Alluvio Aternity Reviews

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.

One of the things we wanted to do is we have a number of call centers that are at a disparate, some of them are partners, some of them are owned and operated, and when we have an issue reported from a call center, we could end up with forty people on a phone call trying to figure out what was going on. They're running around, w'ere reporting in individual workstation, this agent says, "Hey, I got this problem and it's over here," and you got to stop and document that. Then they have another guy who says, "I got this problem over here," so you have all these disparate pieces of information that you have manually correlate with a bunch of people on a phone call for hours and hours and hours.

With Aternity you can gather that perspective quickly, it's gathered automatically, so that slow response time or issues with the application, hung workstations or network issues, you get that perspective right away. It eliminates a lot of the time spent troubleshooting.

All of it, but it depends on who the end user is. The folks that support the applications, like the signatures that we've developed, it gives them feedback on their application performance. The folks that deal with the IT with their desktop in the call centers like it because it gives them visibility into the desktops that they wouldn't otherwise have. Then the guys that are responsible for our mobile devices like the mobile aspect. The reason they like the features is they didn't have them beforehand - it's visibility they didn't have prior to this tool.

For instance, the folks in the call centers if they wanted to look at a workstation that wasn't performing or was having an issue, they had to go to the workstation or remote into the workstation. They had an agent that kept having issues with her machine and they couldn't tell what was going on, every time they looked at it it'd reboot. With the Aternity tool they were able to see she was actually powering the thing off and then saying, "Hey, I can't do my job," so there were some shenanigans. It gives good visibility into what the behaviour is of the agent interacting with the workstation as well as interacting with the applications.

From the application owners perspective, we have real user monitors out there in the call center and we've got sniffers that capture the transactions as they come across a network, and synthetic transactions and that sort of stuff going on, but it really didn't give them that view from the call center agents workstation. It gives them a more realistic picture of what's going on than from a networks perspective. You're actually now getting it from the workstations perspective. Then the wireless guys, (the people that are dealing with the handhelds), that's just visibility we didn't have and there are a number of tools. Since we already had Aternity deployed in the call center, it was a natural extension.

Signature development process requires deep technical expertise in the application and in the use of their studio tools that help you create it. I know they're aware of that and I know they're focused on making stuff simpler. I think in version nine we'll probably see improvements. That's the biggest thing for us, and unless you're creating those signatures on a daily basis, that needs to be your full-time job to maintain the expertise to do it properly. We're still depending on their professional services to help us with that.

In v7, we had some stability issues and those all got resolved, but the first six months of being up we had some stability issues. Now we're on v8, and looking to upgrade to v9. So far, it has been rock solid. It's completely stable, I can't believe it's stable as it is.

Well we overbuild. Our environment is overbuilt, we're built to handle twice the workload that we have. Our model is you live and die by your peaks. All of our stuff is built to handle those peaks. That's just a natural for us, we overbuild it. We haven't had workload related issues.

It was good. One of the things that just for me, I came from a field service background, I worked for Digital Equipment back in the '80's and '90's, and there when you provided customer service you had a fifteen minute call back time. Nowadays you send an email or open a ticket online and you hear back in four hours and so your primary communication mechanism is by email or by updating a ticket on a website. I like phone calls, and that's just a general trend in the industry. I like a phone call back, but that's not anything anybody's doing, so that seems to be lacking in the industry. There are no better or worse than any other, as far as response time.

We didn't use a different solution.

It was straightforward. We used their professional services to do it because we hadn't been exposed to it before, and our environment is sizable. It's not like we installed the app on one box, it's broken up into six components plus an Oracle backend database, so it's a pretty sizable implementation. It's not that complex to manage and maintain. Regarding the installation - unless you're doing it every day, you probably want their professional services to help you.

We evaluated some different solutions. One that we looked at was more for agent behaviour evaluation than it was for monitoring. The analysis there was too deep for our purposes. We wanted the instrumentation that would tell us when there's an issue, and you can certainly do that with both tools, but the other tool is a lot more about understanding that agent's individual actions, and it was just a different tool. We do have other tools, there's RUM and Synthetic Transactions going on as well. This was an enhancement to that.

