Alluvio Aternity Reviews

One of our use cases was to cover some gaps in our current monitoring. We have visibility into the flows and the traffic coming from our branch routers. We have visibility into the infrastructure, SNMP monitoring for our servers, but we never had anything previously to tell us what the end-user is seeing.

The biggest use case we have is identifying the scope of issues. We get tickets all the time saying, "The network is slow at this location." Being able to see and compare the performance of the applications at different locations is huge for us. And when we have an application that's having issues, it will let us know the scope; if it's just one site or all users or one user on VPN.

We have relatively large operations. I'm responsible for North and South America and although we're part of a global network as well, that's currently my scope. We looked for a solution to help us improve end-user performance monitoring. We have about 8,000 workstations distributed across about 500 locations in the U.S., and in South America, we have 3,000 machines in roughly 200 locations.

I was looking at it more from the point of view of the performance of the applications. But our service desk has gotten a lot of value out of it because it really can pull all the details from the workstation side. That was a whole separate piece that is actually a very big piece, now, of the use case that really wasn't even something we had planned for.

In terms of cost savings, there's a piece in Aternity that shows application usage. For licensed software, things like Visio or Microsoft Project, a lot of people say they may need that software, but you can run reports and see who's actually using it. If they're not using, you can reassign those licenses which results in actual hard savings.

If we see issues on the network side, it will help guide the troubleshooting process in the user experience. We actually had a call yesterday with our developers to introduce them to the application and see if it is something that they could start using in their QA and validation testing. We haven't gotten to that point yet, but we are starting to look at it.

It also provides visibility into the employee device and into application transactions all the way through to the back-end. That lets you see what the users are actually spending their time working on. We have in-house applications, but it lets us know if they're using them. If we roll out an updated piece of software and we see users are having problems with the new version, we'll stop, for sure, and review and see how we can improve it.

Something else it has is the "smart refresh" dashboard. It's something that we're looking to review further when we start our next refresh cycle. We've already used it to validate performance improvements by increasing memory on some machines before we actually do a full roll-out of a memory upgrade. It's one of the sweet spots for the product.

Aternity provides metrics about actual employee experience of all business-critical apps, rather than just a few. It does some out-of-the-box monitoring for the Office suite, but you can create custom monitoring for any of your applications, whether a web client or a desktop application. There's a process where you record the transactions and then you feed that into Aternity in an XML file. It then looks at what you're clicking on and what the URL is and, if it sees that on other clients, it can start recording the transactions for those applications.

We've used that feature to measure employee experience before and after changes to applications, devices, or operating systems. That's something that is really interesting. One of the dashboards can tell you, when an application is having issues, when the issues started or when we had a change window. It will baseline the performance before and after that change window.

The process of doing the application recording is a bit cumbersome. It would be nice if there were a friendlier way to do that, or more predefined applications. 

Being able to add custom monitoring to dashboards would be nice. Right now, if you want to monitor the value of a registry key on your systems, to get that added into the dashboard you have to reach out to Aternity so they can start looking for that value. It would be interesting if that were more of a self-serve function.

We bought licenses for Aternity at the start of this year (2020).

The stability of Aternity has been really good. We have not noticed any issues from the client side in terms of causing a problem with the additional data it's collecting. It's been very solid.

It's SaaS-based so we haven't had any issues with scalability at all.

Their tech support is very good. I haven't had any issues with them. We have project hours with them for the implementation and they're very responsive.

The initial setup was very simple. I was shocked, honestly. We just installed the agent on a couple of machines, logged into our portal, and it was already reporting data. Literally, within two minutes of getting the app installed, the machines were checking in.

Our deployment is still ongoing because we're looking at expanding the product. We're doing some demos for other business lines, globally. But for North America, we rolled it out in about three weeks, which is our normal cycle in terms of product deployment.

Our implementation strategy was to start with our pilot users, 100-plus folks, and then just roll it out to our offices.

I was the only one involved in the deployment, on our side, and I'm the one who maintains and, more so, uses the solution. As a SaaS platform, it doesn't really require much maintenance. It's really just the user account administration around who we want to give access to and, occasionally, updates to the clients. For that I just submit changes to our packaging team and they deploy it.

