We performed a comparison between Apica and OpenText Real User Monitoring 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."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."
"It helps with releases because we monitor them in staging. We can tell if something is critically wrong before it gets into production, e.g., if it was load related or function related and also what was different in the dev stage. It then alerts us straightaway inside of our production monitors once it has been released. Therefore, it has improved how we run our systems since we monitor multiple environments."
"As always, within the IT industry, everybody's always looking to upgrade and update everything else like that. Apica has been one of those things but it's really hard to replace because it offers us the unique capability to see what the customer is seeing. A lot of other ones can do Selenium script and things like that, but there's a lot in Apica that we use right now. We utilize a lot of the scenario options in Apica right now, and there's a lot of other ones that do parts of it, but it doesn't do everything that Apica does."
"What I like the most is that Apica can simulate different browsers and different versions of desktop or mobile browsers."
"It is easy to set up and configure."
"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."
"One of the biggest advantages of moving to Apica is the ability get to a hybrid model with the architecture in the cloud and our agents on-prem. We also have access to Apica's cloud agent across the globe. That has changed the way that we have our load testing setup at this point. Previously, it was always internal. Now, with this change in the way it is implemented for load testing, we can test anywhere across the globe and from the list of agents available within Apica's cloud. If I don't have an agent available in a second location, it just takes an email to their customer support, then it is spun up within 24 hours. That flexibility has changed the way that we perceive our load tests, not just in the US, but globally."
"It uses a basic scripting language, which is easy to learn and customize as needed. Compared to LoadRunner, I found writing and customizing code much easier in Apica."
"The most valuable feature is application performance monitoring."
"Real User Monitor has improved our productivity."
"Very easy to implement."
"The most useful feature of this solution is tracking. When the application's traffic has been monitored it is taken from that particular application and analyzed. It is then given a live session of that particular user. For example, if you are using your bank application to do some kind of transaction, everything that you do can be tracked by that application."
"The reporting feature is good for us."
"The technical support is good at resolving issues."
"The Real User Monitor, with its transaction and synthetic transaction monitoring, is the typical classic in APM cases when the customer would like to do transaction monitoring. Micro Focus scores better where the underlying infrastructure management is also covered by Micro Focus tools."
"Apica was a relatively new tool when I started using it. Although Apica had good documentation, it still felt less developed or advanced than a tool like LoadRunner."
"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 having to install an application on your desktop to utilize something like ZebraTester is a little cumbersome. It would be nice to see that become a web-based application. Having the documentation a little more accessible, and easier to digest by people who are just learning how to use the framework, especially when it comes to more complex or more edge-based cases would be really helpful to have."
"There are some components of the user interface that are not up to date. Just to give you an idea, today we have web applications that are called single-page applications that are much faster than the old style of web application. If we can move faster into the flow of the graphic user interface, and in a more effective way, it will save us a lot of time."
"The customer service and support were a little slow to respond. The browser sometimes checks alerts on unknown issues like latency from Apica's side."
"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."
"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."
"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."
"One area to improve is the user interface, of course. The second one is their R&D has virtually stopped building a product roadmap."
"This technology is considered to be older."
"Real User Monitor needs to cover more protocols to provide more in-depth information. It could also be better at monitoring voice-related traffic. There is currently no visibility in that channel."
"Everybody is moving away from traffic and installing agents on the application to do the job, but Micro Focus is using traditional ways to collect the traffic. They should change their architecture completely."
"We would like to see support for non-Windows environments."
"Some issues with login errors."
"When we want to monitor our encrypted traffic, this product doesn't work because our cipher is not supported."
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Apica is ranked 55th in Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability with 4 reviews while OpenText Real User Monitoring is ranked 45th in Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability with 8 reviews. Apica is rated 8.4, while OpenText Real User Monitoring is rated 6.2. The top reviewer of Apica writes "Offers transcript download feature and easy to set up and configure tests but not very user friendly". On the other hand, the top reviewer of OpenText Real User Monitoring writes "The reports and metrics we collect help us to improve our services". Apica is most compared with Dynatrace, Datadog, AppDynamics, Apache JMeter and OpenText LoadRunner Cloud, whereas OpenText Real User Monitoring is most compared with AppDynamics, Dynatrace, Honeycomb.io and VMware Aria Operations for Applications.
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