The first thing I would do is the application owners need to put monitoring and managing the signature set, or the monitor set, that you develop for the applications into their release process. When you do a release for an application, you need to include developing and testing the existing monitors, testing the existing monitors and fixing them if the application breaks them and if the release breaks them. You need to manage your monitors along with the application releases.

It improved our connection to other teams when performing troubleshooting tasks. This is huge when dealing with a large organization with multiple tiers of support, and having an end user utilizing an application that could have number of things go wrong. This deep dive can help mitigate the problem and help align escalations.

The dashboards of this platform are the most valuable, especially the Desktop Health dashboard. This gives you the ability to see the trend in health of all desktops in a historical view.

I would say the reporting capabilities of this product could use room for improvement.I would say the reporting capabilities of this product could use room for improvement. The standard reports that are given are not the greatest, and no custom ones can be created; however, I am told that the latest version of Aternity offers this!

Our only issue with stability was with our previous version, 6.0, and being upgraded to version 8.0.5 was a massive improvement.

I don’t foresee any issues with scalability. We are well aware of the current load that Aternity has on our current infrastructure and we'll monitor how big our environment grows so we can set aside budgets to increase the infrastructure if needed.

9/10. Their technical support is very customer-centric and professional. Their determination is to resolve the problem fast without hindering quality.

We have always used Aternity for end-user monitoring.

It's complex in someways, and our fix to this was to have the vendor perform the installation. We paid a premium for this service.

If the scale of your monitoring will be to go everywhere in an organization, a site license is key.

I would rate this product a 10 because of the way it is able to dive down into the application and report everything that is going wrong with a certain application functions, helping give a full view of the end user’s experience.

Be sure to have a PoC done in a test environment with 100-200 users, if possible, to validate all means of the platform. This will come in handy supporting the tool as an administrator.

We just made an additional purchase which was kind of small. It allows us to offer various business groups and their application reaction times. We didn’t have this before as we were using stopwatches to measure and trend it.

There are a lot of great features. The detailed level of information you are able to get on the complete environment all of the way down to a specific machine.

I think the next release has what we are looking for. I guess they are working on this now, but to monitor these transactions, you need to look at it, analyze it and capture it. It requires a little bit of work, but in an environment like ours, you need it to be easier. They are making great strides to make this easier. I’d like it to still be easier yet, though it might not be possible because unless you have a background, it really makes it hard to do it on your own.

It's consistently stable with excellent performance. We are at maximum capacity. I have had no problems with the server or with the clients. If anything goes above or out of control or CPU resources are used up, it will restart that service or shut it down. It's very stable as far as the server is concerned.

It's very scalable compared to other software. Right now, we are going to 26,000 end points. It’s a common set up. We plan on going to 100,000 end points and it's as simple as adding some extra servers. It's very scalable with a familiar design.

The solution architects are great and are very knowledgeable. I have actually been up to their offices for training and some of their application developers were there from Israel. Very smart and willing to go above and beyond to make sure they are delivering.

We previously used different types of software.

It depends on what you are talking about. The setup of everything is very simple. The only time it gets complex, and it needs to be, is when you are working with home-grown applications and all of your thousands of people and developers. Your trying to isolate those transactions, but even that process is straightforward.

We used other software and we looked at 23 solutions. It very specifically meets our goals. It really depends on the needs.

Some of the biggest things I like about the software is that it’s simple to use and you can learn it in a few hours. Something this easy to use shouldn’t be so powerful. In one hour, people can be overwhelmed with the information they can get from such a simple UI. Data analytics is a simple, easy-to-use interface.

The application response time. That's what our business has been having a problem with.

It hasn't improved the way it functions. It has improved the ability to troubleshoot on the backend.

When maneuvering between certain applications, it might have been slow, but it was actually not the system. It was the associate that was slow. It's caused a little bit of a training change for us.

• Dashboards and reporting features: They are not user-friendly
• Reports were a lot easier in the older versions
• They need to revamp their whole sales, management, and technical support. Their technology is fine. It's the associates around it that make it not worth my while.

I have been using Aternity for two years.

We have not had stability issues.

Scalability is fine.

We have had a little bit of help from them. I am not too impressed, to be honest. I would give them a rating of 2/5, because they don't respond very quickly.