The only thing we really had to consider for our global testing is that we had to run the agent installer with the PAC file, the proxy config settings. But that's defined on their website, so it's not really an issue.

We have seen return on our investment, for sure. The software licensing piece alone, those reportings, wasn't even part of our initial use case, but it's a way that tool provides hard savings.

For what it is and for all the different use cases, it's well worth the price. We did some negotiation with Riverbed, so we got a decent rate.

In addition to their standard licensing fee, initially there was the project implementation cost, to have the support from the Aternity project team.

I launched the investigation last summer into about 10 vendors, and started out looking at how to improve our network service monitoring. The focus, initially, was on players in the network performance monitoring. 

But I ended up coming to the conclusion, with Aternity, that it was probably going to give us the most bang for our buck. It was also one of the few solutions out there where we could actually see what the users were experiencing when accessing on-prem applications as well as SaaS-based applications, and when they're on the network or off the network and going through VPN. That was pretty key for us because when you start looking at monitoring solutions, there are packet analyzers and stuff that comes into the DC and there are things that you put out in your branch offices to monitor the connection back. But because where applications reside now is changing, Aternity was a really good fit for us so that we could get that insight regardless of where the user is and where the application is.

We narrowed it down to four, including Aternity. The others were AppNeta, ThousandEyes, and NETSCOUT.

It wasn't so much that we chose Aternity over ThousandEyes or AppNeta. They perform two different functions. The result of the review was that we needed two sets of tools: one that monitors the end-user experience, what they see transactionally and how the applications are performing, and a solution that could look at the health of the actual routing and the network, end-to-end. We ended up with two recommendations for solutions.

But in terms of choosing Aternity over the other solutions that were more closely aligned with it, like the NETSCOUT agent, it had a lot of functionality out-of-the-box, which is good, and it was fast-paced, which is a good model for us. They put out new functionality every month, which is great. For me, it made sense to monitor the performance from the client itself and not from some point in the network that could potentially change in the future. We've had a lot of offices closed or move based upon COVID, and we were lucky that it didn't impact us. We didn't go out and buy a bunch of probe devices to put on the network and then have a huge shift in how users are working. It worked out well for us.

The fact that other products may provide deeper visibility into device performance doesn't really concern me. That wasn't even our first use case for the product, so we look at all the value we're getting out of the service desk side as icing on the cake.

Getting the most value out of it depends on your use case: if you're using it more for service desk agent support or if you're using it for business-level reporting on application performance. My advice would be to learn about all the different use cases there are because it continues to find ways to generate new value for us.

Understanding user behavior is probably one of the most enlightening things that we've gotten from the tool. We're seeing that there are certain applications they spend a lot more time in than we may have ever realized, and certain periods when they're active that we may not have realized before.

The solution’s Digital Experience Management Quadrant (DEM-Q) to look at how your digital experience compares to others who use the solution is a relatively new feature. They just rolled it out a couple of months ago, so we've taken a peek at it. I've shared it with my upper management to show that we're actually in the good quadrant. We're running above other industries. It's useful to give you a "sanity check," but there's not a whole lot of information out there; it's pretty high-level. It's good to see where we are versus other corporations.

In terms of seeing the employee experience, it doesn't do screen recording to see what they're experiencing. It gives a representation of the transactions that they're doing and what the performance for those transactions was. In some cases, but not in all, it provides a good enough picture to understand what they're going through. Sometimes we have to do a screen share to really understand what the user is trying to accomplish and what issues they're having. But the good thing about it is you can always go back in time with Aternity. If the user has an issue, by the time they call the service desk and get a hold of an agent and start to troubleshoot, they may not have the problem anymore. But you can always go back and look at the history of those transaction metrics.

Something else we're starting to work on now is the automated remediation actions that the service desk can do. Those weren't even part of the initial review, but because of the value of having all that data together, it's been very beneficial for them. There are scripts so that if a user runs into an error on the screen, we have a fix that we know we can deploy. The help desk can just right-click and run that auto-remediation script. We've done some initial testing with it, but it's next on our list.

