Alluvio Aternity Reviews

I work for a managed service provider, and we offer Aternity as one of the main solutions for any customer who needs applications and full end-to-end user experience monitoring.

The main use case is around application performance. Another main use case is related to Teams. Our customers like to know what's happening with Teams when they call in. Is it a performance issue at the backend or within their desktop environment? 

We have its SaaS-based service version. It is deployed on the cloud, but the agents are deployed on-premise. So, I needed to buy stuff.

It is useful for working out whether there are any issues in the network or between the endpoints. It is also useful for working out any performance issues. It has been useful for a lot of stuff around Teams. Our customers like to know what's happening with Teams when they call in.

It is helpful for easily profiling users. It records all the applications that are being used for each user, and you can see what users are doing.

It is very good in terms of performance. You don't have to wait forever to try and get reports or results. It is quite quick to get everything that you need out of the software.

For me, the biggest problem is the price. It is not so much about how much it costs. It is about Aternity only giving you 12 months upfront. So, you got to purchase it for 12 months. A lot of our customers are on a per-user-per-month type billing. They are all OPEX rather than CAPEX. It would be a lot better for our customers if there was an option available for OPEX so that it is billed on a monthly basis than a yearly basis.

They've got only Windows agents. They don't actually have mobile agents. It would be a lot better if they could also integrate Android and iOS because then we can start pulling steps and performance management out of users' mobile devices. That's the biggest addition I would suggest at the moment. A lot of our customers have desktops as well as tablets or mobile devices. We should be able to monitor that stuff as well.

I have been using Aternity for less than three months.

It is very stable.

It is very scalable. We've got several enterprise customers using it, and we provide it as a managed service with the SLAs and stuff wrapped around it. 

We plan to increase its usage. I don't think we would switch at this point. It already ticks most of the boxes. We've only been using it for three months, and we're signing a lot more customers down that path. It is hard for us to change the application or software internally because it requires a lot of internal training and other things. You can't just cross-pollinate. You will have to change every one of them.

We haven't contacted them so far.

It is pretty straightforward. Anyone should be able to do that. 

It is all SaaS-based. You order it, and they set up the backend on their service. You just download the agent and install it on the desktops. It doesn't take a long time at all.

You have to purchase it for 12 months, which is an issue because a lot of our customers are on a per-user-per-month type billing.

There are a few additional costs. A lot of customers only get the essential licenses, and then they get what they call the application add-ons on top. They have to pay depending on how many customers and applications they want to monitor.

We evaluated Dynatrace. The cost of Dynatrace was about two or three times more, and it wasn't giving what we needed it for. Dynatrace has got some aspects, but it was not what we were looking for. We were looking for end-user experience monitoring, not just application monitoring or application performance.

I would rate Aternity a seven out of ten.

The introspection into the desktops, there's nothing else that we have that will do that. While it also provides desktop metrics, the main thing we use it for is monitoring our applications. I would say we use the application side of it the most.

The biggest improvement would be the ease with which you monitor applications. It's a little clunky right now; it takes a little bit of time. It's very manual right now; maybe it can be automated more. I’m not even sure that they can make it better, but they have started to. There's a weakness, but it's kind of due to the type of tool it is; it's going to be there. It's probably always going to be there, no matter how easy they make it.

Also, when you call in to support, a couple of times they haven't had the best of luck as far as getting the answer right away. It has taken a little time. I don't think it's any worse than any of the other tools we have, but there's always room for improvement there.

Some of the dashboarding and reporting on the analytics side could be improved. I think they realize it. Obviously, some of the desktop monitoring metrics always can be improved.

We had one conflict with a version of an application I believe we were using. We had a conflict with one of the variables that Aternity didn't anticipate a variable getting wiped out, and it did. It would actually hang one of the applications, but they corrected it very, very quickly. To completely solve it and get us an actual fix for it, it took maybe a couple of weeks. They actually figured out what it was and knew basically how to mitigate it, how we could avoid it, within a day or two, it wasn't very long.