We've talked to sales reps and we've talked to managers. We didn't talk directly to a technical manager, but we had problems with communication as a whole from the company, whether it's technical support, sales, or management.

We didn't have a previous solution.

The implementation was pretty straightforward. There were no problems.

Pricing is a bit high. Don't take that as the "be all, end all".

I have not had any training yet, so I really can't commit to that. The newer version is a lot harder than the older version. We didn't need training with the older version. That's why we didn't do it. That's why I'm saying training is key for this.

The training that I think everybody should take on creating signatures. Don't rely on them to create your signatures. It takes way too long and costs way too much.

I can't remember the name of the product we evaluated. There were only two out there at the time and Gardner recommended one of them.

Have the right training upfront. That's really about it.

• We can solve problems before they grow to be a larger problem
• We can identify trends
• We can assist a user with a problem that they haven't told us they have yet

It's all about being proactive and solving problems before they're big. It's also a customer service perspective, too. If we know someone's hard drive is about to blow up and they haven't even called in the service desk yet, it's pretty cool that you can go and say, "Hey, your hard drive is about to blow up." They respond, "Well, how did you know that? I've been having problems." It's pretty cool.

Being able to proactively identify issues on user systems.

When they moved from Version 8 to Version 9, the customers lost so much control of what they could do with the product. They need to give back what they took from us. In the previous version:

• We could create our own monitors easily
• We could set incidents easily
• We could look at the thresholds for our configuration and change them accordingly

We can't do any of that now.

Scalability didn’t seem to be a problem.

Their technical support structure is terrible. I would give them a rating of 2/5.

We did not use a previous solution.

The setup was what we expected. We had to configure the product to work and to detect things in our environment. That took some time. It wasn’t just come in, install it in one day, and you are done. It's come in, install it, and then, let's really configure the product to meet your needs. That took some time.

It's very expensive. I think it's overpriced. If they want to get the full value out of the product, they need to be able to dedicate people to train, to learn how to create monitors themselves, and have people assigned to look at the data. That takes time. Depending on the size of your organization, you must have one or two people just doing this. In some cases, that could be a lot of money.

You also have to develop systems and processes around reacting to that data. For example, if the solution detects that someone has low space available on their computer, it is not going to call that user and help them automatically delete some files so they have more space. There has to be a process in place to have somebody view that data and to take action on it. That's my point. It gives you good information. You have to build processes and take the time to look at the data. That just requires people, and people are money.

I don't remember if we looked at other options. I don't think there's another product on the market quite like Aternity.

This is a product that needs to be managed and monitored. To really pull the value out of it, you have to use it. It's not magically going to fix everything for you. It does a lot very well, but it takes people to look at the data and to react to what the tool is telling you.

We were able to identify bottlenecks in the application code that we had. A good example would be JavaScript, as we found that we had inefficient JavaScript in some applications.

Desktop monitoring, and being able to understand the performance of applications that runs on the desktop.

The thing that I think most companies like ourselves would want would be an easier way to customize custom scripts. It does a lot of out of the box standard monitoring, but there are special applications that every organization have, and right now, creating the custom scripts requires technical resource support from Aternity.

It's fairly robust in terms of its architecture design and development.

We haven't really scaled it as we've only installed it on a customer base of about 300 desktops.

It was straightforward. Because it was a very small agent that we deployed, and did not require a lot of customization. By small agent, I mean the footprint of the agent was very small to install, and it didn't really require a lot of customization.

The product is kind of unique. We used other products in the past, I don't even know the names of them because they were old IBM products dating back to the 60s and 70s. Aternity sort of fits a niche in the marketplace. I don't know of too many tools that do what they do.

I think the nature of, and it's not only desktops, but people that are doing mobile development, that the industry is changing whereby the applications that are being developed today are using more and more of the local processing resources on the client. Because of that, it's important to have tools that can monitor the client performance and look at resource utilization, things such as JavaScript run locally on the client.

We use it for end-user computer performance monitoring and troubleshooting.

In short, Aternity gives us the actual user performance data. This is very different, because typically a lot of the end-user device performance was handled by experience. The client service engineers would base their evaluation on their experience, and of course, typically they would say that the secret of IT is "restart." When they would troubleshoot a user's computer problem, they would tend to go with restart or reinstall or reimage, which is the ultimate step. If they could not solve all the problems, they would just reimage the whole thing. 

