Apica Reviews

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).

We have an eCommerce company. so we manage a lot of online stores. Our main usage is to make sure that our store web pages are different types of web pages, so there can be a homepage, search page, or product list page for each online store that we manage worldwide. We leverage a lot of Apica Synthetic probes to make sure that every store is available and responding as we expected worldwide. This is to ensure that there are no outages in specific parts of the world. Also, we collect some performance metrics, like response time, time to first buy, etc.

We are using the web-based service. While we do have some on-premise probes installed, we use the service on cloud the all the way. We installed the probes two or three months ago.

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. There are some false positives, depending on the website configuration that we are checking. Other times, the alerts are real. We receive a very quick alert through our NOC so we can immediately check and try to find the root cause. This is our biggest benefit. 

Another benefit that we leverage is the creation of reports every month, regarding the availability of all our stores. This is something that is needed by the executives of our company. They want to see this report with the SLA availability of the stores. We are able to do this straight away with Apica Synthetic.

We don't have a lot of very complex monitoring cases because most of our checks are basic HTTP checks. However, in some cases where we use the solution with ZebraTester for scripts and monitoring, we have been able to properly import the scripts used on other platforms, reworking them so that they would work with the platform and have no issues.

The features that we use probably 99 percent of the time are the HTTP and HTTPS checks. We set up a lot of them. This is 99 percent of our current usage of Apica Synthetic as well as some full browser checks, but this is a lower amount. We also use some scripts that utilize the platform, but our usage of them is very small. 

An very important point for using Apica is the ability to have Chinese probes, which is not common among these types of tools. Other important things were the Grafana native integration and PagerDuty integration, which are all tools that we use extensively.

When we started using Apica Synthetic, we lacked a very important feature that was readily available in the following months. The alerting is usually very good - it allows if any websites or web pages are not responding properly. What we missed was the ability to aggregate alerts. This means that if we were monitoring one website with multiple probes worldwide, like Tokyo, France, and London, then Apica Synthetic would initially alert us if any of these three probes were responding with errors. We wanted a less sensitive alerting. For example, we could be alerted if the website was unavailable from all three probes, not just one. However, an aggregated check was not initially available. 

We do have two main open topics with them, regarding the features that we would like improved or added. 

1. 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. 
2. The management of their single-sign on authentication does not 100 percent fit our requirements.

I have been using this solution for around two years.

The stability is very high. We had probably one outage in two years. I am very happy with its stability.

It is very scalable. Of course, scalability comes with a cost. If you need to scale out, that means you would need to use more of your licenses. However, that is reasonable.

There are mainly three to five administrators of Apica who check the platform, configure things, etc. These administrators are all part of the monitoring team. Plus, there are another 40 to 50 users who access the tool to check the collected data. Sometimes, they will also add some checks, but most users only check the outputs.

Right now, we are around 80 percent adoption. We would like more people to use it on our side. On the Apica Synthetic side, we would like to cover some additional checks that we haven't had time to add.

Their support team is very helpful. If we miss something, they make sure this is easily taken into consideration in the future. This is very important for us, because we tend to evolve pretty quickly. Also, in terms of requirements, they are very responsive, which we really appreciate. On a scale from zero to 10, I would say that they are very close to 10. I would probably give them a nine. I am not giving them 10 because 10 is perfection. I am leaving some room for improvement, but it is a very high rating in my opinion.

For now, the coverage is 100 percent of what we need. We were using another tool before migrating to Apica Synthetic. So, we made sure that all our needs were fulfilled and Apica Synthetic was covering all those needs. 

The reason that we switched was mainly because the previous solution that we were using did not have all the features that we needed. It was not really well-maintained. Often, it had some outages, which were unplanned. Overall, its usability was very low. So, it looked like a very old, not updated tool. So, we needed to find a better tool for our purposes.

We were using Broadcom ASM. I know they changed the name a few times, but initially it was owned by CA, and now it is owned by Broadcom. 

The initial setup was very straightforward. 

The solution went through our InfoSec review, which is something very important for us. The fact that we can deploy the service in a hybrid way is very useful because we do have some web pages available that are only using our internal network. We used to have two separate kinds of solution in order to monitor Internet-facing websites and internal ones, but thanks to this hybrid solution with the on-premises probe, we are able to use only one tool for both use case scenarios. This is very good for us.

