logging in on time and not using applications they're not supposed to.

I rate the solution seven out of ten. I want to rank it higher, but I need to see more capability from the tool.

The solution provides metrics about the actual employee experience of all business-critical apps. For our purposes, many of our applications are customer and agent-facing, so we don't get metrics on those. However, we can get metrics for our employees' interaction with apps. We used this feature to measure employee experience before and after changes to our software and hardware, though not with a change in OS. An example of a change we were able to gauge is the performance of staff working remotely versus onsite; most of our remote employees don't have company-provided internet and the equipment that comes with that, and we can see a difference in their performance. 

We used the capability to measure the employee experience of apps to prioritize which equipment to replace first during an upgrade. 

The product can provide visibility into employee devices and app transactions all the way through the back end. Still, we only have an Essentials license, so we cannot monitor many application activities. We don't subscribe to Aternity's APM solution.

As far as the DXI feature helping to perform root cause analysis and remediation, that's done more at the individual PC level. From a machine perspective, however, the DXI works well for replacing and configuring equipment. 

Regarding the level of Aternity's visibility into device performance metrics versus competing solutions, I would tell an engineer that all the tools measure the same items. Still, Aternity's UI is far superior to the others we looked at.  

I advise anyone planning on using Aternity to get to know PowerShell.

The initial use case was purely endpoint performance monitoring, but one of the key things that really shone about Aternity as a product was that the use cases were extremely broad. It became, without a doubt, our most important asset management tool.

It was used for productivity management — that was also a very strong use case. 

Another use case was compliance and security, because one of the key things that we started to leverage it for was monitoring when people were turning off or disabling antivirus products. We could measure that with Aternity and then take action. It was really great at compliance and security.

We also used it for application performance, obviously. It provided super-deep levels of insight into applications through performance tracking.

We also used it for cost reduction when it came to unused, licensed software. Adobe was a big one; Visio, Project, Access, etc. We managed to drop our spend quite heavily by using it for that.

One of the key benefits was when it came to buying. From a procurement team perspective, very often what would happen was that when they were going to buy new IT hardware, they would go to a couple of vendors — big names, like Microsoft, Apple, etc. — and the vendors would give them half a dozen test devices each, and then they would deploy those to various people and wait for feedback. Normally, the feedback would be very human and very speculative. More than likely, the person who got the super-shiny, super-sexy MacBook Pro or Surface Pro, would say, "Yeah, I really like it. It's amazing. It does the job." But what we were actually able to do with Aternity was scientifically measure which asset was giving us the best performance for the spend.

We actually found, in some instances, that it wasn't always the most expensive laptop that was performing the best. It was the one that actually managed to run the company's image optimally. We were able to really save when it came to spending, and do so scientifically. We did not need to solicit feedback from people. The feedback was present in the tool. So when it came to buying, we knew exactly what to buy, at the right price point, for that performance. There were big savings there.

Another key thing that we weren't anticipating saving a lot of money on was network capacity. There were some really interesting dashboards that you can get to in Aternity, out-of-the-box, no configuration needed. They showed top talkers on a per-site basis. If you've got a really distributed organization — our company had offices in 200 countries — each country will procure network infrastructure from whichever incumbent in that nation is the easiest or the cheapest or the best one to get it from. You end up with a very complicated network. In the third-world regions, it's a lot of ADSL. In the more metropolitan areas, in first-world countries, you're getting expensive lease line, or fibre, or dark fibre. For traditional network monitoring solutions, it can become quite challenging, especially when bandwidth and things like that are changing regularly. But what Aternity would allow us to do is actually see individuals who were taxing the network from an endpoint perspective, and we could tackle that on an individual-by-individual basis.

We could also give advice to local IT leaders on whether or not their bandwidth was appropriate for what they were doing. In some instances, we were able to tell people that they could actually shrink the capacity that they were paying for because it was unnecessary. There were all sorts of "edge" use cases. Your ability to save money and to improve performance and to improve productivity with Aternity, is limited only by the imagination of the team that is in charge of the tool.

The solution also provides metrics about actual employee experience of all business-critical apps, rather than just a few. You need to create signatures so that the tool can monitor them appropriately, but it is very agnostic. You need to point Aternity at the thing that you want visibility into, and it gives you exactly that, and in the ways that you want it. You're measuring it from the user, from the inside out, and from the outside in. It gives you very different levels of perspective compared to standard, traditional IT monitoring tools that you use: SNMP, pings, polls. Those conventional, old-world metrics are very easy to dispute as an end-user. If you're an end-user and your experience is bad, someone telling you that the network is up and running and okay doesn't really help you. Someone telling you that the server is good doesn't help you either. It's the perspective of the monitoring with Aternity that really changed the dynamic, because all of a sudden you're able to see things from the end-user's experience. So there are far fewer occasions when you are arguing with your end-user and saying, "No, we don't see an issue." You're far more a proponent of that person's experience. You can tell much more quickly exactly what those issues are that they are experiencing.