Aternity gives us the capability to troubleshoot, to find out exactly where the problem is. It enables us not only to fix the current problem, but it gives us the knowledge to prevent similar problems in other computers. That gives us the capability to provide proactive end-user support.

The most valuable feature is the application performance troubleshooting because Aternity is able to provide the performance from the end-user perspective. It doesn't just give the standard application logon time, etc., rather it's also able to measure the performance inside the application, the performance of specific transactions in the application, and break it down into three elements: the client time, the network time, and the server time. This gives us a lot of insights into what we need to focus on to improve the performance of an application.

Another area is the before and after comparison. Before and after any change, we can use Aternity to compare the performance. For example, when we implement a big application on our infrastructure, or even let's say when they moved the office, we had the user performance benchmark in the previous office location. Once they moved to a new location, we could look at Aternity and the overall performance and see if there was any change. We find that's a very helpful feature. 

The new office was supposed to have newer hardware, bigger than what we had, so the performance was supposed to be better. And it turned out, after the move, that user feedback was mixed. They couldn't really spell out what the real issue was and we didn't know if it was based on their feeling. But from the Aternity data we could tell that the network performance actually dropped. Then we started to look into what could be the problem and what we found out that the network equipment was misconfigured. That led to the correction of the error and we could see from Aternity that the performance was getting much better. That was one of the experiences we had using it for the before and after comparison.

A third valuable feature is the end-user device troubleshooting or the performance monitoring. For example, when we look at a computer that has slow WiFi connectivity, we are able to see what is the actual transmission speed, what the WiFi signal strength is, etc. We are able to find out what the possible causes are of the user performance issues. This gives us great insights.

Also, all the way to the back-end from the server, Aternity provides visibility into the employee device and into application transactions, in the SaaS version. We haven't fully tested that yet. But Aternity has the capability of analyzing the server side and to break it down further into different processes and different procedures that have longer lead times.

In addition, the Digital Experience Management Quadrant (DEM-Q) to see how our digital experience compares to others who use Aternity, has gained a lot of attention, not just from IT staff but also from management. We are looking at it and trying to understand what the numbers mean and, more importantly, what the costs are. It tells us we are in a certain quadrant. Why are we there? What can we do to improve? It's very interesting. I wouldn't say it's helpful yet, because we haven't fully understood it, but we are very interested in it.

Aternity does provide performance numbers, the data. However, it doesn't tell you what you can do about it. It just presents the facts. How to interpret the data, and how to draw conclusions from a lot of the data, requires knowledge and experience. That's the part that I would hope Aternity can continue to explore and give us that kind of capability.

I understand it's challenging. A lot of things may not be due to a single factor or make it easy to draw out an action plan. If, for example, we look at the stability index and it's low, there could be many factors involved. Right now, Aternity doesn't tell you that maybe by doing this or that sequence you can improve your stability next. Not yet. That's the area I'm hoping for. For the time being, I'm developing the team who will have the experience and knowledge and provide that part of the capability.

It is an area that I would love to see Aternity make more progress in, but I also understand it's challenging. There's definitely the room to continuously explore it. It requires very good experience with the hardware and also requires a lot of intelligence. It's going to be very exciting if Aternity can make more of a breakthrough in that area.

We are also trying to integrate it with ServiceNow. We are still learning that process. It would be easier if they had more configurations or the capability to inject the logic into the interface. For example, right now Aternity creates alerts that can turn into ServiceNow tickets, but there are a few areas that can be improved.

First, the alert is pretty much defined by Aternity. An alert has to be created to be converted to a ticket. But if I don't need to create an alert, can I make a dashboard and create certain parameters and convert from those parameters into a ticket? That would be very powerful. Right now, only alerts can convert to tickets.

Second, when they convert to tickets, it would be helpful if they put in a lot more logic which we can easily configure. For example, when a user is from a certain region, it would be good if we could automatically assign the issue to the specific IT group in that region. We are still working on this. Right now, the scripts for the integration are still rather complex and we are still trying to understand this part.

