No more typing reviews! Try our Samantha, our new voice AI agent.

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
31st
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
33rd
Average Rating
8.4
Reviews Sentiment
4.4
Number of Reviews
3
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
 

Mindshare comparison

As of May 2026, in the Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability category, the mindshare of Alluvio Aternity is 0.7%, up from 0.5% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Apache SkyWalking is 0.6%, down 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 (%)
Alluvio Aternity0.7%
Apache SkyWalking0.6%
Other98.7%
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

"Aternity's Digital Experience Management Quadrant (DEM-Q) has been a game changer for us. While knowing your own metrics is nice, if you don't know how you compare to others or what the numbers should be, then it doesn't tell you much. This solution puts that into context (if we are doing better than others or worse), which helps us prioritize where we want to focus and do improvements versus that's just how slow it's supposed to be. It's also great in communicating what we are doing and why we're doing it to our IT leadership teams, by saying, while we're pretty far behind others in certain categories, the time and changes for our prioritizations are justified."
"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."
"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."
"We've looked at the Digital Experience Management Quadrant (DEM-Q) to see how our digital experience compares to others who use the solution. We have used that to see how we are trending and it gives us some insight into areas that we might need to focus more on. That's helpful."
"The advanced dashboards allow operations teams the ability to focus on outliers."
"Being able to proactively identify issues on user systems."
"Alluvio Aternity provides predictive analysis and trend analysis for IT teams to evaluate the performance of hardware and applications."
"We are dependent on Aternity; we get daily alerts and they help my administration team and my support team a lot because they get to know things in advance and can isolate the problem and start working on it."
"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."
"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."
"Apache SkyWalking has positively impacted my organization by reducing the time of the team so that they can put in more efforts into their other tasks, saving a lot of time, improving our SLA in resolving any issue, providing good RCA analysis to the leadership team, and helping us in monitoring the entire health in a shorter time span."
 

Cons

"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."
"The thing that I think most companies like ourselves would want would be an easier way to customize custom scripts."
"They've additionally added some great color coding, but they need to explain better and drive down further on the meanings of this workflow."
"Reports were a lot easier in the older versions"
"The only thing I can say which has been frustrating are the Tableau workspace/dashboard options out-of-the-box, at least prior to version 8."
"Aternity does provide performance numbers, the data. However, it doesn't tell you what you can do about it. It just presents the facts. How to interpret the data, and how to draw conclusions from a lot of the data, requires knowledge and experience. That's the part that I would hope Aternity can continue to explore and give us that kind of capability."
"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."
"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."
"Apache SkyWalking can be improved by enhancing a few things. The learning curve is definitely there, so it needs a good learning curve."
"Apache SkyWalking can be improved by responding more quickly to new versions of monitored products."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"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."
"The price for Alluvio Aternity is favorable."
"We always try to reduce costs and purchase the Alluvio Aternity Essentials license."
"Regarding cost, compared to other solutions, Aternity is pretty low. It's definitely lower-cost than others that we looked at, like Nexthink."
"Our management squeezed Aternity pretty hard on the pricing, in my opinion a little too much. I advise negotiating for sure, but I do think it left kind of a sour taste in Aternity’s mouth that we were being so pushy despite the fact that we were only purchasing a small number of licenses."
"The pricing for the users and agents is reasonable compared to other solutions and vendors."
"Pricing is a bit high. Don't take that as the "be all, end all"."
"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."
Information not available
report
Use our free recommendation engine to learn which Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability solutions are best for your needs.
894,738 professionals have used our research since 2012.
 

Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Financial Services Firm
14%
Manufacturing Company
8%
Government
6%
Construction Company
6%
Financial Services Firm
20%
Computer Software Company
17%
Manufacturing Company
13%
Retailer
10%
 

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: April 2026.
894,738 professionals have used our research since 2012.