What is our primary use case?
Because we are in retail, we have a lot of store-facing applications and they have some performance issues. We really want to know how an application is behaving at the endpoint, from the end-user perspective. We support Microsoft Teams, SharePoint, and all the Microsoft SaaS products.
How has it helped my organization?
If a user was having any issues they used to call us. After we installed Aternity it helped by sending advanced alerts so we can proactively look at the issues, whether it's an issue with the PC, the network, or the back-end. It's a nice tool.
The solution provides metrics about actual employee experience with business-critical apps. We have used this feature to measure employee experience before and after changes to applications, in a few cases. Microsoft products are in the cloud and Microsoft releases a lot of changes. Teams is an example, as is SharePoint. They release a lot of patches and we were able to see them, before and after. We chose a nice graphic to show the before and after for the response time. I like this response-time graph. It's very useful and beneficial for any code changes.
It also helps to reduce hardware refresh costs by considering the actual employee experience, rather than just the age of employees' devices. In our teams, a lot of people are complaining about an issue with device memory. The recommended amount is 8 GB to 16 GB. People who have 8 GB are complaining. But looking at the PC, it's not just a RAM issue. It may be due to other challenges, issues with the back-end or network. It depends, in each case. But we can really see, if we run a report on those running 8-GB-memory PCs, whether there is good performance or not. Maybe one or two of those PCs are not doing well, but the remaining ones are good. I don't have details on how much it has saved us in refresh costs, but we have around 200 PCs and upgrading all 200 PCs' memory with 16 GB or 32 GB could cost a lot. It's not viable for any company to upgrade each and every PC's memory.
When employees complain of trouble with applications or devices, Aternity enables us to see exactly what they see as they engage with apps. In fact, we get advanced notice. So rather than the user complaining, we get to know in advance and will see what the hiccups are. We can correlate the user experience. It makes troubleshooting easy. At a high level, the application support teams who don't know much about coding can tell if it is an issue with the data center or the back-end network. It can tell them the root cause at a high level. And if there is any outage it will also tell them that. If the application is down, they'll know how long it's been down. It mainly plots out a graph and shows what time it started, what time it ended, how many users were impacted, and how many business locations were impacted.
We can look into a lot more details about Microsoft Teams, specifically the audio or the video, and we can look at network stats on it.
What is most valuable?
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.
To give an example, we have a SharePoint portal and we configured about 15 banners. If any one of them is breaching the threshold of the number of users, any support person can easily click the incident and nail what the root cause is by looking at the graphical representation. It may be the network or another issue.
There are a lot more features for troubleshooting and monitoring and a few other tabs are available, nicely presented.
The beauty of this product is that it does support desktop. I've seen a lot of products and they have synthetic monitoring, but they're not real-time. Aternity is real-time and it covers desktop applications. An APM may not help, but a real end-user solution like this is helping us with any issues on the desktop. The thin client is running on the local machine, so we need to know what's happening at the end-user machine. This is another one of the features I like.
Another nice feature is that we can customize a lot of dashboards using Tableau.
What needs improvement?
Maybe they could extend coverage. Right now it is only for mobile, desktop, and web. If they could extend it to point-of-sale devices, that would be helpful. For example, your local floral shop has a scanner. I want to know what the performance of that device is like. It may be slow. Or when you go to pump gas and the screens are slow, these are the kinds of point-of-sale that we could start troubleshooting. That would be a nice feature.
Also, when it comes to what is called creating signatures, it's not easy for a non-coding person for desktop applications. You need to run the recording and you need to have some exposure and knowledge. That is an area where they can improve. For web applications, they have the Web Activity Creator and that's an awesome and easy tool. Anybody can use it and capture the signatures. With the desktop applications it's a little more cumbersome and difficult.
Aternity provides visibility into the employee device and into application transactions all the way through the back-end, but it does not support that at a high level. It's not really detailed, but for support people it is helpful so that they can tell if the problem is with the end-user PC, the network, or maybe the back-end. But when you talk about the Waterfall details, it's not providing any. If they could include that, it would be great.
For how long have I used the solution?
I have been using Aternity for about one-and-a-half years.
What do I think about the stability of the solution?
It is stable. I haven't seen any issues, other than a few outages. They were able to fix them on-the-fly.
What do I think about the scalability of the solution?
Scaling is very easy because it's a SaaS product. If you want to add more endpoints, it's easily achievable. In terms of increasing deployment it all depends how you're going to handle it: manual or automated. On a scale of one to 10, scaling is a seven to eight. It's easily scalable.
