Apica Reviews

Apica is used to perform availability checks of our IT services. We put what we call synthetic checks in place, and these are mainly used to check if a specific application is running correctly, or if it is not available.

Because it is a platform that allows us to check the availability of our services, we have a process in our company that allows us to open an incident when we receive an alert that is raised by Apica. It is really critical in our company to have a tool like Apica, because every time we have an alert we know that there's a real problem in our system and we can forward the problem to our internal team so that they can take charge of the problem and solve it as soon as possible.

We are very satisfied with the flexibility that is offered by Apica. In our opinion it is much greater than in other products, even more expensive products. We found a good balance between the cost, after our spending review, and the features that it offers. The alerting is very reactive as well as very accurate. We are really confident in the alerts that we receive from Apica. The alerting accuracy has absolutely saved us time because we can minimize false positives and that means that we don't have to spend the time dealing with them. On a monthly basis it is saving us about 20 hours of work. That is the amount of work we did on false positives that we received before adopting Apica. That might seem like a low number, but trust me, when we have a critical issue, 24 hours are a lot.

We decided to move from another provider to Apica because it offers, from our perspective, more features and more advanced use case coverage. For example, it has a feature that allows us to set up business logic on the availability of our services. We can apply multiple criteria to trigger an alert. We have availability checks that allow us to check two different services at the same time and, to trigger an alert, both of them have to be down. One of the very difficult things with this kind of product is the possibility of false positives. Thanks to the flexibility that Apica provides, we are able to minimize the false positives, and that means that when we take charge of a problem opened by Apica, we are very confident that it is a real problem.

We are also using some JMeter scripts. At the moment, the platform itself is not using JMeter scripts, but they provide a converter that allows you to convert a Jmeter script into another language called ZebraTester. Thanks to that, we are using our JMeter scripts without any problems. And that means we can implement automation in the scripting and, obviously, that adds up to spending less time and effort on these automated activities. It's quite critical to have a tool that provides you this kind of automation. Apica also provides public APIs that allow us to run these kinds of scripts on demand. That is a good thing when you have to develop some automation to achieve very specific needs and tasks that are very frequently executed.

Overall, Apica has definitely saved us costs involved in managing monitoring, although I can't put a number on it.

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.

There is also the ease of use. The user interface it provides is really advanced, but at the same time, it is really easy to use. That's a really good feature when it comes to daily use and our daily processes on the platform.

It is also very good in terms of the range of protocols it can monitor. Even if, at the moment, we are only using the HTTP protocol and browser synthetic checks—it's mainly the emulation of the end user browser—they also provide other protocols, such as DNS verification.

The first thing that I would suggest they improve is the user interface. Not from the point of view of how to access the features, but how they are presented. The user interface is very clear, but 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.

Another feature they can improve is related to how easy it is to set up what they call on-premises locations. Apica offers locations all over the world, but they also offer a manual to install a location on-premises to check the availability of services that are not public. This process, at the moment, is not so easy to achieve. The last time we did it, we were forced to contact their support to set it up. The automation of this kind of setup is not good. It should be something that does not require human involvement to follow the deployment. The possibility of being totally independent in installing and using an on-premises location would be much better.

I've been using Apica Synthetic for about one year.

The stability is absolutely excellent. We haven't had any issues so far. And when there was some kind of unavailability of the service, because no software is perfect, they advised us before or, if not before, as soon as possible, to let us know about the problem. This is definitely a good approach since if you tell us the platform is under maintenance for a problem, we can change our internal processes to take the unavailability into account.

It's very flexible in terms of scalability. At the moment we have about 2,000 scripts running on the platform without any problem. It's absolutely critical, since we are quite a big company, and moving from a software that is quite famous—because CA Technologies is a famous vendor—to another vendor, Apica, that is smaller, could be a risk. But after the PoC, we really trusted the Apica product. We are very happy that the platform is reliable and very scalable.

We used CA Nimsoft Monitor and Dynatrace Synthetic.

We were migrating from another product to Apica, so the main task that we performed was to migrate all the scripts that we were using on the old platform to the new one. We were able to do that thanks to the professional services support that Apica provided us. They offered us exceptional help in performing this task. It was mostly implemented using the APIs that Apica offers, since migrating data from a platform to another one requires some automation. You couldn't think about doing it manually. The Apica platform was made ready for our use cases because they provided the API that we needed to perform the migration.

The second task that I performed internally was to let the company know about the new processes to be implemented using Apica. The technology is the "engine," but then you need to build the "car" around the engine. That meant we needed to develop processes to let the people who were interested in using the platform know how to do so.

In summary, the first technical task was to migrate all the scripts from the old solution to the new one and the second step was to develop new processes, based on how Apica works.

Overall, our deployment took one year. But the level of support we received from Apica during our deployment helped reduce the time and costs involved in switching to their product. Without them, it would have taken double the time. Thanks to them, the time needed was reduced by a factor of half. They anticipated our needs, meaning that every time we asked them something specific, they replied right away, "We can do that. Don't worry."

It's not possible to provide ROI numbers for a simple reason. Last year we only performed the migration of the platform from CA to the new platform, so we have only been using Apica officially starting this year. We need more time to collect this kind of number. But the perception that we have after the assessment that we performed at the very beginning, is that it will halve our cost and double the performance of the processes that are related to the adoption of Apica.

We checked the new Dynatrace Synthetic platform. We decided to dismiss that and move to Apica after we performed the PoC, since we found that Apica was much more flexible than Dynatrace Synthetic.

Another main difference between Apica and the other products was the cost. We really thought that the balance in Apica between the features and costs was the best among all the products on which we did a PoC. 

There is also the support and the innovation that they bring. One of the reasons we decided to leave CA and Dynatrace is that they are bigger companies, but they are slower when it comes to solving a problem or when it comes to implementing a feature that we request. Apica is smaller, but being smaller means that you are even more flexible and more available when it comes to solving a problem. For example, Apica provided us with a totally new feature that we requested, before we moved to them. That feature was not in the Apica platform and it was critical for us. In about one month, they were able to develop that specific feature for us.

If you are looking for a product that offers a huge technology modernization, and quick support, you should take Apica into consideration, for sure. It is a small company compared to others, but they are really quick in answering your needs and providing you modern technology. If your company is growing and is looking to add new monitoring that is up to date, I would warmly suggest Apica.

We decided to use the SaaS version because we are trying to change the model of services that we are using in our company. We are trying to minimize the on-premises products because we don't want to be in charge of the management of the infrastructure of things that are on-premises. We are absolutely confident that Apica respects our security needs and that we can use Apica safely.

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.