We also used its Digital Experience Management Quadrant (DEM-Q) to see how our digital experience compared to others who use the solution. Aternity were probably one of the earlier adopters of a strategy where they would allow customers to baseline their experience against a wider marketplace. It's becoming more prevalent in other tool sets that I see across big enterprise, but it was at least 18 months ago that we started to see Aternity providing us with that capability. It was very interesting because one of the things that some of the bigger industry consultancies, like Forrester, try to do, is create "industry monoliths," where you can baseline against people within your industry. Media companies will look at other media companies; industrial transport and logistics organizations can then benchmark against each other. But where Aternity, and some of the other vendors that are doing this at the moment, brings something quite new to the marketplace, is that you're benchmarking against everyone. That allows you to really see whether what you're doing is correct for you as an organization. Are you getting the results that you need for the money you're spending?

Using DEM-Q undoubtedly affected our decisions about IT investments. It's always very difficult, especially at a large enterprise, to know that you're doing the right thing. When you go into a big purchase, especially for someone who is head of enterprise or head of IT, a key consideration is, "Am I spending the money wisely? Am I going to get return on investment?" If you are able to benchmark against your industry peers and see that you're doing the right thing, that in itself is a validation. It's a validation that you're headed in the right direction. It's a validation that you're spending the money appropriately for the improvements that you're getting.

It can also potentially help you to avoid spending money unnecessarily, because there are certain components, certain aspects of your stack, where you would need to invest heavily to get a small gain. The tool can allow you to look at whether or not that is a necessary investment. "Do I need to upgrade everyone's memory chips from 8 GB to 16 GB?" If you've got 8,000 devices, and an 8 GB memory chip costs you $100, you're looking at close to a million bucks. The tool can show you through its own metrics, and through the baselines against your industry peers, that maybe that's not a worthwhile investment. That million dollars is going to get you 5 percent, and that 5 percent is not necessarily really worth it. Outlook is going to open one second faster. Do you want to spend a million bucks so that everyone can get their emails one second faster? It's that kind of thing that makes decision making much more clinical, much simpler. When I'm sitting in front of a director and he says, "Why do you want this much money?" I want to be able to stand behind that request and say, "If I spend it, this is what you're going to get." That kind of ability to baseline, not only against your own org, but against industry peers, means that when you have those conversations, you can say those things much more confidently.

We saved on hardware refresh by considering the actual employee experience, but it was not only that. Traditionally, with refresh, there is one single metric that IT departments use for going after assets that need refreshing, and that is age. Age is the number-one metric. If you've got 10,000 devices and you get enough budget to replace, say, 1,000 of them, 99 percent of big enterprises are going to go for the oldest 1,000 devices in the estate. That's completely wrong. Just because they're the oldest, it doesn't mean they're the worst. What we were doing with Aternity was targeting the 1,000 least-performant devices; not the oldest. There wasn't some sort of guesswork, but actual science that says which 1,000 were the worst. The 1,000 human beings using those devices would gain the best levels of productivity from those devices being refreshed.

You can also see whether or not a refresh is actually necessary. This is something like "painting the Forth bridge." You paint the bridge and then you go back to the beginning and start all over again because it's taken you that long to do it. With traditional refresh programs, you replace those 1,000 devices, and then you start all over the following year, and you replace another 1,000 devices because you get the same budget. And you do that again and again. But with Aternity, you can look at it and say, "Do we need to?" Are the bottom 1,000 devices performing in such a bad way that they need refreshing? Or are they actually performing well enough that maybe you don't need to spend that $10 million this year? And you can roll that money into network upgrades, or server upgrades, or cloud migration, and wait until the end of the next financial year before you look at it again, because you can actually see.

So you're saving money, undoubtedly, but also investing properly. You're now using metrics that provide you with certainty, instead of just something as monolithic as age. "Oh, a device is three years old, let's refresh it." Sometimes a three-year-old device is perfectly adequate.

In our company, we had 55,000 laptops. On average, the refresh spend would be between $50 million and $100 million a year. We were able to turn about 10 percent of that around, meaning a savings of between $5 million and $10 million, by making sure that we were not refreshing devices that didn't need to be refreshed, and targeting the ones that were most appropriate rather than just the oldest.

It's true that the simplest way to look at these products is in the monolithic way that a financial analyst would look at return on investment. Did we save money? That's really a small part of the value that you can derive from this. The bigger bit is that if you've just replaced 1,000 old machines, and 400 people out of those 1,000 users had bad experiences with their old laptops, they get a slight improvement and they're pretty happy. If you go at it with Aternity, you actually target the 1,000 worst devices, and you're highly likely to be getting a 100 percent success rate when you give that person a new device. All 1,000 of those people are going to be happy. Your "net promoter score," your customer satisfaction, is going to be much more true, accurate, and high. It's very easy to focus only on the financials, but there's actually a big chunk that doesn't fall into financial buckets. That piece is also very good, given the more accurate, targeted approaches that you can use with Aternity.

