Alluvio Aternity Reviews

We have three general buckets that we put things in:

1. For ad hoc troubleshooting of individual problems that people are having with their laptops in the field. 
2. Finding, identifying, and resolving wide-scale issues that exist in the field. 
3. Understanding the impact of changes that we're making in the field as well as reducing the negative impact of changes made in the field.

We need to understand how many machines are experiencing certain crashes, for example: 

• Blue screens
• Specific applications that are crashing.
• Specific versions of applications that are crashing.
• How various laptop models are performing differently, either having better or worse stability than other models. 

By tracking the high level number of blue screens in our environment and being able to categorize them according to the specific blue screen code that is returned, we were able to focus on prioritizing the issues that are most prevalent in our environment and taking actions to reduce the number of blue screens based on those priorities. This increases user satisfaction by reducing problems, like blue screens and application crashes. 

We were able to identify certain users who were opening a certain application, but it took a really long time. We were able to see through Aternity that this affected a decent number of users. By identifying those users, we were able to use other tools on specific devices to identify the root cause, which happened to be an IPv6 configuration, then eliminate that problem. Therefore, it increases the performance for approximately 10 percent of users' devices in the field.

Aternity has given us a view into what the user is doing. For example, the applications that we have defined as managed applications will show us what they are running. It will show us any of the activities that we've predefined to get measurements of. It will give us attribute information that the user doesn't necessarily know. For example, if they have their battery on high performance or battery saver, the user doesn't necessarily know that information at the time, but we can actually see it in Aternity. So, in a way, we can see even more than a user would be able to tell us. However, in order to do that, we need to make sure that we have defined the set of applications and activities that we want to ensure that we're tracking on a user's device.

Aternity's Digital Experience Management Quadrant (DEM-Q) has been a game changer for us. While knowing your own metrics is nice, if you don't know how you compare to others or what the numbers should be, then it doesn't tell you much. This solution puts that into context (if we are doing better than others or worse), which helps us prioritize where we want to focus and do improvements versus that's just how slow it's supposed to be. It's also great in communicating what we are doing and why we're doing it to our IT leadership teams, by saying, while we're pretty far behind others in certain categories, the time and changes for our prioritizations are justified.

The ability to filter the comparison by geography, industry, or company size is super important to our analysis. We need to be able to make sure that we're comparing ourselves with other companies that are similar. Also, we get to compare other devices that are similar. Some companies, who are using Aternity, use it more on server operating systems or on desktops. We are a very mobile company, using Aternity on our laptops. It makes more sense to compare us with companies who are also similar because that can make a big difference when you're thinking about how a laptop should be performing versus a server, and also Windows 7 versus Windows 10. You need to put that in context, or you're not going to have a realistic view of where you stand.

For the applications installed on the laptop, it's very customizable. So, we can get certain features out-of-the-box and add to them. Even with custom applications, we can create our own monitors and application signatures to track user activities which are specific to our company. We are measuring:

• How long certain actions take for a user to typically complete. 
• Before and after any particular change and do the comparison. 
• In smaller chunks, we can compare a change group to a control group and be more confident about the impact of the change based on the user experience for the change group versus the users who didn't get the change.

Before we make a change that would impact the entire company, we do it on a pilot group and measure it then. So, we avoid rolling something out that fixes one thing and breaks something else, which can happen. Therefore, we have more confidence in our changes.

It gives us visibility into what the user is doing, i.e., the user activities on their endpoint, and the response time for any of those activities. It gives us a breakdown of client activity. e.g., what an end user's computer takes time to complete versus what's happening on the network, and if there are any network delays. 

I would like to get more granular detail. In regards to defining the applications and activities upfront, that can be challenging. Simplifying that would be a big win. One of the things that I know they are already working on is a verbose mode. 

Aternity does a great job of not impacting the device. It only sends up small bits of information at the time so it doesn't have a negative impact on the device itself. That also means that sometimes you want to get more data, but it's not giving it to you. However, being able to turn on a verbose mode so it could give us even more granular detail, at certain times, would be helpful. 

I think helping get to root cause would be really huge. One thing that Aternity is working on is its Insights and being able to inform us whether this type of model in this location, for example, performs worse. Getting those Insights automatically to the surface, which they are working on now, is a big improvement.