We currently have 200 users, meaning 200 stores. But we have about 3,000 stores. Even if there are only two or three pieces per store, that would be around 10,000 endpoints.
Maintenance is very minimal. One person is more than enough for maintaining 1,000 or even 10,000. The development is a one-time effort, and after that it is all maintenance. It's just administration: installing the endpoints, making sure endpoints are talking to each other, and configuring any new applications.
How are customer service and technical support?
Their support is good. They respond on time.
The transition from Riverbed was smooth. Aternity was acquired by Riverbed and now it's a different entity. But we didn't see any difficulty or hiccups. The transition was easy and I haven't seen any difference in the support, other than that the support portals were all changed. Riverbed has its own URL.
Which solution did I use previously and why did I switch?
We used AppDynamics, but it's purely for application performance from the data center, not the end-user. We did not have any tool and we had a lack of end-user visibility.
We tried synthetic monitoring. It's like there is a PC sitting and running a few scripts at several intervals. But if there is an issue and we want to get real-time stats, synthetic monitoring lacks that. For example, if the network seems to be good at 10 o'clock and the back-end and PC seems to be good, but at 11 o'clock the network is slow, you only know the 10 o'clock stats. At 11 o'clock you don't know what happened. Aternity has
- real-time monitoring
- very good alerting
- ServiceNow integration.
How was the initial setup?
Setting up the process is very straightforward. All you need to do to install is double click a link. The user does that. And from an admin perspective, it's very easy for web applications. You directly punch in a URL and it can monitor based on the thresholds.
The complexity is only with the desktop application configuration and we need to do that to capture business activities. It requires some expertise. It's not as easy for someone from the support team. You need some development knowledge.
Because this is SaaS, it's not on-prem, all you need to do is procure the license. For the endpoints you can do it manually or use automation. The time it takes to deploy depends on the number of endpoints. We use Radia to deploy to 200 endpoints and do any upgrades. It's a straightforward process. It also depends on the number of applications. For one application and between 100 and 500 endpoints, it might take four weeks or so.
Some customization may be needed and that has to be done by Aternity's SaaS team. For example, if you want to do location mapping or fast tenant configuration for Microsoft Teams, there is a process for talking to any external SaaS tenant. We had to do some customization on this, importing certificates.
What was our ROI?
We have not seen ROI on a large scale because we are planning to go with this on a large scale. We are just doing 200 endpoints. But it is definitely helping us.
What's my experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing?
Pricing depends on the number of endpoints. With only 200 endpoints, which is what we have, it may be a little expensive. But I think pricing is negotiable; that's what I heard from sales.
Which other solutions did I evaluate?
There are other products for this kind of functionality, but for our use case there is no such tool because we are directly looking at the user PC, rather than comparing how much detail someone else might give us. If you are having an issue, I am looking directly at your PC and seeing what happened during that time frame. I can see resource consumption on the PC for that process; Aternity's resource consumption data is very good. And it also has basic remediation, such as restarting the process, emptying the recycle bin. We haven't done much, but there are so many features available.
We tried Microsoft monitoring itself and AppDynamics synthetic monitoring and there was one more product that we did a PoC with as well. Other solutions we looked into were not real-time monitoring solutions and that's the primary reason that we selected Aternity.
What other advice do I have?
I would definitely recommend this product if you're looking to get on-time, real-time alerts from the end-user point of view. Your application may be good with hosting in Azure or AWS, but when it comes to the end-user, it's important to know how your application is behaving. What is the performance like? What is the user interaction like with your application?
It is not only for monitoring. At an enterprise level, the 10,000-foot overview, we can see a lot more details. We can generate a lot more stats for the enterprise. We can see the software inventory and how long it has been in use. For example, if anybody is using Microsoft Visio or Word, the licensed products, we can decide to move them from inventory and save some money. We can also look at how the Macs are performing compared to Windows. We can run queries and it can generate a lot more data about the end-user.
We are dependent on Aternity. We get daily alerts and they help my administration team and my support team a lot. They get to know things in advance and that way they can isolate the problem and start working on it.
I would rate the solution at eight out of 10. The two points that I'm not giving it are because a little development knowledge is required for configuring desktop applications, and to create some dashboards you need some Tableau knowledge. It doesn't require much scripting; it's easy, drag-and-drop, but people should be aware that some development knowledge is required for creating advanced dashboards.
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