Overall, I would rate Aternity a 10 out of 10. It's such a powerful tool with so many different uses. We don't have an infinite budget for IT. A lot of times, investment in tools is really something that's at the bottom of the list. So to get one that has so many capabilities built into it and that is so flexible — we can even convert, and we have converted, some of our extra end-user licenses over to the server-side monitoring piece — is incredible. It's like we were going for one product yet we could roll it into a completely separate product which is comparable to Dynatrace. For sure, it's quite impressive.

I'm a huge fan of it. It's definitely a great product and it sets the stage for some advanced capabilities in terms of the metrics that they're collecting. They're starting to look at more of the machine learning and AI side. I have a lot of hopes that the product is going to continue to grow into something new in the future.

We have many use cases for Aternity, but the key ones are that we use it to validate and deploy. One of our big initiatives was converting all of our users within the bank to Office 365. Aternity was heavily used for validation and performance monitoring of the Office 365 project.

We're now able to get a real measurement of user productivity. We're able to use this tool to reduce the mean time to resolution, whenever there is a problem with our end-users. It helps us speed up the time needed to address their issues. When there are any issues with their devices, we're able to use Aternity to very quickly figure out what the issues are, whether it's an issue with a workstation or an issue with a particular application.

Using this tool, we now have visibility, so detection, and the remediation that comes after it, are much faster now. That's instead of being blind, per se, without this tool.

The tool has a very good feature called Validate Application Change, which allows us to validate any changes to an application or infrastructure changes, or even a simple configuration change. It allows us to quickly measure the baseline and gives us a very nice before-and-after view. For example, suppose that prior to the change, the user-experience was two seconds. After the change, using the Validate feature, we can see that it got better and the user response-time is one second instead of two.

This feature helps us make decisions about the effects of changes in two ways. One is that we use it to validate whether a change should go ahead. For example, for our Office 365 migration, we used it to test and validate whether, if we were to convert users into the Microsoft 365 suite of tools, the application performance would be good or not. It helped us make a decision on whether to actually push it out and put it in production for everybody. That was heavily used during performance testing phase.

The second is that it gives us a way to validate whether a change was successful and meets our bank's current SLAs.

Using the solution we know what the full transaction experience or performance is like, how much time it's taking, and where any bottleneck is. If there is an issue with the backend, or there's an issue with the network, or the issue is with the client side or workstation, if the root cause resides in the client or workstation, it has the troubleshooting capability to specifically figure out what the root cause is.

The main feature, what we really like about Aternity, is that it can monitor the actual user experience, meaning their actual response times, volume, and when they did what.

Another key feature is with regard to the current situation with COVID. A lot of people are now working from home and Aternity has been a very good tool to monitor and measure the performance of the VPN.

Other features we use heavily are the WiFi analyzer, the Skype for Business analyzer, and the troubleshooting functionalities. We also use the Device Health quite religiously here for troubleshooting devices that are unhealthy, when we're talking about things like high CPU or memory consumption, or file system problems within the users' workstations.

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. We are planning to move to the SaaS solution to get those features. 

But the issue is how Aternity, as a company, works their roadmap. They put all the new features on the SaaS solution and that's where you get the latest and greatest stuff. But some of those features are not available for the on-premise users, which is what we are. Why not have those features available for on-prem users?

We've been using Aternity for about six years. Our first engagement was about six years ago but in the last two years we have had more dedicated focus in using it on a larger scale, using one of their latest versions.

It's very stable. We haven't had any downtime because of the tool.

Scaling it is very easy and intuitive. It's just a matter of acquiring a server. It's very well documented on their portal; how to scale and what all the numbers will be.

Their technical support is very good. They're extremely knowledgeable about their product and the support has been great. Their responses are very timely and they'll fix the issues.

From my end, the initial setup was very easy because we engaged their Professional Services to help us.

Our deployment took three days.

At a high level overview, our deployment strategy included acquiring the necessary servers based on Aternity's documentation. Aternity provided sizing consulting to review and make sure that we got the right hardware and sizing and capacity. Once that was acquired, it was just a matter of installing it in a test environment and then moving on to the production environment.

Our experience with their Professional Services was very good.