We did use the professional services provided by Apica to help us with the migration, since we were migrating from an existing tool. Therefore, it was not from scratch. So, we leveraged them, and it was a very straightforward process. I would rate the level of support that I received during the migration as a nine (out of 10). This level of support helped reduce the time and costs involved in switching. Without the support, we would have had to do that entire job on our own. This means a lot of man-hours, and we couldn't afford that much because we don't have a lot of free capacity.

A few times, they solved some issues or problems with what they were importing or moving. They notified us, providing us with a better option. So, they anticipated our needs.

The migration took around four to six months. 

One person from our company was involved in the migration. This person's role is as an application performance specialist. His main job is to manage our application performance and availability tools. During the scope of the migration, he supervised that the checks were migrated properly as well as responding to Apica in case they had some issues or suggestions.

Apica Synthetic is used to avoid losing money, rather than make money. 

Our JMeter script is loaded into the Apica Synthetic platform. If Apica Synthetic didn't have this feature, we would have been forced to either choose another solution or add an external service to adjust for this purpose. In this case, they saved us money by allowing us to use only one tool.

The aggregated check has since been implemented by Apica, and now we are using it. Thanks to this, we are seeing when there is really a problem instead of just seeing some glitches and issues with the alerting. This has saved us time in operation costs because instead of having to check every time for just one probe that is failing, now our NOC center is able to focus on the important ones. We are saving a third of the alerting, e.g., if we were alerted and had to check three times a day, we are now doing it only once. 

Apica Synthetic reduces the time required to fix issues. If our website is down for hours, then we lose money. So, the less time it takes for us to be alerted of a problem, then the less money we lose.

The pricing is very reasonable, but it is not cheap.

We did some PoCs with other tools before selecting Apica Synthetic.

I would recommend it to get in touch immediately with Apica Synthetic support to have a chat with them and discuss best practices. They are usually very helpful since they are knowledgeable about the tool, so they are able to suggest the best way to implement checks.

I would rate this solution as a nine (out of 10).

We have various tools, applications, and websites and the use case for Apica is emulating user actions on those sites and in the tools. We use it for proactive action. Before the user starts getting errors, Apica will alert us because we have it monitoring the same actions we expect the users will be taking. Once Apica detects an error it will notify us so we can take necessary action, before it becomes widespread and users start to report it. Apica is doing an important job in monitoring because our company offers services through those sites and the application.

We're using it on-premises and we're using their agents on their cloud.

Because we're using this product to monitor, for example, the sign-up flow, meaning Apica is doing the same actions as a user who would like to sign up, we have been able to figure out when there's a failure in that flow, before it starts to impact users and prevent them from signing up through the services. This is something that has a very high revenue-impact on our company. Apica has helped us find issues with the sign-up before users have started to call customer care regarding the services.

The fact that the solution offers multiple deployment options — on-premise, hybrid, managed cloud solution, bring-your-own-cloud — helps our organization meet our security requirements. Some of the tools in our company can only be accessed internally. To have an internal, on-premise agent makes it easier to test these corporate tools. We have these tools also monitored with the on-premise installation. It helps us to monitor both customer tools, services, and applications, and the corporate tools and applications.

We use the solution’s ability to make use of our own scripts in Selenium and Postman. We're using Selenium to write scripts that can be run for the browser checks, and we're using Postman to run the ZebraTester scripts. Using the scripting feature saves us on resources. It is one of the things that makes the product easy to use. We don't need a specific type of engineer or operator to be able to write these scripts. There are many people who can do the scripting.

In terms of the alerting, since we started using Selenium, which is for the browser checks feature, about 95 percent of the alerts have been real issues. This level of alerting accuracy has saved us time. It helps us to identify root cause quicker. We used to spend something like an hour just to find the root cause, but the ability to have sensitive monitoring reduces it by half. We can identify root cause within 15 to 30 minutes.

Apica has saved us management costs as well. I'm not involved on the financial side, so I can't put a number to it, but I know that we resolve priority-one incidents faster.