I have not encountered any scalability issues. We're right around 7-8 thousand desktops right now. We're just now getting ready to scale that up a little bit. We're probably doubling that soon. Aternity should be able to handle that many users eventually. I don't see any issues there.

I'd say technical support is an 8/10.

We didn't really switch from another product to Aternity. We actually added Aternity because it's a niche product with it being able to introspect in the desktop. We have tools that will do application monitoring, just not from the desktop, to provide the desktop perspective. It's actually an add-on for us.

Initial setup was very straightforward.

Before choosing Aternity, we actually looked around and we didn't really have anything that met the need. We couldn't find anything that met the need that Aternity does.

Definitely plan on monitoring the application. If you're doing a lot of customer applications, you'll definitely need to have that relationship with your app teams already in place, or it's going to be very difficult. You probably need to have that plan in place before you buy a product like this.

On your side, in your IT team, you need to integrate your application developer teams into the process right from the beginning. You need to have that in place. If that's not in place, it's probably not going to work well.

Alluvio Aternity is primarily used to understand what is going on in the environment.

Alluvio Aternity is a SaaS solution.

The ability to quickly utilize the dashboard to gather information is valuable from a DXI perspective.

Alluvio Aternity is comprehensive.

I would like Alluvio Aternity to be certified by the IRAP for petrol companies in Australia. This will improve their security posture for the collection of data from the networks.

I have been using Alluvio Aternity for four years.

I give Alluvio Aternity's stability a seven out of ten.

I give Alluvio Aternity's scalability a seven out of ten.

The initial setup is straightforward and I give it a seven out of ten.

The price for Alluvio Aternity is favorable.

I give Alluvio Aternity a seven out of ten.

Alluvio Aternity is for medium to enterprise companies.

I suggest Alluvio Aternity users focus on the outcomes and the use cases and evaluate based on those.

Having data from the user perspective has helped us target our activities. Otherwise, we're operating off of a lot of anecdotal evidence. Users would say things like, "Oh, my computer's slow or it's crashing a lot." We wouldn't have that actual, quantifiable data from that user. We also wouldn't have it from the high-level perspective to understand.

There are two most valuable features:

• The ability to monitor crash and health event issues at a user level
• The ability to get performance data, customized performance data from our enterprise production apps, third-party apps, specifically like Microsoft and HP and so on

Most of the other APM solutions don't really monitor third-party apps as much. They can't go in and do the normal monitoring of, for example, Microsoft Word, or something similar.

I think they need to focus more on ad-hoc and customized reporting. They also need to allow the users to be able to create their own dashboards, rather than only be able to use what's out of the box. I do know that this is on their development roadmap, but those were the two things, from our perspective, that jump out.

I'd like to be able to pull data out of Aternity a little easier. It all comes in pretty nice looking charts and things, but we have a hard time pulling out hard data, which is usually what you'll need if you're trying to be actionable.

To deserve a higher rating, we would need some additional data, access to additional data around crashes, and they would need to add more robust reporting or ad-hoc reporting module and customizable dashboards.

I did not have any stability issues in this time span.

I have not had any scalability issues. It's an awesome solution. From a performance perspective, we haven't seen any issues. The agents on each machine sometimes will start eating up too much CPU, but they have a self-moderator and if they do that, they shut off. We haven't had any issues there. From a data perspective, it gets more effective the more data you have, the more you scale up. No, there aren't any scalability issues.

We have run into some issues and we have contacted technical support, which has been adequate. However, because it's such a short time frame, we're still often dealing with the implementation support team, rather than their standard support team. So I don't really know what their support would be like in a normal function.

We have a tech assigned to us, since we're still in the implementation phase. I can't really speak to what their standard support is like.

We were looking for the ability to get some performance data from our third-party enterprise apps, like our Microsoft Office, our internal document management system, and so on. We wanted some data on, from a user perspective, how long it was taking to open, how long it was taking to do specific tasks within the applications. We wanted some data to be used internally for SLAs and to develop KPIs and items of that nature. We have pictures from the backend, from a network or a server perspective, but we didn't have any user data. Collecting that data manually was pretty time-intensive and relatively inaccurate. With Aternity, we now have the data.

