Alluvio Aternity Reviews

The two most valuable features for us are its abilities to validate the customer experience and to measure performance before and after upgrades.

• Intuitive use: The GUI isn’t intuitive and several elements of its design differ in appearance and function with other parts of the interface.
• Reliability: Issues interfering with the deployment and use of the product has made its use reduced in scope.

We've had issues with stability. We have a case pending and instead of fixing version 7.1.7, we're looking to upgrade to 7.1.9 instead.

We've had no issues with scalability.

Customer Service:

Customer service is excellent.

Technical Support:

Technical support is excellent.

We had no previous solution.

The initial setup was complex. There’s a lot of architecture and installation, configuration, and setup of varying pieces to make it all work.

The vendor implemented it for us. They did an excellent job, as usual.

Understand what it does, what it can do, what it can't do, and set realistic expectations.

Without a product that can store this type of data and give you a front end for analysis, you don't really have a lot of statistical knowledge about a problem. You might get user complaints about this or that, but this solution can tell you that there is an actual problem. It also tells you exactly what time the problem started happening and where it started happening.

Without a product that can do this, you don't really have eyes into that and you're just relying on help desk tickets and some guessing. Putting a time frame on when an issue started occurring is really helpful, then you can look at what changes were deduced in the environment at that time. You can really start analyzing the issue quickly.

The most valuable feature for us is trend analysis, particularly with device-help type of events and computer help events, such as blue screens, application errors, and application crashes. It also gives us the ability to correlate that with different attributes, such as location or the Internet Explorer version or whatever comparisons we'd like to try to make to analyze our environment.

They have a lot of features built into the product, but it would be nice if they had some additional features that I think a lot of organizations would benefit from. For instance, I can see the location and computer model and I can see a bunch of different attributes. But one thing I can't see is the Internet Explorer version.

I'd also like to see some more use interface upgrades to make it easier for people to utilize. I think it's easy for a person like me, who uses the product daily, but it's not so easy for somebody who only intermittently uses the product to interface with it.

It has been stable, but I know they're planning some updates in the future to version 9, and that might really spin it around the other way. Future upgrades might really impact us.

For us, yes, it has been scalable, because we started off with a fairly small user base on a very large platform hardware-wise. We've never had to upgrade our hardware yet as we increased our user base.

As with most vendors, if you're troubleshooting a difficult issue, you have to break through the levels of troubleshooting to get to the really high-end engineers, and that can sometimes take some time.

The big trigger for us was that we have a lot of small offices. They don't have any IT presence and we wanted to really try to validate users' concerns and performance in those remote sites without actually having to send a tech there.

It's pretty straightforward.

Try to get implementation correct right-off-the-bat. Try to get some training sessions scheduled with Aternity and lock them down into helping you utilize the user interface.

It's improved our organization by giving us visualizations and measurements of what users are often doing and by quantifying how the application is performing, how persistent it is, etc.

In our current version, the user experience it provides is the most valuable feature for us. Also, the performance navigator is very valuable.

I’ve seen the version 9 demo and they have really improved the product. It starts out as a high-level view. They've additionally added some great color coding, but they need to explain better and drive down further on the meanings of this workflow. For example, how quickly can I see why it’s not showing green?

Once you get it configured with full enterprise deployment, it's stable. There are minor modifications that needs to be done so that it's all-in-all stable.

You just hold on to certain components and base this on your size. In this way, it's stable.

The only fault I would give them is that I do troubleshooting on my own. If they could simplify or skip some stuff it would be great.

The initial setup was straightforward as they did this for us. The daily operation is straightforward.

We implemented it through a vendor team.

This is the only tool we use to show us what the user is doing. It's also the quickest product for its value. I'd highly recommend the product.

If we have an application that appears to be causing problems, like if users are seeing slowness, we'll go back to Aternity and look at the data. From there we'll try to get info about where things might be going wrong and then send it to whichever team needs to take a look at it, such as the network team or the application team. It could be a desktop issue, in which case we can try to see at least where the problem is using Aternity.

The item we use the most and what upper management wants is the SLA reports. It's a good summary of how the applications are performing over time from month to month.

We're two versions behind so some items have probably been taken care in the newer versions. In our current one, I think the workflow needs improvement. I wouldn't say our desktop is an issue to be able to click into it deeper and then move to where the problem is on the desktop site. From what I've seen in the demos of the newest version, have already improved on that.

On the server side we had a web app for a while, the web portal into the Aternity console would just freeze and crash, and then we had to reboot the servers and then it would come back up. I contacted support and they were able to find out what the problem was and we got it resolved.

We haven't grown all that much really as far as number of workstations. We are having more and more people jump into the console side of it and I don't think there's any issues there.

It's pretty good. Sometimes the response could may be a little better but overall it's pretty good.

This is the first solution we had.

I don't know because I wasn't involved with the initial setup. I came into it a little after the initial setup but I have done upgrades since then and those are done through support hours and Aternity just walked us through it. They remote into the machines and then we just let them do the upgrades for us, so I would say pretty simple then.

Make sure you're set up correctly. In order to get the actual full view of what's going on we would recommend to deploy the agent to all of your computers instead of just some of them.

The version that I've seen, the one thing it doesn't do which I don't know if it's really meant to do is that you're getting all the view from the client side but sometimes it's not possible to look on the server side at anything that's happening on that side of things. It's good to see what the users are seeing but doesn't do a great job of digging into what the problems could be on the backend. It'll kind of tell you if it's the backend or not but from there it's limited.

The dashboards and the analysis tools, especially the navigator, are great features and are very valuable.

We haven’t changed our version yet, but we are working with newer versions of operating systems. This is what we are hoping to get from it. Maybe an easier capability for monitoring and that’s what this product is going to give us. From what I understand, when we implemented Tableau into the dashboards it really worked well.

I’d like to be able to build monitors easier. That has to be an easier process, and they need to make the program less complicated. The documentation could be better. Also, I'd like to be able to download the latest version for testing.

We've used it for six months.

I think it’s fairly stable. We distribute across various different servers, we shut them down so it works properly. You come in sometimes and it works, sometimes you have to shut it down and then it works again.

We don’t have any problems with scaling. We haven’t really done much with it to be honest.

They are very timely, they get back to us quickly, and they are very good.

Complex. I read the documentation, but it's still complex.

Aternity is end-user monitoring. It can do all kinds of monitoring. All of the other APMs are web-based. This one can do it all.