What is our primary use case?
My main use case for using Glassbox is to see the session activity that has been done by users. It helps me by using a correlation ID or a session ID to understand what actions users have performed. Glassbox records the full session, and through the session, I can trace the full behavior, including all calls that have been placed, which helps in understanding if it's a user behavior error, where the error has come from, or where the request has failed for better analysis.
Recently, I was working with the Marriott International group, where we noticed a lot of bot activity. I went to a particular browser and replicated some malicious behavior by opening the session repeatedly. I took a session ID from the production server, entered that session ID into Glassbox along with the proper timing to minimize search duration, and reviewed the recorded session. During the recorded session, I observed user behavior and traced various calls. I identified a user error when one of the users entered the credit card number incorrectly, helping me to recognize patterns associated with bot activity. Through those parameters, I identified various types of errors and user behaviors.
A second use case involves verifying if I am entering the correct credit card details or selecting the right country. I can review those use cases via recordings to assess sub-calls, which is essential because manual tracing can be challenging. Glassbox assists me in tracing the complete end-to-end flow, allowing me to identify where the error leak is.
What is most valuable?
Glassbox offers data recording and user behavior tracing within the application. Its features include AI struggle detections and session replays. It also provides insights through heat maps and journey mapping, allowing me to isolate errors, whether they occur in navigation pages, review pages, or find pages. This functionality helps in identifying drop-off points for errors, enabling me to mitigate those issues.
The AI struggle detection feature helps me identify user friction points by analyzing trillions of user interaction data points. It aggregates over 30 distinct behavioral and technical triggers into a singular struggle score, allowing me to know how many users faced issues. The AI algorithm flags patterns such as double clicks, session invalidations, rapid scrolling, and technical errors like Ajax failures and slow page loads. It helps me create alerts for the team, ensuring we address network abnormalities proactively and understand the potential business impact of financial loss.
Glassbox has positively impacted my organization by detecting bot traffic, which helps create better features to prevent that traffic from hitting the application. It enables me to track application issues and convert complex user data into clear and prioritized insights while directly mapping digital frictions to financial losses. For example, we previously encountered a lot of 500 errors, and Glassbox helped us reduce those errors and improve page response times, particularly on a find.mi page that had a high response time due to those errors.
What needs improvement?
Glassbox can be enhanced by adding direct alerting features that effectively pinpoint user pain points found in GW crowd reviews, better training the system based on past behaviors, and improving session loading speeds, as loading sessions can take too long. Additionally, refining UI navigation to ease usability and reducing lag during complex session replays would be beneficial, along with implementing data retention limitations for improved data processing.
I choose a seven because, despite helping in user behavior and error counting, session replays have been a significant pain point for me, and UI navigation can become complex. Clear documentation with a guided experience would help users understand the features better.
For how long have I used the solution?
I have been working in my current field for the last seven years.
What do I think about the stability of the solution?
Glassbox is stable, providing predictable sessions and strong compliance structures, along with a secure and tamper-proof vault and native event web parity.
What do I think about the scalability of the solution?
Glassbox's scalability has been good, effectively managing a significant amount of sessions.
How are customer service and support?
Customer support is occasionally beneficial, offering 24/7 technical troubleshooting, dedicated help infrastructure, and strategic optimization consulting, all governed by strict service level agreements for prompt response times.
Which solution did I use previously and why did I switch?
Previously, I used Dynatrace but switched to Glassbox for its more interactive views, which aid in user behavior analysis, especially since Dynatrace was cost-prohibitive.
How was the initial setup?
My team found it easy to learn and adopt Glassbox because of its user-friendly interface, requiring us only to input the session ID to navigate and get the needed information easily.
What about the implementation team?
We purchased Glassbox through its marketplace.
What was our ROI?
I have noted a return on investment since employees previously took two days to manually identify data, but now they complete the same work within four hours thanks to Glassbox, which reduces working hours and translates into cost savings for us.
What's my experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing?
Glassbox is priced as a premium enterprise platform featuring multi-tiered licensing structures. The enterprise entry point usually ranges from $10,000 to $50,000 per year, offering robust support, session volumes, data retention periods, and deployment models, which justifies our choice of its enterprise version.
Which other solutions did I evaluate?
Before choosing Glassbox, we evaluated options including Quantum, LogRocket, and ContentSquare among others.
What other advice do I have?
Glassbox facilitates effective communication within the team through numerical reports that developers and analysts can use to improve application performance and draft strong KPI results.
We have a governance agreement governing our use of Glassbox and ensuring compliance with regulations, allowing us access to data under that guidance.
Glassbox ensures data privacy by employing built-in privacy guardrails that prevent collection or exposure of personally identifiable information. By default, it masks highly sensitive information.
Glassbox helps me prioritize which issues to fix first by providing an overview of errors, such as internal server errors and application failures, allowing me to segregate error types and focus on addressing critical issues promptly.
Glassbox integrates by sharing session data and connecting with tools like Dynatrace and other platforms through pre-built connectors and open APIs to facilitate behavior analysis.
Glassbox updates its platform through patching with regular release cadence, featuring weekly improvements and significant feature launches. This process makes it easy for us to stay informed about new installations.
Glassbox supports mobile analytics using a single lightweight SDK, capturing 100% of user sessions on both iOS and Android, mapping behavioral data alongside technical performance metrics without requiring manual event tagging. It also uses native SDK wrappers like Flutter and React Native.
I created a before-and-after matrix to measure the reduction in 500 errors and page response time. Previously, I had around 3,000 errors on my find page, but after using Glassbox to analyze and implement the right blockers, that number reduced to 500. This reduction significantly helped prevent Ajax and network data errors and quantified the revenue lost, making it clear how I improved error management and user experience.
I advise others to understand their needs first, particularly if they focus on user recording behavior within enterprise applications like hotel booking or grocery systems. They should read the Glassbox documentation before starting, which will enhance their experience with the platform. I gave this review a rating of seven out of ten.