When employees complained of trouble with applications or devices, the solution enabled us to see exactly what they saw as they engaged with apps, and hilariously so. We did some travel to remote offices to showcase some of the capabilities, and we would sit in an executive boardroom with 10 to 15 people, and troubleshoot performance issues, in the room, in front of people. There was surprise, amazement, and genuine pleasure that we would see on people's faces when we could resolve issues that they had been facing for months or years. They had been having the same issues, the same performance problems, whether it was Excel taking a long time to load, or network instability, or voice call problems, and we would fix it in minutes, in front of them in a meeting, with absolute confidence. It would just blow their minds. You would see levels of faith and trust build in minutes, because they could see that there were no shadow games. We were not hiding behind a telephone. We were sitting in front of them and fixing it tangibly, right in front of their faces. That level of confidence and trust that we built with them was completely irreplaceable.

What was even better than that was that we set aside small pockets of time each month for people to go and target the worst-performing machines, and then proactively reach out to the users. So instead of waiting for someone to complain, we would reach out to the people who were having the hardest time. We would have an IT rep phone a person and say, "Look, we can see your machine is running like absolute trash and here's a couple of things that we can do to fix it." That's just unheard of. Most people were just completely blown away by the fact that they were getting a call to make their day easier and better, and they didn't have to do anything about it.

What was really quite good about it was that, with some of the out-of-the-box, standard applications that everyone expects to be able to monitor it was good, but we could monitor home-brewed applications, which big enterprises have a lot of — applications that are not off-the-shelf but are developed in-house — we could monitor those very carefully, and that was incredibly important. It gave us very bespoke levels of detailed monitoring, and that was for on-prem, mainframe, cloud — any type of application. That was great.

The most valuable thing that you get from Aternity is very broad visibility. You get visibility of your network, of your endpoints, of your software usage, your application performance, capacity, in one pane of glass. We had 20 to 30 IT tools, including application performance monitoring, network monitoring, security, endpoint detection, network protection, capacity management, service management — every kind of monitoring you can imagine. But Aternity was always the first place that I turned for anything, because you can see everything in it. 

The beauty of it is that it has that really simple Tableau backend so you can manipulate the data within it incredibly easily. If you can think of something, you can usually find a way to force Aternity to show you that permutation of data, in the way that you want to see it. It's flexibility is great.

The user interface is good. It's elegant, it's quick, it's simple, it's all built on Tableau, so it feels familiar. It's not difficult to learn how to use it.

Potentially, the one thing that could probably help with better levels of enterprise adoption is around creating the application monitoring signatures. That process can be a little bit difficult. If one thing could be simplified a little bit, it would be the application monitoring signature creation process.

But that's probably quite unfair because it's a super-technical thing, so it's difficult. There is no other tool that can do it in a simpler way. If there were something I would want to simplify or improve, it would be that, but even that would be quite unfair to demand of any product.

I have used Aternity for three years. 

The stability was very good. It wasn't without teething issues, but comparatively speaking, if you were to line it up against every other product of a similar nature in the industry, it's very stable.

One of the things we were able to do is set maximum load limits on how much CPU, memory, and disk the product would use. If it went over a specific threshold, the sensor would shut itself down, which meant that it would never really impact performance because before it got to the point where it started to impact performance on a machine, the sensor would kill itself. You've got safety nets upon safety nets. From a stability perspective, it was fantastic.

Scalability was one of the things where I was having to go in and beg my executive for more money because I wanted to put it on every device in the network. I could quite quickly see every possible use case under the sun. The initial business case was only to cover desktops and laptops, but about three months into the project I was back in the executive office asking for more money so that I could deploy it to servers and everything else. I wanted that same visibility across the full enterprise.

The compatibility of the sensor is very broad so we didn't really have an issue when it came to scale. The issue I had was that I wanted it everywhere, and it was a case of having to reformulate the business case and go back to the exec and ask for more money because we identified that it was such a good product. We needed to put it everywhere rather than just on endpoints.

We did not have a similar solution previously. We had every other kind of monitoring tool that you can imagine, but they were all for specific use cases: network, database, infrastructure, clouds. They were all point solutions. Aternity was the first solution that was focused on end-user performance monitoring, but it also brought in that breadth of being able to see everything.

I was involved in the initial setup of Aternity, every step of it: the proof of concept, the purchase, the initial roll-outs, the deployment, the management, the training; every facet of it.

The initial setup was fantastically simple. That was one of the things that allowed the business case to go through so quickly and so efficiently. From the proof of concept, the business could immediately see the value in the tool. It was solving problems that had been around for a really long time, and it was solving them in really simple ways. Even though it was a time when the company was going through quite a rigorous digital transformation, we were able to deploy the sensor without creating any disruption. No one really noticed it, to be honest. They didn't even know it was there. And we immediately got the results and the data back.