On another topic, if they had an easier way to claim back a license, that would be beneficial to us, but it may not be very beneficial to Aternity, because we might not need to buy so many licenses. For some computers, once we finish troubleshooting, we probably don't need Aternity on them all the time.

I have been using Aternity for at least the past five or six years. We were using on-prem Aternity for many years, and only this year we've migrated to the SaaS version.

Generally, it's quite stable. 

There have been some incidents where the agent was deployed but didn't report back the data. In those cases, redeploying the agent typically resolved the issue. Overall, the stability is good. I don't have much of a concern about that.

I do notice, in terms of the timeliness of the data, it may not be what I expected. I was expecting data for what happened 10 minutes ago, but that may not be there. So the timeliness may not be real-time.

Scalability is mainly the cost side of it. To roll it out to more users, it's pretty straightforward. You just deploy the agents.

Currently, we have about 1,000 devices in the solution. Whether we will increase our usage depends on how well we can prove the value of Aternity to the users, to IT, and to management.

Most of the time we get quite a good response. The people that we have worked with, from our collaboration with their accounts team and the presales team, are excellent. We met a number of the people and they are extremely friendly and helpful, and they're very patient. I'm very impressed by the people.

We didn't use any other similar solution. Aternity is the one that we have used for the end-user performance, monitoring, and troubleshooting, all these years.

The SaaS version is pretty straightforward, there's not much of a set up, per se. The setup is more about the client deployment. 

When we switched to the SaaS version, the deployment took at least one month. The reason was not just the deployment. The reason was more about the internal process, because we don't have enough licenses for every computer. That meant we had to identify the end-user devices to which we would push the agent. That took time. It's not the complexity of Aternity, it was our decision on whom to push it to.

In terms of selecting the users, we went by different categories. Every company can certainly make its own decision about whom they want to deploy to. We wanted to deploy to some of the VIP users, and we also wanted to deploy to users who had more frequent use of certain key applications. We also wanted to deploy to the users who tended to have more issues. And we also deployed to the Citrix users.

For deployment of Aternity we don't require much staff, but we do for support. We definitely need people to constantly look at it, to analyze it, and to generate the reports. We have a team to support Aternity. The core team is about four people but we leverage the client service team as well. We are trying to develop the client service teams in the different regions to be able to analyze the user performance data for that region and for other regions, and to take care of the device issues in their region. For us, Aternity is a tool to give out the information. As I mentioned, the action part still needs to be taken by our IT folks.

We did it ourselves.

I'm trying hard to justify Aternity, but sometimes it's very hard to come up with a return of investment for it. It's hard to calculate the value of, for example, the performance improvement of your competitor. I haven't come up with a good way of calculating the return on investment yet.

Pricing and licensing is pretty standard.

Ever since I have been using it and have been the main advocate of Aternity, I haven't evaluated other solutions, even though I do hear about other solutions. I look into some of the comparisons, but I haven't really done a thorough comparison.

I do recommend the SaaS version, which has a lot of very good features. And I recommend the team, it's very friendly and helpful. But I would also caution that you need to put in the effort to learn the tool. It's not something that, when you have the tool, all the problems go away. It only tells you the data. How to use the data, how to derive the action and how to improve, still relies on the people who are reviewing the data. It's like the weather forecast. They tell you the weather forecast, but it's your decision, whether you still want to go out or you want to climb a mountain. 

Aternity does require effort from the IT team. They need to spend time and learn how to best use the tool. There is definitely a lot of reward from doing that.

The solution hasn't yet helped us to reduce hardware refresh costs by considering actual employee experience, rather than just the age of the employees’ devices, but it's an interesting point. I would like to explore it more. Even though we have been using Aternity for a few years, we were not able to justify the value very well in the past, when it was on-prem. This year, with the Aternity SaaS version, we are paying a lot of attention to it. 

I hope we can derive all the value from Aternity, including reducing refresh costs. It makes sense that if we analyze the user's performance and it is still functioning very well, we probably don't need to replace it based on the number of years the device has been in use. But we are talking about the end-user device as the primary focus. Their failure is not just in application performance alone. It could be the monitor having a problem, or it could be the battery having a problem, or it could be the motherboard having a problem. I would like to see whether Aternity can help us to reduce and avoid unnecessary refreshes.