I think the next steps, since it's essentially a net new function, we have to start integrating the data as far as developing how we're going to handle SLAs and how we're going to handle the KPI reports and things like that. Immediately, we're using it also as a secondary function to assist with problem and incident identification and resolution, using it there as well to monitor crash data firm-wise and so on.

Initial setup is pretty straightforward for the actual install. We used SCCM to deploy. That was pretty easy; it came in a pre-packaged MSI. I think the more difficult part is training and having your team members understand how to utilize the tool. Their training programs could probably use a little work. I'd say that was about it. From a technical perspective, the implementation was relatively seamless. But from a process perspective, especially if you're not replacing something, it was difficult. So we're still working through that.

Make sure that you have a well-developed plan for integrating it with your existing processes before you roll it out. Other than that, I wouldn't say much. It's pretty easy to roll out and it's really just leveraging it as effectively as possible is what I think you want to make sure you focus on.

The data we have collected from monitored applications has shown that the problems we thought we were having were actually completely different in nature. We have been able to pinpoint performance issues related to certain activities, and because the monitor-writing tools are so extensible, we’ve been able to break activities down and see exactly which part is causing bottlenecks. We can then take that information to the app teams to discuss what can be done to make things better (i.e., optimize the queries that certain actions initiate, etc.).

The data collected by the agents on each end point is the most valuable feature for us. There is so much valuable information that the agent can send back to the Aternity platform, and even though the dashboards that come out of the box with the installation aren’t always the most intuitive, we have been able to use the data itself for our own custom visualizations and reporting.

The dashboards and navigatability of the platform could use improvement. It often takes five or six clicks to drill down to exactly what you want to see, but many of our stakeholder groups have refused to use the tool because they perceive it as “too cumbersome” to get the information they need. As a Tableau developer myself, I’ve been able to provide certain customizations that have helped, but overall this is the biggest area of opportunity for improvement that I see with Aternity.

We had no issues with stability.

This question isn't really applicable to us. We purchased 1500 licenses and currently don't even use 1/3 of those.

Customer Service:

Customer service is the best I have ever encountered from a software vendor. They're responsive, courteous, thorough, and share our sense of urgency in getting issues resolved.

Technical Support:

I'd rate technical support through the roof. There was one issue we were having with a certain .dll file that wasn’t working properly in our Citrix environment. It took over a month to finally reach resolution (it turned out we have some settings configured incorrectly within Citrix), and during that time the support team thoroughly and diligently investigated every piece of information we sent. They also connected us directly with the R&D department, who spent an hour with us doing a screen share, looking in our environment and explaining exactly why this problem was happening, and proposing several solutions (one of which worked, and we were able to fix it). They were professional, friendly, and knew their stuff!

Yes – we used CitraTest, which was a tool that allows you to generate and conduct synthetic transactions on a schedule. Tools like this have their place, but it wasn’t accomplishing what we really needed, which was to understand actual user experience and pain points. Additionally, this particular tool didn’t work the way the documentation stated, and their support team was rude, condescending, and actually in denial of the issues (even though I provided screen shots, timestamps, detailed documentation, etc.).

The initial setup was mostly straightforward. The Citrix setup was a little more complicated, but that was partly because our Citrix admin left in the middle of the process and hadn’t completed all of the pre-installation checks.

We implemented it in-house. An implementation engineer from Aternity came and spent four days with us, and we installed and implemented together. Then our team handled it from there.

I’m honestly not sure and I don’t know how we would even quantify that, because the process of analyzing performance has been so disorganized and touched by so many hands. We’ve had different tools, different teams, and no real protocol for handling any of it. But Aternity is helping a lot with that end of it.