The thing that took a little bit of time was creating the signatures for our in-house developed applications, but a lot of the out-of-the-box functionality provided immediate value. Two or three days after deployment, we were getting value back. We were seeing data that was interesting and useful and insightful.

We were quite aggressive and were at 99 percent coverage within about three months. That covered just under 60,000 devices, so we were deploying it to a huge enterprise.

Our implementation strategy for Aternity was "concentric circles." We started close to home. We would look at deploying to sites and to teams that we knew and were familiar with, so that we could solicit feedback quickly. We would roll it out and we would give it a little time, with concentric circles of 100, 1,000, and 5,000 users. We'd wait a week, get feedback from people, and see if it had impacted performance. One of the beautiful things is that you can monitor Aternity with Aternity. You can see if it is impacting performance of the machines you deploy it to and you can't say that about a lot of tools. When you're deploying antivirus or EDR or other monitoring solutions, it's very rare that you get to see, first-hand, exactly what impact you are having by deploying your own toolset.

That really allowed us to do quite a lot of PR work with the change-management department. We could say, "Look, we've smashed it out onto 1,000 devices and it has caused no impact. You can see that it has caused no performance issues." We could show them baselines and measurements to prove that, and that allowed us to develop trust very quickly with the change team. As a result, we could move quite fast.

Aternity was the one tool that we were able to actually train all people on. Within my team of 100, I would have specific pockets of people that were experts at database, network, infrastructure servers, endpoints. And for those specific skill sets, your network guys, for example, would be trained on SolarWinds and PuTTY. Your database guys would be Oracle and SQL. But Aternity was the one tool we could give everyone access to and everyone training on, and it was useful to all of them.

We had two dedicated Aternity Professional Services people in-house all the time, attached to our purchase. To me, that was fundamental. Having people who are technical experts to help with the deployment and training and application signature-creation was something you can't beat. If you had to buy the software on your own and try to do it on your own, you would move much slower. Having that Professional Services component attached to our purchase of Aternity was a really beneficial situation.

When you look at the breadth of usability, the breadth of use cases that you will discover, you start getting into the kinds of volume metrics where you are saving money when it comes to asset management, and you are saving money when it comes to productivity management, and you're saving money when it comes to procurement and compliance and security. That return on investment business case is the easiest one that you're ever going to do.

I was given 12 months to demonstrate return on investment. We finished our ROI business case within four months. It was that convincing.

It's not a cheap product. There are no two ways about that. If you compare it with a couple of the other solutions operating in the space, it might be on the slightly more expensive side, but it is one of those tools where, once you've got it, you understand the true value. You will get that money back.

What I would say to people who are thinking of buying Aternity is that it's not always better to go cheaper. Sometimes you buy cheap and you end up buying twice. What we found with Aternity is that, fine, it's on the expensive side when compared to other products, but it's also 16 times more useful. You will get so much more out of it.

We evaluated other similar tools, but ultimately settled on Aternity due to its capabilities and compatibility with our existing tooling stack.

The other thing that was very attractive was how Aternity stitched naturally into the Riverbed ecosystem. We were using some of Riverbed's other programs, like AppInternals and NetIM, among others. Aternity felt like it would fit into that ecosystem much better. Ultimately, that was one of the key considerations. And because of the fact that Aternity was a Riverbed product, we already had relationships with that team. Creating that vendor ecosystem was a simpler situation.

But when it came down to the the nuts and bolts of the RFP, when we got into the proof of concept, we could see, despite what a lot of tools say they can do, this one just did it, simply and well and out-of-the-box, without fussing and messing around and trying to configure the bejesus out of it. That was key: Simply put the agent in place and you're good to go. 

Some of the other ones said that they were end-user performance monitoring solutions, but they were very focused on some quite simple things — CPU, memory, and disk — and nothing more than that. They were very mechanically simple and that led to the tool being a little bit useless. Anyone can open up Task Manager and look at how much processor, memory, and disk they're using. But that information isn't really usable and useful until you start to line it up with the other things that really matter. And those include: What does your CPU, memory, and disk utilization mean for the end-user experience? How performant is your operating system, and how performant is your image, and how performant is the application stack that you're deploying on top of that specific image. A couple of the other products that we looked at were very heavily focused on extracting kernel data from the machine, but not really looking at the stuff that mattered. Context is very important. You can't really give someone contextual awareness when the product is only looking at a monolithic subset of metrics.

Based on my experience, what was key was having Professional Services for at least a period of time. It might not be necessary for the full, end-to-end life cycle of the product, or the period of time that you buy licenses for. But having Professional Services — these are people who know the product intimately, inside and out, and who have a direct line of communication to the engineering teams within Aternity — come and help you set it up, get it out of the box and to start to think of those use cases, is helpful. 

