Apica vs BMC Compuware Strobe comparison

Apica and BMC are both solutions in the Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability category. Apica is ranked #17 with an average rating of 7.7, while BMC is ranked #72. Apica holds a 0.3% mindshare in APM, compared to BMC’s 0.1% mindshare. Additionally, 81% of Apica users are willing to recommend the solution, compared to 100% of BMC users who would recommend it.

Apica

Read 11 Apica reviews

666 Views
257 Comparison Views

81% willing to recommend

BMC Compuware Strobe

Read 1 BMC Compuware Strobe review

207 Views
129 Comparison Views

100% willing to recommend

Apica

BMC Compuware Strobe

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Executive Summary

We performed a comparison between Apica and BMC Compuware Strobe based on real PeerSpot user reviews.

Find out what your peers are saying about Datadog, Dynatrace, Splunk and others in Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability.

To learn more, read our detailed Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability Report (Updated: June 2025).

Buyer's Guide

Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability

June 2025

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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

Apica

Ranking in Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability

17th

Average Rating

8.2

Reviews Sentiment

7.3

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

Log Management (17th), IT Operations Analytics (5th), Observability Pipeline Software (2nd)

BMC Compuware Strobe

Ranking in Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability

72nd

Average Rating

8.0

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

No ranking in other categories

Mindshare comparison

As of June 2025, in the Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability category, the mindshare of Apica is 0.3%, up from 0.2% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of BMC Compuware Strobe is 0.1%, up from 0.1% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.

Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability

Featured Reviews

Punith H K

Senior Systems Engineer at Infosys

Enables users to create scripts easily and provides excellent real-time monitoring features

It is easy to create scripts. We don't have to write any script. Ready-made options are available. We can select, drag, and drop the options, and the script is ready. The solution’s real-time monitoring features have had a huge impact on our service delivery. If we have an application and the script for it, we keep monitoring it. When the script goes red, it indicates that something is not working. So, we check and analyze the applications. We keep track of applications and monitor whether they are live or not. The tool is also useful for monitoring cloud services.

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reviewer1272504

IT Analyst at a tech vendor with 1,001-5,000 employees

Stable with a good database and a good interface

We primarily use the solution to deal with problems in the production environment For us, the database is the most useful feature. The interface is great. We don't find the pricing to be too bad. The initial setup was fairly easy. I'm not sure how to improve the solution. It currently has all of…

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Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"I like the transcript download feature. And with UI scripting, it's helpful that Apica handles a lot of the backend work automatically. I don't have to tag everything manually, though I can tag elements later if needed. It's really good at recording the steps."

"The solution’s real-time monitoring features have had a huge impact on our service delivery."

"From our standpoint, there are a number of valuable features. The WebHooks are obviously really great. The alert framework is really good and then the reporting and visualizations that you get from the dashboards is good. Those three areas are primarily what my team's focused on in terms of usage from day to day."

"What I like the most is that Apica can simulate different browsers and different versions of desktop or mobile browsers."

"It is easy for beginners to learn and use Apica."

"With the ZebraTester, the ability to have and store dynamic variables, when setting up the monitors, means you can extract that value and use it in a subsequent service call. This is something that has made our lives easier... This is one of the features that I like the most because it helps us in configuring these services, in a certain flow, without the need to re-record the whole thing."

"Anyone can understand the solution easily because it doesn't require a specific scripted language."

"You can tell from the operational space of people who are using and consuming this data that they are more integrated. It is not dependent on one team anymore. It saves a lot of time by capturing and pinpointing the exact problem that is happening quickly. We have moved from getting escalations manually to getting escalations synthetically."

More Apica pros

"The initial setup was fairly easy."

Cons

"The tool does not provide automatic correlation features."

"Learning the tool has always been a little difficult from a scripting perspective because the framework is proprietary and unique. Once we became used to what it does and how to perform it, then it became easier for my team and me. I would like to see some of the testing steps be part of a more well-known language, like Java or Python. That would be a big improvement."

"The reporting part that we use for our executives needs a bit more customization capabilities. Right now, you can use only the three main templates for reporting. We would like to be able to customize them."

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

"Apica should add more features and integrations with different tools and certain ticketing systems, like ServiceNow."

"Alerting needs improvement. It's a little noisy. It needs some better options. Currently, they have an issue, when you set up a synthetic monitor, you can set up where it's monitoring from, a data center that Apica owns."

"The accuracy of alerts can be improved a little bit. Right now, it's pretty good in terms of alerting pretty quickly about failures or changes in response times. However, what we have seen happen is the number of alerts that we are getting is very frequent, and we would like to tone down the number of alerts. That's the only trouble we have. Apica could tone down those settings because there is no option for us to tone it down to a level that would reduce the alerts to a minimum. As a platform, it does send us good alerts, but it could be improved a bit."

