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Apica pros and cons

Vendor: Apica
4.1 out of 5
290 followers
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Pros & Cons summary

Apica enhances release monitoring by identifying staging issues before production, improving operations across environments. It offers WebHooks, effective alerts, and comprehensive dashboards. Dynamic variables in ZebraTester simplify service monitoring configuration. The hybrid model allows for global load testing. Real-time monitoring ensures operational continuity. However, it has limited integration options, a steep learning curve, high costs, inconsistent support, and complex alert setup.

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Prominent pros & cons

PROS

Apica enhances release monitoring by detecting critical issues in the staging environment, thus preventing them from reaching production.
Apica's comprehensive alert framework and visual reporting through dashboards streamline daily operations efficiently.
Features like ZebraTester in Apica allow dynamic variable storage and usage in subsequent service calls, simplifying the configuration of service flows.
Apica supports a hybrid model with cloud architecture and on-prem agents, offering global load testing capabilities and rapid response through flexible cloud agents.
Apica Synthetic provides customizable monitoring scripts that mimic customer interactions, enabling early detection of potential outages before affecting customers.

CONS

Having to install an application on the desktop to use ZebraTester is cumbersome and it would be better as a web-based application.
Documentation accessibility and ease of digestion for new users, especially for complex cases, need improvement.
Internal agent installation would benefit from being Docker-ized for easier management and deployment.
Alerting is noisy with frequent alerts and there is no option to reduce the number of alerts to a minimum.
Creating scripts using ZebraTester is difficult and the tool does not provide automatic correlation features.
 

Apica Pros review quotes

NM
Jul 9, 2020
It helps with releases because we monitor them in staging. We can tell if something is critically wrong before it gets into production, e.g., if it was load related or function related and also what was different in the dev stage. It then alerts us straightaway inside of our production monitors once it has been released. Therefore, it has improved how we run our systems since we monitor multiple environments.
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JF
Jul 27, 2020
As always, within the IT industry, everybody's always looking to upgrade and update everything else like that. Apica has been one of those things but it's really hard to replace because it offers us the unique capability to see what the customer is seeing. A lot of other ones can do Selenium script and things like that, but there's a lot in Apica that we use right now. We utilize a lot of the scenario options in Apica right now, and there's a lot of other ones that do parts of it, but it doesn't do everything that Apica does.
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GA
Jul 19, 2020
From our standpoint, there are a number of valuable features. The WebHooks are obviously really great. The alert framework is really good and then the reporting and visualizations that you get from the dashboards is good. Those three areas are primarily what my team's focused on in terms of usage from day to day.
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Apica
November 2024
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SM
Sep 17, 2020
One of the biggest advantages of moving to Apica is the ability get to a hybrid model with the architecture in the cloud and our agents on-prem. We also have access to Apica's cloud agent across the globe. That has changed the way that we have our load testing setup at this point. Previously, it was always internal. Now, with this change in the way it is implemented for load testing, we can test anywhere across the globe and from the list of agents available within Apica's cloud. If I don't have an agent available in a second location, it just takes an email to their customer support, then it is spun up within 24 hours. That flexibility has changed the way that we perceive our load tests, not just in the US, but globally.
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DD
Feb 2, 2021
There are several features that are really good. The first one is the flexibility and the advanced configuration that Apica offers when it comes to configuring synthetic checks. It provides the ability to customize how the check should be performed and it is very flexible in the number of synthetic locations that it can use. It allows us to run scripts from different locations all over the world, and they have a really good number of these locations.
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reviewer1446309 - PeerSpot reviewer
Nov 1, 2020
You can tell from the operational space of people who are using and consuming this data that they are more integrated. It is not dependent on one team anymore. It saves a lot of time by capturing and pinpointing the exact problem that is happening quickly. We have moved from getting escalations manually to getting escalations synthetically.
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reviewer1394475 - PeerSpot reviewer
Jul 26, 2020
With the ZebraTester, the ability to have and store dynamic variables, when setting up the monitors, means you can extract that value and use it in a subsequent service call. This is something that has made our lives easier... This is one of the features that I like the most because it helps us in configuring these services, in a certain flow, without the need to re-record the whole thing.
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GA
Feb 10, 2021
We see the benefit almost every day. It allows us to be alerted whenever there is a store that is not responding properly around the world. We do have a network operation center (NOC) who receives these alerts, immediately checking if everything is okay.
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reviewer1490040 - PeerSpot reviewer
Jan 19, 2021
Our application SREs do script checks in such a way that closely mimic our customers' actions using the platform. Because there are so many different ways and options to be able to configure checks to closely mirror your applications' capabilities, it provides a lot of optionality for teams to create the right type of check that can notify when there are any issues. At the end of the day, we want our monitoring tools to be able to catch any outage before our customers do. This is where Apica Synthetic does a great job.
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Priya Raman - PeerSpot reviewer
May 20, 2024
The solution captures all our requests and responses.
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Show 8 more reviews (out of 18)
 