Because they've got a direct link to the engineering team which is also getting requests from all of Aternity's other customers, they have the capability of bringing ideas back to you and saying, "This is what another customer is doing. Why don't we do this?" It makes the speed with which you can start to really leverage the product so much faster. You start to get value from it much quicker. My advice is that when it comes to implementation, a bit of Professional Services will go a long way.

Another big thing for me was that monitoring, prior to us using Aternity, always felt like something that we were doing in very specific ways. If I wanted to look at a network, I would go to one product. And if I wanted to look at application performance, I would go to another product. The thing I learned from Aternity was that if you change the perspective that you are using, you can get a much broader level of visibility. The perspective, in this case, is looking from the end-user or endpoint. Because we had changed that dynamic and we were looking from the endpoint inwards, all of a sudden we could see so much more. That was just "revelationary." I really started to look quite hard at whether or not we needed 10 different monitoring tools. And a couple of those monitoring tools were retired because we found very little need for them after we had built proper levels of monitoring into Aternity. There was just no need to have those point solutions in place because we could already see everything in Aternity. The thing that I learned was, although we bought it because we wanted to see endpoint performance — and that's probably why everyone goes shopping for that type of product in the beginning — what I very quickly learned was that it's much more than that. It's a very wide and capable tool.

If you had to choose one tool, if your organization said, "We're going to stop spending money on IT tools altogether, and you're only allowed to have one thing," I would take Aternity every time, because you can do so much with it. It's like the Swiss Army Knife of IT tools. It's the most useful tool I've ever used by a long, long way. There's nothing that I've used that has ever come close to being as useful as Aternity.

The solution is used for the digital experience. It is also used for auto-remediation and reporting issues in servers. Currently, we use it only on our VDI.

Currently, we don't monitor the applications. In my previous company, we used it to monitor the applications. It helped us understand the latency of the back-end application, the client, and the network.

The response time in the application is valuable. The product can quickly analyze and see where the bottleneck is. It can identify whether it was on the network, the back end, or the client side. It is pretty good.

The solution’s user monitoring features help us to have a quicker time to resolve. It also prevents us from having 20 different teams on a call. We know which team to contact. We do not waste resource time. The dashboard is very effective. We can easily identify issues that come up.

Integrating the tool with other products is a challenge. We didn't have the time to work with the integration. The integration must be improved. There are so many different monitoring tools out there. It becomes challenging to have too many different dashboards.

I have been using the solution for two and a half years. I am using the latest version of the solution.

I did a POC on Alluvio, Nexthink, and ControlUp. Alluvio came out on the top.

I will recommend the tool to others. Overall, I rate the product an eight out of ten.

We use Alluvio Aternity for digital experience monitoring. 

The solution is cloud-based SaaS.

Alluvio Aternity has multiple use cases.

The licensing model doesn't suit the market we are in and has room for improvement.

I have been using Alluvio Aternity for one year.

Alluvio Aternity is stable.

Alluvio Aternity is scalable. The organization had around 4,000 people using the solution.

The initial setup is straightforward. We, as the managed service provider, were involved in the deployment process, which took approximately one week with the assistance of one engineer.

We helped the client implement Alluvio Aternity in-house.

I thought the price for Alluvio Aternity was reasonable, but we had difficulty selling it in our market due to the minimum number of agents required for deployment, which I believe was around 500. Many of our customers operate with fewer than 500 agents, so the product did not fit well within that lower market segment, even though it could have been beneficial for them.

I give Alluvio Aternity an eight out of ten.

I believe that Alluvio Aternity is a useful product for diagnosing issues and locating problem areas. However, it may not be suitable for all potential customers, particularly those who require fewer than 500 licenses or prefer a monthly billing option. This pricing model may not be compatible with the current MSP model. While I find it challenging to market to my customer base due to the license threshold, I still believe that Alluvio Aternity is a good product. If the license limit was not a factor, I would be able to sell it to many other customers easily using a SaaS-based pricing model.

As a bank we have a lot of retail branches, and we especially rely on Aternity for helping us do fault domain isolation across our infrastructure and in the end-user space. We can understand relative performance between different remote locations, and we can understand, within a user profile, when there are hardware issues and when there may be software issues. We use it in our corporate offices as well, but we really see the focus being around when a branch user is having a problem. 

We're not as mature as some organizations so that we don't have a full, proactive reporting and alerting built through Aternity yet, but that's on our agenda for the near-term, in the next three to six months.

We deployed it in our own AWS space. It's not on-prem, but it's also not SaaS.

When we converted Windows 7 to Windows 10, we were able to isolate some issues. Aternity pointed out that there needed to be changes in the VDI. We needed more memory to be allocated. It wasn't necessarily clear just from the specs from Microsoft, but it became clear as we migrated people over, with a before-and-after view within Aternity.

When employees complain of trouble with applications or devices, Aternity enables us to see exactly what they see as they engage with apps. That allows us to focus our troubleshooting. Fault domain isolation is the difficult problem. Knowing where the problem is 75 percent of fixing the problem, or even more than that. Aternity helps us know where the problem is. We can compare different branches, we can compare different users, and we can compare different applications to help us determine what the common factors are.

