We performed a comparison between Accedian Skylight, Dynatrace, and SolarWinds Server and Application Monitor based on real PeerSpot user reviews.
Find out what your peers are saying about Datadog, Dynatrace, New Relic and others in Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability."Capturing traffic [is very interesting]. Currently, with our configuration, we don't capture the payload of the packets, just the header. But when we want the body, the payload of the packets, we can do a PCAP, and then analyze it within Wireshark."
"This solution has helped to improve the interaction between our network, datacenter, and application teams. I have used other tools, but this tool can pinpoint the root cause of my application or network issue in the majority of the cases. So, it helps different divisions or groups in the IT department to troubleshoot together and get an issue resolved. This tool helps a lot in our day-to-day networking application and IT operations."
"What I like most about Accedian Skylight is that it's a UI application, so using it is easy. I also like that the support for Accedian Skylight is helpful."
"If [the problem] is something related to HTTP or VoIP, then I can have a quick look into the protocols, a process which gives me some good ideas..."
"The feature I used to like the most was its ability to decode layer seven protocols, although this is becoming less useful now that encryption is so widespread."
"For us, the most valuable feature is something called TWAMP that allows for real-time traffic in a way that is 10 times lighter than things like SolarWinds. It's in the sub-milliseconds of accuracy, and you can divide tasks so that you can literally see things like the tagging for Quality of Service. That had been incorrect with the carrier, but there was no way on this planet you'd be able to tell a carrier that they're wrong. I have dozens of scenarios where we found "No, that's not right," and got it resolved instantly."
"The ability to measure performance end-to-end across the cloud data center allows us to take corrective action to keep our channels online."
"I think the analytics features are okay. My customer also likes the interface, the GUI, because it's easy to operate."
"Since we have been receiving alerts from Dynatrace, we go ahead and fix them without the user knowing about them."
"One thing it helped with: We should never get traffic from outside the U.S. and we were getting traffic from Europe, and that was a problem. We found out what caused it. Dynatrace helped us find that information out. We wouldn't have found it otherwise."
"Dynatrace has great training available. It is easy for everybody to use. Anybody can go out to YouTube, watch a video, and figure out how to use the piece that they need."
"PurePath does deep dive analysis, has dashboards, and provides real user experience monitoring. It has allowed us to do analysis which was never possible before."
"We like the user's experience piece: being able to see, from the browser perspective, the user's behavior; being able to answer questions from our customers about why such and such happened, why the performance was slow, why we had an error."
"Reduces troubleshooting time by finding problems before the system is launched."
"It's very easy to reach the root cause of the problems in the applications, due do the analysis with Dynatrace. The timeframe to update and fix the applications has been reduced a lot compared to what we had before Dynatrace."
"Dynatrace's power lies in its ability to inspect and chart transactions, and draw the PurePath tree. The parameters of the requests and methods can be selected to access the necessary information for efficient analysis."
"I'd rate technical support at eight out of ten. They are helpful and fast."
"Features like monitoring and infrastructure dependency mapping are valuable to us."
"Hardware health: It allows for proactive monitoring of the hardware health and is a game changer."
"We use the solution as a central monitoring tool. We use it to monitor every transaction that has a relation to the organization’s infrastructure."
"The more valuable feature of this solution is the Exchange feature."
"There are many valuable features, including the network configuration manager, and the network performance manager."
"Solarwinds has an open database that allows you to do serious integrations. It doesn't matter which service desk you have, you can implement and integrate it with SolarWinds."
"One of the most valuable features are the reports. They're pretty good. Also, the ease of installation and customization for the client is another feature that we value. SolarWinds has a lot of features but these are the ones I like the most. We also like that the KPIs have the ability to be preset."
"The UI interface of Accedian Skylight could improve."
"For the PVX, they are in the process of getting the results to export to cloud and SaaS for analytics. They told me that this will happen later this year. Right now, for the most part, I create that data myself."
"The Accedian Skylight user interface still has room for improvement."
"It's a bit slow. When I execute a query, something general with a short timeframe that covers one month, for instance, and I do not specify the IP source or IP destination, it can take ages because it has to query the whole database."
"Some of the Skylight applications are a little newer, and they're still moving through initial revs. There are certain bugs, but nothing is insurmountable... It will just take a little bit of time for their user interface to get a little bit better."
"Because of the policies in Vietnam, we cannot connect the system to the Accedian cloud. It would be good if Accedian could provide a local cloud. In the next release, I would like them to focus on improving and adding more reporting features. This will help the operations teams."
"There should be an option to update and upgrade the solution to the new version without having to re-buy it. I have clients switching to other solutions. The old solution is great, but if you change your license to a new one, you have to almost re-buy it completely."
"This solution is expensive compared to some others."
"Regarding features, it would be good if there would be some features regarding app security."
"I would say it's not scalable, because we've had to move large applications that were in a shared environment to their own separate Dynatrace server instance."
"We found it was quite challenging in terms of the learning curve."
"I would like to see AppMon also integrated in the Dynatrace portal. There are certain features, which I am not saying are not there in Dynatrace, but I am used to in AppMon."
"The products or company go through a rebrand/renaming about once a year, which creates some confusion with our customers."
"They need better infrastructure monitoring. New Relic is beating them for infrastructure monitoring."
"It needs improvement with proprietary protocols for the DC RUM part."
"The integration between the web monitoring of Dynatrace and OneAgent. "
"The tool's AppStack needs to improve in the storage monitoring part. It should also include an analytics and recommendation approach. If I have found a fault in a server or application, I would like to know what caused it and how do I recover from it."
"SolarWinds Server and Application Monitor could improve the server monitoring and the web application monitoring features are not good. Microsoft SCOM has better server monitoring."
"Reporting is the only thing with which we currently have challenges. They have this in two ways. There is the report writer, which is the backend, and we also have web reports, which are on the console. So, they have removed the report writer for the backend reports, and we are making use of the web console, but most of the users are not finding it very interesting to use the frontend reports. I would like them to bring back the report writer. That's the key area within it to improve on the reporting. If they can bring back the report writer, then most users will actually be comfortable. I have some customers who are trying to export their report to an Excel format, but it is not possible because they said any report that has been done from the web console cannot be exported to Excel, but most of the customers need to export their reports to Excel. That's one area they need to work on."
"The product does not explain why a problem occurred."
"Solarwinds should come up the same monitoring system for other certificate expiration alert apart from SSL."
"It should also be easier to upgrade SolarWinds. AppDynamics is harder to deploy but easier to upgrade. So AppDynamics takes a lot of time and effort to install, but you can upgrade it in minutes. SolarWinds is the opposite. It's easy to deploy, but upgrades take forever. To date, nobody can complete it on time, so the production environment is sitting idle."
"It lacks a user experience for measuring things like the end-to-end time for which a user waits for a specific response in the system. In the application layer, it has some very basic stuff. You have to build your own with manuscripts and things like that."
"Currently SolarWinds SAM offers AppInsight for modern versions of: IIS, Exchange, SQL Server. They have shown to be powerful and insightful tools. However, AppInsight needs to be offered for more applications: Citrix, SharePoint, AX, etc."
More SolarWinds Server and Application Monitor Pricing and Cost Advice →