Apica Cons review quotes

NM
Jul 9, 2020
The initial screen on their dashboard could have a bit more data, but this is a small thing. It could have more data, so we do not need to drill down to a screen behind that initial information. I would like them to get a little better on the user interfaces that we need to go into.
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JF
Jul 27, 2020
Alerting needs improvement. It's a little noisy. It needs some better options. Currently, they have an issue, when you set up a synthetic monitor, you can set up where it's monitoring from, a data center that Apica owns.
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GA
Jul 19, 2020
The having to install an application on your desktop to utilize something like ZebraTester is a little cumbersome. It would be nice to see that become a web-based application. Having the documentation a little more accessible, and easier to digest by people who are just learning how to use the framework, especially when it comes to more complex or more edge-based cases would be really helpful to have.
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Buyer's Guide
Apica
November 2024
Free Report: Apica Reviews and More
Learn what your peers think about Apica. Get advice and tips from experienced pros sharing their opinions. Updated: November 2024.
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816,406 professionals have used our research since 2012.
SM
Sep 17, 2020
The accuracy of alerts can be improved a little bit. Right now, it's pretty good in terms of alerting pretty quickly about failures or changes in response times. However, what we have seen happen is the number of alerts that we are getting is very frequent, and we would like to tone down the number of alerts. That's the only trouble we have. Apica could tone down those settings because there is no option for us to tone it down to a level that would reduce the alerts to a minimum. As a platform, it does send us good alerts, but it could be improved a bit.
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DD
Feb 2, 2021
There are some components of the user interface that are not up to date. Just to give you an idea, today we have web applications that are called single-page applications that are much faster than the old style of web application. If we can move faster into the flow of the graphic user interface, and in a more effective way, it will save us a lot of time.
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reviewer1446309 - PeerSpot reviewer
Nov 1, 2020
Learning the tool has always been a little difficult from a scripting perspective because the framework is proprietary and unique. Once we became used to what it does and how to perform it, then it became easier for my team and me. I would like to see some of the testing steps be part of a more well-known language, like Java or Python. That would be a big improvement.
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reviewer1394475 - PeerSpot reviewer
Jul 26, 2020
When it comes to the way the internal agent is installed, because you can install an application on a server, I would love to see the application Docker-ized. If you could install internal agents using Docker or using containers, it would be easier for us to manage them and spin up internal agents.
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GA
Feb 10, 2021
The reporting part that we use for our executives needs a bit more customization capabilities. Right now, you can use only the three main templates for reporting. We would like to be able to customize them.
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reviewer1490040 - PeerSpot reviewer
Jan 19, 2021
We have been focused on reducing polling times for synthetic checks. We have gone from 10 minutes down to five minutes for a pretty broad swath, but there is some appetite to reduce that further, which could be an improvement.
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Priya Raman - PeerSpot reviewer
May 20, 2024
The tool does not provide automatic correlation features.
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Show 8 more reviews (out of 18)

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Product Categories
Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability
Log Management
IT Operations Analytics

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