The most valuable features are the ability to 

• separate machine issues from software issues 
• build custom monitoring of our own homegrown or non-standard applications.

As a financial institution, we have a lot of applications that are either written internally or bought from a vendor and customized for us. Having a tool that lets us monitor specific transactions in those applications allows us to focus on the transactions that are important to the business. We find it valuable to be able to see what's going on with the hardware and look at standard applications like Outlook or Teams or Office applications. Those provide a comparison point and let us separate out hardware versus software issues. 

The custom monitoring is where we really do see a lot of value.

We don't feel that we get the back-end transaction details from Aternity. We have other tools that do that.

Also, there is room for improvement in the granularity of the alerting and reporting. We would like to be able to alert on a defined set of users for a given application, for example, that all users in this group who are using this application are seeing low performance. And we would like it to provide comparisons of that to other users in a similar group that are not experiencing the issue. We would like the ability to alert and report on those types of specifics. I don't necessarily know what all the parameters are that I might want to use to slice that data, but our experience has been that within Aternity it's not always as granular as it needs to be. 

Version 11, with the Tableau reporting, offers some promise there. We're only a couple of weeks into Version 11, so we haven't fully implemented it. But that's something we're looking to improve with our new version, moving forward. 

The other place for improvement, as an on-prem, non-SaaS customer, is that the system administration and management in Aternity are very difficult. They've even told me that most of their support calls come in due to configuration and system administration on their on-prem. Their on-prem solution is not easy to use. I know it's not their focus, but for now they still have us and a lot of other customers using it, and they could improve that, rather than forcing wholesale, brand-new builds.

We've had Aternity for six years.

The stability has been good. When we were running version 9, we did not have a lot of problems. We've run into a few applications that were affected by the agent so that we had to not use the agent on some of our very specific, custom-built apps. The Aternity agent somehow interacted with them to the point where the application did not work. But stability-wise, in general, nothing has changed.

Their design is pretty scalable from what we've seen. Before I was involved with the product, people did take it from just a couple of thousand agents up to 10,000, and now we're over 20,000 agents, without too much trouble. It does scale. I've talked to other companies that have hundreds of thousands of agents.

We do not have all our business-critical applications in there. It's also not just a few. We were waiting because we just upgraded to Version 11. We are looking to now go more broadly into other applications. Certainly, the most critical applications are in there.

We have plans to increase our usage. We have a mandate to start using it more for proactive monitoring and to increase the footprint, the number of applications, that we're looking at.

Aternity's technical support is average. We had to push to get the right people and resources engaged from the back-end technical. I found that a lot of the support required us to wait for an email response. We've pushed our account team and they did respond and help with that somewhat, but in general I've seen better and I've seen worse than the Aternity support, in the tech world.

Previous to this, there wasn't really a tool that gave visibility into the end-user device experience at this level. We had related solutions from Dynatrace that would look at the back-end system performance and the front-end user experience as users connected to the servers in the data center. But they didn't look at what was happening on the desktop and how the end-user really perceived that webpage loading or that Outlook item coming in.

The initial setup was complex. There are multiple servers involved in the management system and getting those servers to interact properly — getting them configured so that the management system, the aggregation servers, and the database all communicated properly, all shared certificates properly, and had the proper certificates installed for the API — all of those pieces were difficult. There was a lot of stuff that was not straightforward in our implementation.

Our upgrade from version 9 to version 11 took three months to get the new servers built and configured correctly, tested, load balancers built, etc. That was with Aternity support, so it was not a straightforward implementation.

In terms of an implementation plan, going to version 11 we built a development environment in AWS, completely separate from our existing version 9 production environment. We got that working and then replicated it into production and then deployed part of the solution alongside the current version 9 before we finally upgraded the full system to version 11.

Internally, on our admin side, there are three IT folks who work on Aternity.

What I'm spending versus what I'm getting is a little high, especially as I explore the possibility of moving into their SaaS solution. But I think we have had return on our investment. We had some struggles under the older version, struggles that version 11 seems to be fixing. If we get to the place where we are proactively alerting and where we're giving better reporting, both of which are available in the new version, then we'll absolutely be getting return on our investment from our on-prem.

In my opinion they are asking a lot for their SaaS solution, but I also know that that's the direction they're going. They seem like they're on the high side for what they're providing, but we're not fully implemented. We've got some room for growth. As we grow into using Aternity more, I would hope that we'll be able to do that with costs staying flat. Then it would become more of a return on investment.

Their pricing is a little high. Their pricing model has changed from the old style — and all companies are doing this — the older perpetual license plus maintenance, to more of a subscription-based service. They're pricing their subscription a little high right now.

The current, on-prem solution is probably a fair price. I need to get more value out of it, so that's where I hesitate a little bit. But especially in the SaaS world, when I looked at some of the pricing, I was a bit taken aback.