We mainly use the ZebraTester and the browser checks. These are the most important scripts that we're using on Apica. 

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. The most complex monitoring processes are for security purposes: You need to have a fresh token for the user when, for example, he tries to log in. That token keeps changing. To be able to get the results of other service calls that are depending on the login, you need to use that token in the subsequent service calls. Being able to extract that token, store it in a variable, and use it in the other service calls is one of the most complex things. 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. Being able to extract that value from the service calls is something that has made monitoring a lot easier.

For the browser checks, the screenshots that are available help the engineer or the operator who is on the shift figure out what's wrong or what step is failing.

Also, the flexibility of the solution in terms of the range of protocols it can monitor has been great. The product has been working as expected and it has helped us to cover something like 95 percent of the outages or issues that we have had.

There is room for improvement with the GUI. It's not a big deal, but it would be great to fix the way the GUI is loading. Sometimes when we want the manager alerts and manager checks, it takes time to load all the way. With the whole GUI, if the information appeared quicker, loaded faster than it does now, it would be great.

Also, 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. Most of the applications we have now tend to be Docker-ized applications. I'd love to see Apica going that way with its internal agents.

I have been using Apica Synthetic for about five years.

It's stable. Sometimes there's an outage, but it's not frequent.

They offer scalability.

We have about 25 users of Apica Synthetic, people who log in to the tool. About 14 out of the 25 users are engineers with the NOC team and the rest are senior management and engineering leads. We're using the dashboards for management to see the SLAs and the availability of the different websites.

At this point it's being used very extensively. We may increase the number of users in the future, as we have some new projects coming out.

Technical support is always there to answer my questions. They are very responsive. Typically, they all have the ability to support the product, whether it's updates, or issues that we have regarding scripting, or setting it up.

They're just 100 percent available. They always help us on any issues that we have.

We were using Keynote before. I was not involved in the reasons for the switch.

The initial setup was pretty straightforward. There aren't too many requirements in setting up Synthetic. The guides they provided are easy to read and easy to follow. 

Apica support was also always available so we could just shoot a question to them and they would answer right away. During my shift, when I reached out to them via email or a form, they would be able to jump up on a Zoom or a Slack call, to help us right away. They were very helpful. We switched to Apica from a different product and they definitely helped us with recording the scripts that we already had, and with introducing newer ones. They helped reduce the time that we would have had to spend going over the admin guides. Initially, we just wanted to record our existing scripts and they offered to record them. Their support took care of converting the scripts from the language that we used in our old tools to Apica. That saved us time. 

They anticipated our needs during the deployment. They had pretty much everything that we needed when we initially set it up. And when we had a feature request or some kind of additional setup, they tried to provide that feature or help us with a workaround to meet our requirements, even if the product at that point did not have those things directly.

Our deployment, overall, took two to three months.

We had a deployment plan. There was a project manager, and I was involved in writing the scripts and trying to figure out how to convert from the old solution to Apica. Afterwards, I just took care of just recording the new scripts, but there was a whole project for changing to Apica. For deployment and maintenance there were two people involved from our team.

I have not tried all the synthetic monitoring tools out there, but I have tried two of them. They had the same ability to assign the dynamic variables, which is the most complicated stuff that we're implementing, the dynamic variables from one service call to another. But I found Apica offers the easiest way to set this up. This is something that made us stick with Apica, because it's easier to set up the scripts, even with the most complex feature. The two other products I tried have that ability, but it was so complex to set it up. That's what makes Apica better than the others.

Every time I face an issue and reach out to the support, they point me to a part of the documentation. So read the administration guide or the documentation, because they have everything that you need in their Knowledge Base. This is something I learned from opening multiple tickets. It's there in the documents. It now saves me time when I read the documentation.

Apica Synthetic is one of the most important monitoring tools that we're using. 

I would rate it at 10 out of 10 because it's accurate. I've dealt with so many tools and applications, but their support is the most responsive support I've seen. The tool itself offers so many integrations with other applications. It's easy to set up, easy to configure. The documentation is great. The most important part is that the tool covered most of the issues we have and was able to help reduce the time that we needed to resolve the issues and the outages that we had.