One misconception that some people at our company have when they first hear about Aternity, or start using Aternity, they expect it to find a root cause. If an application crashes, they want to jump right into why that application crashed. Aternity doesn't come right out and tell you. It gives you the diagnostic that gives you the information about what happened. You still have to sometimes have to put together those pieces, going farther to get to the why. I don't know that there is a tool out there that does give you the root cause of any of these issues. 

I have been using Aternity for almost two years.

There are client entities installed on every device that are not very impactful to the endpoint, which is very important. The discovery side is stable. We only had one somewhat big outage in the last couple of years, so I would say it is very stable.

Officially, on our team, there are three of us who maintain it. I'm managing the team. We have our Aternity engineer who is responsible for ensuring upgrades are going smoothly during the customization, the activities, and any script changes that we can do on our side. We have someone else as an analyst who is looking at the data and surfacing issues in the field. We also have a lot of other people who are using the tool internally, but they're not on our core team supporting it.

There are roughly 20,000 end users of the solution. It scales well.

There is definitely room to grow in terms of the customizations that we can make to managed applications and the activities of our own managed applications. Now that we have more PowerShell and remediation capabilities, we are starting to grow those as well.

There is someone who supports the SaaS environment. Anything not on-prem and in the back-end that needs changing that we don't have access to, we can easily ask that of the SaaS administrators. Their responses are very good. 

The support is good. We have had to open up a few different cases here and there, but they are very responsive. 

We switched because we needed more near real-time data. The customized, homegrown solution that we were using was not able to pick up information in a very timely fashion. It was only once per week, then we would be a week behind with our reporting. Also, it didn't give us insight into the application activities that Aternity does.

The initial setup was straightforward. Aternity sets up the instance on the back-end on their side, then they give us access. We had to set up on our side: The integration with our single sign-on (SSO) provider, then downloading the endpoint agent and sending that out to the machines. 

To set it up, it took maybe a few people hours. For deploying it, that took a couple of weeks based on our standards. However, just getting it up and running, then installing it on a couple of machines was done within a day.

For the deployment, we had our Aternity engineer. We needed someone from our identity team to set up the SSO side of things. We have our software packagers who put the software through our software deployment tool and send it out to the appropriate machines. There is also probably someone else who is reporting back on that. Overall, it's about four to five people.

I would take advantage of the Aternity Professional Services. We had someone from Aternity operating basically in-house with us for nearly a year. We found him to be very knowledgeable. He helped us get the most out of the tool over that first year before we were really ready to take it over alone.

Over the last couple of years, we have shown that we have improved user experience with surveys. We surveyed the environment and are seeing that Aternity improved things over the last couple of years. We are now also able to better prioritize our projects and the things that IT is working on.

It is definitely a premium solution; it is not an inexpensive product. We have to ensure that we are getting the most out of it in order to justify the cost. However, it is not cheap, especially when you want to install it on all your endpoints.

We looked at a lot of different solutions. We did a proof of concept with Aternity and Nexthink. 

Aternity had a SaaS model, where the solution was on-prem, which was easier to set up on our side. Also, Aternity gave us the insight into application activities and the end user's actual experience that the other tool couldn't give us. Those were the main reasons we went with Aternity. 

Aternity does give us (and other applications don't) application visibility into the activities that the user is actually performing on any particular application.

Eventually, it will reduce hardware refresh costs by considering the actual employee experience rather than just the age of the employees’ devices. Right now, we're still on the basis of how long the machine has been in the environment. Really, it's tied to our own warranty information. When a machine's warranty is expired, then that's about the time that we get a new machine. For a particular model of device, we decided to accelerate that based on the data in Aternity, because we could see that the worst performing machines were with one particular model, which was getting older, but wasn't quite at the state that we would normally replace it. However, because they were performing so poorly, we did accelerate the removal of those devices from our environment, replacing them with a newer model that performs better.

The SaaS model has worked really well, because we don't have to manage the infrastructure. Because of COVID-19, everybody started working from home. That gave us a lot of insights around that time as to different performance and stability changes when someone is in the office versus at home.

Aternity gives us more device information now than it used to. Also, we can customize the solution now in a few different ways: PowerShell scripts being the newest method. While there may be other tools that get deeper into the device, Aternity gives us an advantage from the user experience side of things. 

I would rate this solution as an eight out of 10.

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.