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Alluvio Aternity vs Apache SkyWalking comparison

 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive Summary

Review summaries and opinions

We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use. Here are some excerpts of what they said:
 

Categories and Ranking

Alluvio Aternity
Ranking in Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability
33rd
Average Rating
8.4
Reviews Sentiment
7.3
Number of Reviews
39
Ranking in other categories
Mobile APM (4th), Digital Experience Monitoring (DEM) (6th)
Apache SkyWalking
Ranking in Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability
30th
Average Rating
8.6
Reviews Sentiment
5.5
Number of Reviews
2
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
 

Mindshare comparison

As of March 2026, in the Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability category, the mindshare of Alluvio Aternity is 0.5%, up from 0.4% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Apache SkyWalking is 0.7%, up from 0.7% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability Mindshare Distribution
ProductMindshare (%)
Apache SkyWalking0.7%
Alluvio Aternity0.5%
Other98.8%
Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability
 

Featured Reviews

Akhilesh Mishra - PeerSpot reviewer
Technical Lead at M.TECH Solutions India Pvt. Ltd.
Monitoring end-user activity has improved visibility into device and application performance
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.
reviewer2784462 - PeerSpot reviewer
Software Engineer at a tech vendor with 10,001+ employees
Tracing has revealed hybrid bottlenecks and delivers full visibility into critical payment flows
Apache SkyWalking provided full visibility into the black hole because before using it, we could not see what was happening when a request left Amazon EKS and went to our on-premises legacy databases. Apache SkyWalking's distributed tracing correlates these two worlds in a single view, showing us that 40% of the latency was actually happening in the network hop between the cloud and the physical data center, not in the code itself. Second, it exposes hidden architectural flaws. By using the automatic dependency mapping, we discovered that some microservices were stuck in a cyclic dependency which was documented nowhere. This visual evidence allowed us to refactor the logic and immediately increased our throughput by 30%. Apache SkyWalking gave us database-level insight without database access. Through its slow query monitoring, the Java agents captured the exact SQL statements that were hanging during peak sales hours. This meant our developers could fix the exact line of code or index without needing to wait for a DBA to pull logs, reducing our mean time to resolution. There are many features that are useful to mention in this case because we obtained different benefits. Apache SkyWalking automatically drew the topology of the 600 pods where we discovered cyclic dependencies between services that no one had documented before and that were slowing down the system. Another valuable feature is resolving hybrid bottlenecks because we isolated a specific network issue between AWS and the physical data center. Without distributed tracing, infrastructure teams blame Java code and vice versa. Database tuning is also important because thanks to slow query metrics captured by the agent, we identified and rewrote the SQL queries that most impacted performance during sales peaks.

Quotes from Members

We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use. Here are some excerpts of what they said:
 

Pros

"All of it, but it depends on who the end user is. The folks that support the applications, like the signatures that we've developed, it gives them feedback on their application performance."
"We were able to identify bottlenecks in the application code that we had."
"We're now able to get a real measurement of user productivity."
"The ability to monitor crash and health event issues at a user level"
"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."
"The item we use the most and what upper management wants is the SLA reports, as they provide a good summary of how the applications are performing over time from month to month."
"Being able to proactively identify issues on user systems."
"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."
"Apache SkyWalking is a very nice tool and an exceptional tool for managing volume and complex architecture on AWS without the prohibitive cost of commercial suites."
"Using Apache SkyWalking has had a positive impact on my organization because it has enabled us to identify the causes of various problems more quickly."
 

Cons

"Potentially, the one thing that could probably help with better levels of enterprise adoption is around creating the application monitoring signatures."
"When it comes to a lot of the features that I would want, they will tell you they are in their SaaS version, which we don't use."
"Their technical support structure is terrible. I would give them a rating of 2/5."
"Signature development process requires deep technical expertise in the application and in the use of their studio tools that help you create it."
"I would improve the dashboard, the presentation player."
"The dashboards and navigatability of the platform could use improvement. It often takes five or six clicks to drill down to exactly what you want to see."
"They've additionally added some great color coding, but they need to explain better and drive down further on the meanings of this workflow."
"Aternity doesn't currently provide metrics about actual employee experience of all business-critical apps. It's something you have to build out. It's not 'canned' that way and there is a lot of configuration that you have to do to the environment to collect the data you want to collect and that is important to you."
"Apache SkyWalking can be improved by responding more quickly to new versions of monitored products."
"Apache SkyWalking can be improved with storage management complexity because with this volume of 50 million traces a day, managing data retention on OpenSearch is critical."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"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."
"The solution's price is pretty comparable to the industry."
"We always try to reduce costs and purchase the Alluvio Aternity Essentials license."
"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."
"Pricing is a bit high. Don't take that as the "be all, end all"."
"If the scale of your monitoring will be to go everywhere in an organization, a site license is key."
"Its licensing cost is very low. That's one of the reasons why we have kept it for so long. We get more than a 70% discount on the maintenance licenses. Its cost is very low for us, but if you buy it new, it would be much more expensive at the retail price."
"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."
Information not available
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Financial Services Firm
15%
Manufacturing Company
8%
Computer Software Company
6%
Government
6%
Computer Software Company
19%
Financial Services Firm
16%
Retailer
11%
Manufacturing Company
11%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business1
Midsize Enterprise5
Large Enterprise32
No data available
 

Questions from the Community

What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Aternity?
Riverbed is costly in the Indian market; I would rate the pricing for Alluvio Aternity as a higher price.
What needs improvement with Aternity?
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 mult...
What is your primary use case for Aternity?
The main use case for Alluvio Aternity is end-user activity monitoring, which is the process I'm mainly using currently.
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Apache SkyWalking?
Our experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing for Apache SkyWalking is positive since it is free, which was the reason for our decision to use it.
What needs improvement with Apache SkyWalking?
Apache SkyWalking can be improved by responding more quickly to new versions of monitored products, including, for example, taking into account changes in Java class names.
What is your primary use case for Apache SkyWalking?
Our main use case for Apache SkyWalking is for monitoring Java application servers such as Tomcat and WebSphere Liberty.
 

Also Known As

Aternity, Workforce APM, Aternity Frontline, Riverbed SteelCenter Aternity
No data available
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

Maersk, SwissRe, Travis Perkins, Michelin, National Instruments, Simmons & Simmons, Lighthouse Guild
1. Alibaba 2. Amazon 3. Apple 4. Baidu 5. ByteDance 6. Cisco 7. Dell 8. Google 9. Huawei 10. IBM 11. Intel 12. JPMorgan Chase 13. Klarna 14. LinkedIn 15. Microsoft 16. Netflix 17. Oracle 18. PayPal 19. Pinterest 20. Qualcomm 21. SAP 22. Samsung 23. Spotify 24. Tencent 25. Twitter 26. Uber 27. VMware 28. WeChat 29. Xiaomi 30. Zoom
Find out what your peers are saying about Alluvio Aternity vs. Apache SkyWalking and other solutions. Updated: March 2026.
885,376 professionals have used our research since 2012.