"When it comes to the way the internal agent is installed, because you can install an application on a server, I would love to see the application Docker-ized. If you could install internal agents using Docker or using containers, it would be easier for us to manage them and spin up internal agents."

More Apica cons

"There are certain aspects of the configuration that could be simplified a bit."

Pricing and Cost Advice

"The solution's pricing is not cheap, but it is in the midrange."

"The pricing is fair. It is neither too cheap nor too expensive."

"The level of alerting accuracy has saved us time and money in operational costs. Overall, it has automated a lot of the manual efforts which have been more complex with some of our other scripting tools or monitors. So, it brings things together by doing things faster and saves us money."

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

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

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

"Apica is pretty cost-effective if you buy both solutions together: Synthetic and LoadTest. If you are going for one solution, the cost is on par with any tool in the market."

"I am sure that Apica's price will be lower than LoadRunner."

More Apica pricing and cost advice

Information not available

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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews

Financial Services Firm

30%

Computer Software Company

11%

Media Company

Insurance Company

Financial Services Firm

42%

Computer Software Company

14%

Insurance Company

Manufacturing Company

Company Size

By reviewers

Large Enterprise

Midsize Enterprise

Small Business

No data available

Questions from the Community

What do you like most about Apica Synthetic?

The GUI is powerful and doesn't require scripting or regular expressions. It has a vast finder for correlation, which is easier than other tools like JMeter and LoadRunner. It's also easy to integr...

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What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Apica Synthetic?

I know Apica is an expensive solution, but it is worth the money for the service it provides.

See all answers

What needs improvement with Apica Synthetic?

Apica cannot perform endurance or scale-up tests independently. It requires other tools like ALM. When editing scripts, only one can be accessed at a time, risking changes affecting other folders. ...

See all answers

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Comparisons

Dynatrace vs Apica

Compared 28% of the time

Cribl vs Apica

Compared 21% of the time

Datadog vs Apica

Compared 16% of the time

AlertSite vs Apica

Compared 13% of the time

Grafana vs Apica

Compared 12% of the time

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IBM Application Performance Analyzer for zOS vs BMC Compuware Strobe

Compared 55% of the time

IBM Application Performance Management vs BMC Compuware Strobe

Compared 23% of the time

Mainframe Application Tuner vs BMC Compuware Strobe

Compared 14% of the time

Dynatrace vs BMC Compuware Strobe

Compared 8% of the time

More BMC Compuware Strobe Competitors

Product Reports

Buyer's Guide

Apica

June 2025

Download Apica product report

Buyer's Guide

Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability

June 2025

Download BMC Compuware Strobe product report

Also Known As

Apica LoadTest, Apica Synthetic

No data available

Overview

Apica offers a unified platform to remove complexity and cost associated with data management. You collect, control, store, and observe your data and can quickly identify and resolve performance issues before they impact the end-user. Apica Ascent swiftly analyzes telemetry data in real-time, enabling prompt issue resolution, while automated root cause analysis, powered by machine learning, streamlines troubleshooting in complex distributed systems. The platform simplifies data collection by automating and managing agents through the platform’s Fleet product. Its Flow product simplifies and optimizes pipeline control with AI and ML to help you easily understand complex workflows. Its Store component allows you to never run out of storage space while you index and store machine data centrally on one platform and reduce costs, and remediate faster. Observe offers modern observability data management, helping you with MELT data, effortless dashboarding, and seamless integration of synthetic and real data.

Experience the Apica Ascent Platform

Apica

Compuware Strobe is the industry-leading mainframe application performance management and analysis solution for mainframe applications. With Strobe, IT departments can pinpoint application inefficiencies that cause excessive CPU consumption, elongated elapsed times and reduce hardware and software costs while increasing customer satisfaction.

With Strobe, mainframe teams can:

Locate and improve resource-consumptive database calls
Identify tuning opportunities to reduce monthly software licensing costs (MLC)
Resolve performance issues before they impact application service levels
Apply analytics to captured data to produce reports showing high-resource consumption and applications that need tuning
Measure activity of both online and batch-processing applications in single and multiple- system environments
Identify several I/O problems, including inefficient VSAM file buffering
Create and schedule automatic, reusable measurements
Automatically detect performance problems by using a rolling average of CPU consumption and elapsed-time metrics

BMC

Sample Customers

HBO, JPMC, Morgan Stanley, Xander, EA Sports, Volvo

Chunghwa Telecom, Helvetia, Comerica Bank, Erste Group, Bank of Ireland, Southern Farm Bureau Casualty Insurance Company (SFBCIC)

Buyer's Guide

Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability

June 2025

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