I advise that you buy more endpoints than you think you need, unless you’re already buying enough for the entire organization. One point of frustration for me has been the fact that we are only collecting a sample of data, and I’m not convinced that it’s completely representative of all problems a user could have. As for pricing, our management squeezed Aternity pretty hard on the pricing, in my opinion a little too much. I advise negotiating for sure, but I do think it left kind of a sour taste in Aternity’s mouth that we were being so pushy despite the fact that we were only purchasing a small number of licenses.

We didn’t – we did a cursory search for other tools to vet, but couldn’t find anything else that did what Aternity does, so we decided to test only that one.

Do it. You won’t regret it. And when you do it, make sure there’s someone in-house who is excited and willing to learn the product inside and out, because you will have SUCH a better experience with implementation and analysis.

Because we can proactively see the productivity and performance of employees and people working on behalf of the company, we're able to see degrading performance and address the root cause prior to business impact.

The most valuable feature for me is being able to monitor the productivity of every employee in the company as well as third-party, outsourced companies that work on our behalf.

And I also monitor cloud services. It can take that much workload.

I would improve the dashboard, the presentation player.

I did not encounter any issues with stability.

We have it right now pretty much enterprise-wide, so it's very scalable.

Technical support has been top-notch.

We evaluated other companies such as a product from a company called Lakeside Software.

Initial setup was straightforward.

I'm rating this solution as high as possible because of the unique insight that it provides and the dynamic nature of the product.

It has helped to identify several problems and performance bottlenecks in different applications through the code-level instrumentation and its features, and sometimes also through the detailed infrastructure metrics in one-second granularity, including memory, heap, and GC statistics.

This is a review of Aternity APM (formerly "AppInternals") on-premises version 10.21 only.

The infrastructure metrics, especially the CPU and memory data etc., are available in per second granularity, and this for quite a long time, which makes it outstanding as compared to other solutions. Its licensing cost is very low for us. For the use of the agent in infrastructure mode only (without code-level instrumentation), no licence is consumed. A license is only consumed when code-level instrumentation data is harvested, or downloaded from the agent to the Aternity APM server.

The code-level instrumentation has been quite helpfull in many cases, including the ability to record and analyse database SQL requests with bind values, and exceptions.

Its user interface and features should be improved. They don't support new versions of certain Linux editions. That is one of the reasons why we have to move to another solution.

In terms of a new feature, it would be good if we could restrict a user to a specific application or server. We have several customers, and we have to set up one or two servers for each customer. We have to set up one server for production and one for the test environment. Each user at the customer level can see all applications and the data of all applications, which is not really useful and good. We should be able to restrict user access at the application level or server level.

Their technical support should be improved in terms of response time. Its stability should also be better. We are currently using version 10, and its stability is not so high. The server crashes from time to time and needs to be restarted. Sometimes, you also have problems with applications.

Version 11 only allows for one AD/LDAP server to be connected to. Version 10 can connect to several LDAP servers, a feature we need; that's why we did not upgrade to version 11.

The on-premises version lacks some features compared to the SaaS cloud solution of Aternity APM.

I have been working with this solution for two and a half years.

Its stability is not so high currently. We are still using version 10. We have not switched to version 11. The server crashes from time to time and needs to be restarted. Sometimes, you also have problems with applications. Once they are instrumented, they have to be fine-tuned because of the problems. 

We are not satisfied with their technical support. If there is a problem, you have to wait for several days to get a response.

Its initial setup is relatively complex.

Its licensing cost is very low. That's one of the reasons why we have kept it for so long. We get more than a 70% discount on the maintenance licenses. Its cost is very low for us, but if you buy it new, it would be much more expensive at the retail price.

We are currently evaluating Dynatrace, which has a lot more possibilities. It has a better user interface and fewer errors or problems with instrumentation features.

I would rate Aternity APM a five out of ten. We are not very happy with it, and we are considering a new solution.

• Proactive application monitoring that is application-architecture independent.
• Advanced dashboards.

• The advanced dashboards allow operations teams the ability to focus on outliers.

• Overall reduction in mean time to repair (MTTR).

Schema is difficult to work with when constructing custom dashboards.