We have definitely seen ROI in terms of cost savings. Implementation times and remediation times are all cost savings, when it comes to operational readiness and day-to-day operations.

The pricing is fair. Their salespeople are very good and they will work with you in terms of getting the best price for you.

We looked at several other solutions. We picked Aternity because of ease of use, ease of setup, ease of configuration. Also a lot of this stuff is automated in the sense that once you install the agent, it's smart enough to measure and collect and monitor all sorts of stuff with the user's devices. With other products there is a lot manual set up and a lot of manual overhead to configure them, to get them to work right. 

Not only was it the ease of use, but it collects and monitors a lot more metrics. It also provides a very flexible interface to do custom reports and monitor and customize internal applications, relatively easily.

Have valid use cases defined, know what you want, and make sure that you talk with the Professional Services team and the product team. Get the demos, ask all your questions, and make sure that their solution will actually meet your needs and your use cases. The Aternity guys do a very good job and they're very upfront and honest with their feedback, regarding what their tool can or cannot do.

We have over 1,00,000 users. Alluvio Aternity gives us some visibility into applications that may be impacting our end users where our end users are getting low-performance scores. It allows us to go in and start troubleshooting the potential issues.

The most valuable feature of Alluvio Aternity is the compiling and displaying of end-user data so that we can utilize it to troubleshoot proactively. Alluvio Aternity is a very good product to utilize. It is a pretty stable, reliable, and user-friendly solution.

The solution's downloadable reports could be improved.

I have been using Alluvio Aternity for two years.

I rate Alluvio Aternity a nine out of ten for stability.

I rate Alluvio Aternity a nine out of ten for scalability.

I rate the solution's technical support seven and a half out of ten.

Neutral

We previously used AppDynamics. We switched to Alluvio Aternity because we're able to scale up a lot easier with Alluvio Aternity.

The solution's initial setup is pretty straightforward.

The solution's price is pretty comparable to the industry.

Overall, I rate Alluvio Aternity a nine out of ten.

The overarching value of the tool is its real-time accuracy, down to the user/host level. We use it for the front-line aspect which is so often discussed in the Aternity videos, or more specifically, to triage issues as they occur and determine whether the main problem is application, host, or network related.

The most valuable features for us are the Incident Management dashboard, Application Status dashboard, and Activity Analysis UI.

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. A simple example: the US map can be ¼ of the dashboard, but there's no out-of-the-box full-screen US map which can show minor/major data points for business locations. And the ¼ screen widget of the US map is, of course, not by default expandable to the full screen. A trifle for sure, but annoying. I think

We've had no issues with stability.

We've had no scalability issues from a pure agent-volume standpoint. However, the memory and CPU requirements of the Tableau server (also hosts the Tableau Aternity Gateway daemon) cannot be underestimated. 12GB of RAM and quad-core CPU was not sufficient.

We go through an Aternity business partner -- J9 Tech -- who is absolutely outstanding. In the cases where they have to open their own internal tickets with Aternity, the support is truly the best I’ve seen in my 18 years traveling, consulting, and fixing complex software issues across many different vendors. The degree to which Aternity customer support is proactive is off the charts. And the skill, speed, and precision of the technical support from both their implementation services team as well as their development team in Tel Aviv is simply par excellence — the best by a mile and in a class by itself.

We use NetIQ (base Windows host resource monitoring), HP’s BPM (synthetic trans scripting), and some of IBM’s ITCAM for Robotic Response Time, and we actually continue to use them for various business units which are accustomed to them. None have the level of granularity possible with Aternity for event/end-user monitoring or the level of real-time precision.

The initial setup was very straightforward -- three-tier arch with all communications occurring upstream (Management Server implements agent config changes by touching a file to the aggregation servers -- tier2 -- which is then picked up not by a downcall to the agent, but by an upcall from the agent to the Agg server). Thus, network and firewall issues are vastly simplified.

We did both with J9 Tech, the aforementioned Aternity business partner, as well as some in-house help from yours truly and a few colleagues.

Our ROI is not nearly as much as it could be as we’re only now getting our internal customers to use it for more than just triaging incidents or real-time problem analysis. Alerting, incident management, and reporting are woefully under-utilized as of yet for us.