At the time, we did not look at other solutions. I wasn't managing the team that runs Aternity at the time Aternity was chosen. I don't know for sure what else they looked at. We have looked briefly at other solutions in the past, after having already had Aternity in place, and have not chosen to take it out, at least not yet.

My advice would be to push the support people to help you. Engage the vendor early in the process, via Pro Services or via the support, to help with the implementation. Aternity support requires you to press a little bit to get what you want. If you want to get support, you have to engage them strongly and be very assertive.

Have a solid list of objectives for what applications and what activities you want to have monitored. It's easy to get lost in "Let's look at everything" without understanding what your key, business-critical functions are. Have a top-10, top-20, top-50 list of activities and attack them that way. That's been a bit of a weakness in our implementation.

The fact that other products may provide deeper visibility into device performance does not concern us. We've had very few cases, to date, that have required any deeper level of device performance metrics.

Right now I would rate Aternity at about a seven out of 10, and with the potential to go right up to an eight-and-a-half or nine if we get our version 11 implementation completed the way we're planning.

Because we are in retail, we have a lot of store-facing applications and they have some performance issues. We really want to know how an application is behaving at the endpoint, from the end-user perspective. We support Microsoft Teams, SharePoint, and all the Microsoft SaaS products.

If a user was having any issues they used to call us. After we installed Aternity it helped by sending advanced alerts so we can proactively look at the issues, whether it's an issue with the PC, the network, or the back-end. It's a nice tool.

The solution provides metrics about actual employee experience with business-critical apps. We have used this feature to measure employee experience before and after changes to applications, in a few cases. Microsoft products are in the cloud and Microsoft releases a lot of changes. Teams is an example, as is SharePoint. They release a lot of patches and we were able to see them, before and after. We chose a nice graphic to show the before and after for the response time. I like this response-time graph. It's very useful and beneficial for any code changes.

It also helps to reduce hardware refresh costs by considering the actual employee experience, rather than just the age of employees' devices. In our teams, a lot of people are complaining about an issue with device memory. The recommended amount is 8 GB to 16 GB. People who have 8 GB are complaining. But looking at the PC, it's not just a RAM issue. It may be due to other challenges, issues with the back-end or network. It depends, in each case. But we can really see, if we run a report on those running 8-GB-memory PCs, whether there is good performance or not. Maybe one or two of those PCs are not doing well, but the remaining ones are good. I don't have details on how much it has saved us in refresh costs, but we have around 200 PCs and upgrading all 200 PCs' memory with 16 GB or 32 GB could cost a lot. It's not viable for any company to upgrade each and every PC's memory.

When employees complain of trouble with applications or devices, Aternity enables us to see exactly what they see as they engage with apps. In fact, we get advanced notice. So rather than the user complaining, we get to know in advance and will see what the hiccups are. We can correlate the user experience. It makes troubleshooting easy. At a high level, the application support teams who don't know much about coding can tell if it is an issue with the data center or the back-end network. It can tell them the root cause at a high level. And if there is any outage it will also tell them that. If the application is down, they'll know how long it's been down. It mainly plots out a graph and shows what time it started, what time it ended, how many users were impacted, and how many business locations were impacted.

We can look into a lot more details about Microsoft Teams, specifically the audio or the video, and we can look at network stats on it.

The most valuable feature is the alerting. As soon as we click on an incident, it takes us directly to the problematic PC. It's a direct solution. We click on an alert and it takes us to the incident details. The details show in different colors, in a graphical representation, and I like that the most. 

To give an example, we have a SharePoint portal and we configured about 15 banners. If any one of them is breaching the threshold of the number of users, any support person can easily click the incident and nail what the root cause is by looking at the graphical representation. It may be the network or another issue.

There are a lot more features for troubleshooting and monitoring and a few other tabs are available, nicely presented. 

The beauty of this product is that it does support desktop. I've seen a lot of products and they have synthetic monitoring, but they're not real-time. Aternity is real-time and it covers desktop applications. An APM may not help, but a real end-user solution like this is helping us with any issues on the desktop. The thin client is running on the local machine, so we need to know what's happening at the end-user machine. This is another one of the features I like. 

Another nice feature is that we can customize a lot of dashboards using Tableau.

Maybe they could extend coverage. Right now it is only for mobile, desktop, and web. If they could extend it to point-of-sale devices, that would be helpful. For example, your local floral shop has a scanner. I want to know what the performance of that device is like. It may be slow. Or when you go to pump gas and the screens are slow, these are the kinds of point-of-sale that we could start troubleshooting. That would be a nice feature.

Also, when it comes to what is called creating signatures, it's not easy for a non-coding person for desktop applications. You need to run the recording and you need to have some exposure and knowledge. That is an area where they can improve. For web applications, they have the Web Activity Creator and that's an awesome and easy tool. Anybody can use it and capture the signatures. With the desktop applications it's a little more cumbersome and difficult.

