Apica Reviews

I've been using Apica for performance testing, scripting our commission, and executions. The platform generally allows you to perform all performance testing cycles.

Anyone can understand the solution easily because it doesn't require a specific scripted language. Everything is on the graphic user interface. You can just click on what you want and proceed. That's the best part. Apica is very user-friendly and has the best GUI compared to other products.

Apica is costly, and there's no way to test mobile applications through Apica. You can test mobile applications through other platforms. However, Apica is only for APIs and applications.

I have been using Apica for almost two years.

I haven't faced any major breakdowns or stability issues with the solution. Apica has been consistent. Apica has around twelve powerful data centers worldwide, and I don't remember experiencing any hard blows.

The solution lets you have multiple virtual users. Although Apica claims to support millions of users, we haven't needed to scale to that level. We did not experience anything negative regarding the solution's scalability.

Apica's technical support team is really fast and supportive. The solution was not picking up some scripts when we wanted multiple scripts for execution. We had 40 executable scripts, and the Apica portal was not picking some of them, leaving behind five or six of them. We had to reach out to their technical support team. They set up a working session with us and helped us resolve the issue quickly.

Positive

Setting up and configuring tests in Apica is easier than with any other tool I have experienced. It's really easy to understand for someone with no performance testing background. Understanding and using Apica is as simple as using any social media platform.

I know Apica is an expensive solution, but it is worth the money for the service it provides.

For API, you usually have to pick the payload, like the role code. There's a place where you can paste it, and it delivers the results. The results are very clear to understand. You can use the solution to test all the APIs or any applications easily.

You can easily perform all the performance testing cycles on Apica, including script recording, script validations, script correlations, and parameterization. For correlation, you can easily correlate dynamic values by just picking up left boundaries and right boundaries to find and correlate them. The solution also facilitates the automatic parameterization of values. It's not complicated, and Apica has made it as simple as using any social media platform.

I would recommend the solution to other users.

Overall, I rate the solution a nine out of ten.

Apica Synthetic is definitely one of our core pillars on the synthetic side. We also use synthetics as a measure of external customer application availability. So, we do a daily report internally, which goes out to the tech leadership team, showing how their applications are performing and how available they are. So, it is an integral part of our monitoring tools, and the synthetics are huge.

These are complex multi-step synthetic checks. The intent is to mirror as closely as possible the points and clicks or API/system-to-system calls that our customers are using. So, if anything is not operating properly, then teams are alerted who can triage and ultimately resolve the issue.

The primary use cases are SaaS, but we do have an on-prem environment for Apica Synthetic as well. That option is very helpful because we do have a number of applications that don't have external endpoints. For those use cases that are only accessible internally, we do leverage the Apica on-prem model. This allows flexibility when monitoring applications that we couldn't with a strictly SaaS deployment.

Apica Synthetic provides insight on our application availability at the enterprise level.

What is huge for us:

• The availability of reporting.
• Finding issues before our customers do.

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.

There is definitely a lot of flexibility. I haven't run into any issues or heard of any issues from our SRE teams that said they weren't able to get Apica Synthetic to monitor or script in such a way where it monitored their applications effectively from a synthetic perspective. 

We have had some use cases come up, like when we have teams logging on through a VDI or multi-factor authentication where we have to think about things a bit differently. We are still working through how we might leverage Apica for those types of use cases. However, generally speaking, it has enough flexibility to be able to monitor the complex apps that we typically use it for.

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. 

We have been using Apica Synthetic for close to three years now.

Stability overall has been pretty good. We have had some isolated issues with a node going down here or there, but generally speaking, it has been good.

Check frequency has been a scalability challenge for them. Other than that, scalability has been good. As far as geographic distribution of nodes, there are no issues.

They have fantastic, outstanding technical support as well as outstanding account support in general. I can't say enough good things about the responsiveness from these teams. Whenever we have an issue, there is fantastic support.

The initial deployment was relatively straightforward, though it is very different between SaaS and on-prem.

There is certainly reputational impact when applications go down and customers find that before you do. There is obviously revenue impact when an application is down and customers are not able to use it. Pick your favorite MTTX number, e.g., Mean Time To Detect or Mean Time To Repair, and having strong monitoring capabilities from a synthetic perspective is a big part of that.

Our ROI on Apica Synthetic is risk reduction. It has increased revenue due to improvements in the mean time to detect and mean time to repair that the solution brings to the table, minimizing downtime. That certainly all goes into our return on investment. At the end of the day, we wouldn't be using the tool if we didn't feel that it is providing a significant benefit to the organization.

License management is another area that Apica could do better. We have already had these conversations with our account teams. This is something that they are looking at largely improving in upcoming releases. I believe that this is already on their roadmap.

Frankly, there are other tools in the space, but we have subject-matter experts on Apica Synthetic now who know it well. We have a good relationship with our account team and have had it for multiple years. So, it is a fairly sticky platform. Where if we were going to a different tool, we would have to learn it. We have established relationships from business and contractual perspectives, and Apica Synthetic has met all our requirements from a synthetic perspective.

We do some load testing internally on JMeter. I know that capability exists, and we have advertised that internally. I am just not sure how much traction that it has gotten just yet.

At the end of the day, it is a tool. You need to have teams using the tool correctly. That is just part of the onboarding and training, which is another thing that my team does. Generally speaking, if the script is instrumented correctly, then the results are correct as well.

We look at three broad strokes from a monitoring perspective: end user monitoring synthetics, application performance monitoring, and infrastructure monitoring. We look at those as three very separate pillars.

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

I used Apica for monitoring browser synthetic checks, like websites and URLs. And I also used it to monitor API collections – specifically mobile APIs for iOS and Android. It was a comprehensive monitoring tool.

I have two applications, one on the iOS platform and another on Android. I used to monitor those applications' APIs, such as the login API, where I'd input the username and password, and APIs for making calls between them, and so on.

I integrated Apica with another ticketing tool. Any failure with any of the response codes, whether a 404 or 500 internal server error, would alert the other tool I have integrated with it.

I prefer using Apica for API monitoring better than for browser synthetic checks, like websites.

The API thing... because initially, I used it for browser checks only. Then, after a year, I used it for APIs. So, the API monitoring could be improved.

Another area of improvement is customer service and support. 

I used it for two and a half years. 

I never had any issues with the stability of the solution. 

I would rate the scalability a seven out of ten. 

The customer service and support were a little slow to respond. The browser sometimes checks alerts on unknown issues like latency from Apica's side.

I wish the support team worked twenty-four hours all week. On the weekend, if we have an issue, there is no answer or reply. 

Positive

It is easy to set up and configure. 

We sent our servers to Apica to access them on their site, and that's it.

The pricing is fair. It is neither too cheap nor too expensive. 

Overall, I would rate the solution a nine out of ten. 

I would recommend using it. It's a great tool to detect any issue on any website or any API. I didn't try any other tools, but Apica makes it easy to determine and identify the issue – where the issue is.