It’s a little on the costly side, but if you license intelligently, accounting for your various hosts connecting in through VDI or terminal servers, you can make it well worth your money. The product quality will speak for itself.

I wasn’t involved before the P.O. was signed, but I hear we narrowed very quickly to Aternity based on recommendations like this one which we received from other prior customers.

Definitely ensure your internal customers/constituents are fully on board before rollout—network route and firewall issues can plague what should otherwise be a smooth deployment. Once deployment is complete you will be amazed how quickly valid, actionable data comes out of the UI.

Our primary use case is in the instance of our service desk, and we use the solution primarily for troubleshooting and visibility into the performance of remote and on-site employees.

We have physical and virtual PCs and monitor both Windows and Mac devices while our applications are across the board. We have desktop apps, cloud apps, on-prem apps, and stat solutions.

The tool improved the meantime to resolution, though I need data to back that up. It provides more visibility to our service desk; callers often exaggerate issues, but Aternity takes the guesswork out of the equation. We can see precisely what happened.

We are constantly in hardware refresh mode, and Alluvio Aternity helped increase employee productivity in that respect because it allows us to pinpoint problem devices and replace those first.  

The data the solution provides is valuable to us; we can see the health of the machines, how they are performing, and what might be causing issues on a particular machine.  

We can monitor the usage patterns for desktop applications, showing us which are performing and which aren't.

We use the Digital Experience Index (DXI) feature. It offers customization options, so we can decide what we want to improve and what can stay the same and prioritize specific improvements. 

I want more reporting around asset management, with greater flexibility and customization ability.

The solution is highly stable and always available. It never went down, and the only issue we had was when the dashboards didn't report any data for the first hour of the day, but that was quickly resolved. 

The solution is entirely scalable; Riverbed manages the infrastructure, which makes scaling much easier for us. All we need to do is push out the agents to wherever we need them.

I'm very satisfied with the technical support; they always respond quickly and are highly competent.

Positive

I did not, but the organization previously used a different solution; it didn't have all the capabilities of Aternity, which explains the switch.

The initial setup was great, as Aternity is very straightforward to deploy. The most challenging part was pushing agents out to the PCs, and we used Microsoft's SCCM solution for that. Once we do that, all the management takes place within Aternity.

Four of us carried out the deployment. There was a project manager, myself, a business analyst, and the SCCM admin.

We implemented via an in-house team. 

That isn't easy to measure as we operate on the expense side of the business; we don't use the solution to generate revenue.

We always try to reduce costs and purchase the Alluvio Aternity Essentials license.

We made a comparison between Aternity and uberAgent, which reports to Splunk. We chose Aternity because the user experience is much better; the UI is friendly and easy to use, and the solution focuses more on improving technical issues and user experience. However, uberAgent focuses more on ensuring employees are doing what they're supposed to do, such as logging in on time and not using applications they're not supposed to.

I rate the solution seven out of ten. I want to rank it higher, but I need to see more capability from the tool.

The solution provides metrics about the actual employee experience of all business-critical apps. For our purposes, many of our applications are customer and agent-facing, so we don't get metrics on those. However, we can get metrics for our employees' interaction with apps. We used this feature to measure employee experience before and after changes to our software and hardware, though not with a change in OS. An example of a change we were able to gauge is the performance of staff working remotely versus onsite; most of our remote employees don't have company-provided internet and the equipment that comes with that, and we can see a difference in their performance. 

We used the capability to measure the employee experience of apps to prioritize which equipment to replace first during an upgrade. 

The product can provide visibility into employee devices and app transactions all the way through the back end. Still, we only have an Essentials license, so we cannot monitor many application activities. We don't subscribe to Aternity's APM solution.

As far as the DXI feature helping to perform root cause analysis and remediation, that's done more at the individual PC level. From a machine perspective, however, the DXI works well for replacing and configuring equipment. 

Regarding the level of Aternity's visibility into device performance metrics versus competing solutions, I would tell an engineer that all the tools measure the same items. Still, Aternity's UI is far superior to the others we looked at.  