Aternity provides visibility into the employee device and into application transactions all the way through the back-end, but it does not support that at a high level. It's not really detailed, but for support people it is helpful so that they can tell if the problem is with the end-user PC, the network, or maybe the back-end. But when you talk about the Waterfall details, it's not providing any. If they could include that, it would be great.

I have been using Aternity for about one-and-a-half years.

It is stable. I haven't seen any issues, other than a few outages. They were able to fix them on-the-fly.

Scaling is very easy because it's a SaaS product. If you want to add more endpoints, it's easily achievable. In terms of increasing deployment it all depends how you're going to handle it: manual or automated. On a scale of one to 10, scaling is a seven to eight. It's easily scalable.

We currently have 200 users, meaning 200 stores. But we have about 3,000 stores. Even if there are only two or three pieces per store, that would be around 10,000 endpoints.

Maintenance is very minimal. One person is more than enough for maintaining 1,000 or even 10,000. The development is a one-time effort, and after that it is all maintenance. It's just administration: installing the endpoints, making sure endpoints are talking to each other, and configuring any new applications.

Their support is good. They respond on time.

The transition from Riverbed was smooth. Aternity was acquired by Riverbed and now it's a different entity. But we didn't see any difficulty or hiccups. The transition was easy and I haven't seen any difference in the support, other than that the support portals were all changed. Riverbed has its own URL.

We used AppDynamics, but it's purely for application performance from the data center, not the end-user. We did not have any tool and we had a lack of end-user visibility.

We tried synthetic monitoring. It's like there is a PC sitting and running a few scripts at several intervals. But if there is an issue and we want to get real-time stats, synthetic monitoring lacks that. For example, if the network seems to be good at 10 o'clock and the back-end and PC seems to be good, but at 11 o'clock the network is slow, you only know the 10 o'clock stats. At 11 o'clock you don't know what happened. Aternity has 

• real-time monitoring
• very good alerting 
• ServiceNow integration. 

Setting up the process is very straightforward. All you need to do to install is double click a link. The user does that. And from an admin perspective, it's very easy for web applications. You directly punch in a URL and it can monitor based on the thresholds.

The complexity is only with the desktop application configuration and we need to do that to capture business activities. It requires some expertise. It's not as easy for someone from the support team. You need some development knowledge.

Because this is SaaS, it's not on-prem, all you need to do is procure the license. For the endpoints you can do it manually or use automation. The time it takes to deploy depends on the number of endpoints. We use Radia to deploy to 200 endpoints and do any upgrades. It's a straightforward process. It also depends on the number of applications. For one application and between 100 and 500 endpoints, it might take four weeks or so.

Some customization may be needed and that has to be done by Aternity's SaaS team. For example, if you want to do location mapping or fast tenant configuration for Microsoft Teams, there is a process for talking to any external SaaS tenant. We had to do some customization on this, importing certificates.

We have not seen ROI on a large scale because we are planning to go with this on a large scale. We are just doing 200 endpoints. But it is definitely helping us.

Pricing depends on the number of endpoints. With only 200 endpoints, which is what we have, it may be a little expensive. But I think pricing is negotiable; that's what I heard from sales.

There are other products for this kind of functionality, but for our use case there is no such tool because we are directly looking at the user PC, rather than comparing how much detail someone else might give us. If you are having an issue, I am looking directly at your PC and seeing what happened during that time frame. I can see resource consumption on the PC for that process; Aternity's resource consumption data is very good. And it also has basic remediation, such as restarting the process, emptying the recycle bin. We haven't done much, but there are so many features available.

We tried Microsoft monitoring itself and AppDynamics synthetic monitoring and there was one more product that we did a PoC with as well. Other solutions we looked into were not real-time monitoring solutions and that's the primary reason that we selected Aternity.

I would definitely recommend this product if you're looking to get on-time, real-time alerts from the end-user point of view. Your application may be good with hosting in Azure or AWS, but when it comes to the end-user, it's important to know how your application is behaving. What is the performance like? What is the user interaction like with your application?

It is not only for monitoring. At an enterprise level, the 10,000-foot overview, we can see a lot more details. We can generate a lot more stats for the enterprise. We can see the software inventory and how long it has been in use. For example, if anybody is using Microsoft Visio or Word, the licensed products, we can decide to move them from inventory and save some money. We can also look at how the Macs are performing compared to Windows. We can run queries and it can generate a lot more data about the end-user.

We are dependent on Aternity. We get daily alerts and they help my administration team and my support team a lot. They get to know things in advance and that way they can isolate the problem and start working on it.

I would rate the solution at eight out of 10. The two points that I'm not giving it are because a little development knowledge is required for configuring desktop applications, and to create some dashboards you need some Tableau knowledge. It doesn't require much scripting; it's easy, drag-and-drop, but people should be aware that some development knowledge is required for creating advanced dashboards.