I advise anyone planning on using Aternity to get to know PowerShell.

We use Alluvio Aternity for digital experience monitoring. 

The solution is cloud-based SaaS.

Alluvio Aternity has multiple use cases.

The licensing model doesn't suit the market we are in and has room for improvement.

I have been using Alluvio Aternity for one year.

Alluvio Aternity is stable.

Alluvio Aternity is scalable. The organization had around 4,000 people using the solution.

The initial setup is straightforward. We, as the managed service provider, were involved in the deployment process, which took approximately one week with the assistance of one engineer.

We helped the client implement Alluvio Aternity in-house.

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. Many of our customers operate with fewer than 500 agents, so the product did not fit well within that lower market segment, even though it could have been beneficial for them.

I give Alluvio Aternity an eight out of ten.

I believe that Alluvio Aternity is a useful product for diagnosing issues and locating problem areas. However, it may not be suitable for all potential customers, particularly those who require fewer than 500 licenses or prefer a monthly billing option. This pricing model may not be compatible with the current MSP model. While I find it challenging to market to my customer base due to the license threshold, I still believe that Alluvio Aternity is a good product. If the license limit was not a factor, I would be able to sell it to many other customers easily using a SaaS-based pricing model.

The solution is used for the digital experience. It is also used for auto-remediation and reporting issues in servers. Currently, we use it only on our VDI.

Currently, we don't monitor the applications. In my previous company, we used it to monitor the applications. It helped us understand the latency of the back-end application, the client, and the network.

The response time in the application is valuable. The product can quickly analyze and see where the bottleneck is. It can identify whether it was on the network, the back end, or the client side. It is pretty good.

The solution’s user monitoring features help us to have a quicker time to resolve. It also prevents us from having 20 different teams on a call. We know which team to contact. We do not waste resource time. The dashboard is very effective. We can easily identify issues that come up.

Integrating the tool with other products is a challenge. We didn't have the time to work with the integration. The integration must be improved. There are so many different monitoring tools out there. It becomes challenging to have too many different dashboards.

I have been using the solution for two and a half years. I am using the latest version of the solution.

I did a POC on Alluvio, Nexthink, and ControlUp. Alluvio came out on the top.

I will recommend the tool to others. Overall, I rate the product an eight out of ten.

It's a monitoring tool. Specifically, it monitors very well the ability to sort large amounts of data into something that is actionable. Once you know how to use it, it's very good at identifying trends underlying in large amounts of data.

It's used to monitor our application performance. Desktop health, network health, things of that nature. We have used it to identify issues impacting large amounts of end users with applications, issues with our network, issues with our group policy setups or exchange, all sorts of stuff.

We've built a task force that I was the head of to resolve some longstanding issues with our existing Windows 7 image. The Aternity application was a key product in helping us not only identify the issue, or at least quantify the issue and begin to narrow down the likely causes of it, but it also allowed us to measure how successful we were at implementing changes, moving the needle in the right direction. It's helped us stabilize our exchange environment.

The latest thing we did with it, specifically, was track down an issue in which our end users were disconnecting from Exchange on a alarmingly frequent basis. It allowed us to figure out what was going on, implement a solution, and then validate the solution was in fact working.

The product itself is actually extremely solid. The support of Aternity, specifically their client success management and after-sales support and training leave a lot to be desired. They've gotten better with my last engagement with them, which was beginning in May.

We're still ongoing with a little bit of training. We recently switched from their on-premise Aternity 7 version to their cloud SaaS-based Aternity 9 product. Largely, once you get the product and you have it set up and get it installed, the relationship management after-sales leaves a lot to be desired. The product itself is actually really, really fantastic.

Between the Aternity 7 and the Aternity 9 version, they've made a whole repolish of the UI. They rethought the entire UI to make it usable for folks that haven't spent 40 to 60 hours training in the product, like I have.

We're getting a lot more value out of the product from every single level of IT, all the way from our service desk up to our executives and back down. They've done a very good job at innovating on the product. It's more so the support and professionalism of their client success managers and after-call support that leave a lot to be desired.

Their product is a 10. The support is a five. I'm going to average them out to about a seven and a half to an eight. I hope they're able to continue to improve. I want to make clear they have improved and I've been much more impressed with their support recently than I was over the last three years.

I hope that's not a function of an ongoing engagement and additional large sum of money that we've tossed at them in order to set up the new product. If they can improve on their support, then they would be in a really, really good position.

I have been using this product for close to three years.

We did have some issues with the SQL database side of the product, when it first stood up, and the application server would lock up. Not always, but there was a period of maybe six to eight months when the application server - or the IAS services specifically - would stop functioning, or we would get some deadlocks on the database. It was a task to deal with Aternity support to really identify those particular issues, but overall, the stability of the product was pretty good. I think we'll have less of those issues now that we don't have to maintain our own servers. It's all handled in the cloud. I imagine that since it's a high-availability service, considering it's a cloud-based application, that we will likely not see those issues moving forward. If we do, I won't have to fix them.

I have not had any scalability issues at all. The deployment of the actual monitoring agent is probably the easiest thing we've deployed through SCCM in years. It's very, very simple. It's easy for us to upgrade. It's silent. It doesn't impact the end user when we install it. It's extremely scalable. We currently have it monitoring all of our end user workstations, which is approximately 1,600 computers.

We do have it on some of our servers, but not all. We're looking to scale that up in the new environment, which will equate to roughly 800 servers, as well as another 12 to 15 for our Citrix infrastructure. Overall, we're close to 3,000 total endpoints being monitored by the product, and it's extremely easy to install and configure. We package it. We put it in SCCM and it installs. It's really, really simple.

Recently, technical support has been fantastic. Prior to us being involved in an ongoing engagement with them, it was a little rough. We had to constantly follow back up with them. My calls and emails, depending on urgency, were not necessarily met with what I believe would be an acceptable SLA, especially considering the expense of the product. It's not a cheap product by any way, shape for form. Recently, the engagements that I've had with them have been far improved. We had two particular issues with the product when we moved to the Aternity 9 environment.

The first one, the installation of the agent itself removed a couple of registry values on our end users machines that caused a piece of our Citrix to not function for our entire environment. They not only identified the issue, provided me a solution I could deploy over group policy within less than three hours, but they also delivered me a new agent version the next day that had the issue resolved, which I was extremely impressed with. I had a four-hour down time. They did a really, really good job of taking care of that for me.

Then I had an issue where the application was not displaying fully correctly in Internet Explorer. Once I submitted the ticket for that, and it was a lower priority, they contacted me within 24 hours, and we had a solution implemented within 48 hours. I would say they're definitely trending in the right direction. My hope is that it doesn't fall off once we're done with our active projects.

Previously, we had several monitoring applications, but nothing that really is able to draw a large picture the way that Aternity is. Did we use other products? Yes. To any level of success? Definitely not. There's really not anything like it on the market that we've been able to find. The algorithms that it uses and the ability to aggregate such a large amount of information in a way that make it really, really easy to use for every member of IT. I use this product every single day. I'm probably the most knowledgeable user of the product, and it's extremely powerful. I really don't know of anything on the market that's like it. The product is phenomenal. I really can't speak highly enough about how powerful the product is, and recently they cleared the one major hurdle with the product in that it wasn't very user friendly.

The on-premise setup was relatively complex. The transition to the cloud platform was really easy. Really, really, easy. One, because the professional services team did all of it for us, but just by the nature of the product and how it functions, the setup of it is always going to be somewhat complex. Specifically, in designing the signatures and the monitors for very specific activities and actions that are undertaken within an application, or on a server. There's always going to be a level of complexity.

Once you set it up, it's very, very easy to maintain. It's considerably easier to maintain when you don't have to maintain your servers, which is where we're at now. There is always an inherent level of complexity, but the upgrade from our on-premise environment to the cloud-based was extremely easy. They were able to import all of our existing settings, with a few exceptions, into it. The training on it has been absolutely fantastic. It's pretty easy. They even gave us training on how to author and signature the monitors themselves, which has allowed us to expand our ability to support and customize the application in real time in a way that allows us to get more out of the product then we were already doing. We were already getting a very large amount of value out of the product.