What advice do you have for others considering Aternity?

I will recommend the tool to others. Overall, I rate the product an eight out of ten.

Overall, I rate Alluvio Aternity a nine out of ten.

I give Alluvio Aternity an eight out of ten. I believe that Alluvio Aternity is a useful product for diagnosing issues and locating problem areas. However, it may not be suitable for all potential customers, particularly those who require fewer than 500 licenses or prefer a monthly billing option. This pricing model may not be compatible with the current MSP model. While I find it challenging to market to my customer base due to the license threshold, I still believe that Alluvio Aternity is a good product. If the license limit was not a factor, I would be able to sell it to many other customers easily using a SaaS-based pricing model.

I give Alluvio Aternity a seven out of ten. Alluvio Aternity is for medium to enterprise companies. I suggest Alluvio Aternity users focus on the outcomes and the use cases and evaluate based on those.

It is a good product, and I would rate it as a nine out of ten. I advise others to use this solution.

Do a proof of concept. It's one of those rare, genuine products that does what it says on the tin. It delivers, and quickly, without a lot of configuration or anything needing to be done during a proof of concept. Because it's all SaaS, you can do a PoC very quickly: push agents out and start collecting data. The dashboards are mostly pre-configured so you can see the value of that data instantly. It's a good product. More people need to be aware of it, to see how well it works and how much value this can bring to a business. My number-one recommendation would be just get it in and PoC it. There's very little time investment involved in doing that, compared to some other products, and it will pretty much sell itself. It's easy to get excited about a good product, but sometimes it's hard to convey that value to other customers who may have been jaded with vendors making similar claims in the past. But in this instance, you can verify it straight away with no obligation and no real effort. Diving into an application, if you want to pull apart how it is actually performing in the code itself, can be done with an additional module called APM (previously called AppInternals). We don't have that module because we don't develop apps internally using the programming languages that it supports. But even without that module, we can still see very useful granular performance data inside an application. For example, we can see any slowdowns or any performance issues on the client side, the network side, or in the backend. But the APM add-on gives you deeper visibility into the application stack if you have applications that are supported. Aternity hasn't yet helped us reduce hardware refresh costs by considering actual employee experience, rather than just the age of the employee's device, but we predict it will, based on the existing data we've got and when our next hardware refresh cycle is due to happen. Those cycles are quite long. But it absolutely can help reduce refresh costs and we will be using it for that.

I would rate Aternity a seven out of ten.

Eventually, it will reduce hardware refresh costs by considering the actual employee experience rather than just the age of the employees’ devices. Right now, we're still on the basis of how long the machine has been in the environment. Really, it's tied to our own warranty information. When a machine's warranty is expired, then that's about the time that we get a new machine. For a particular model of device, we decided to accelerate that based on the data in Aternity, because we could see that the worst performing machines were with one particular model, which was getting older, but wasn't quite at the state that we would normally replace it. However, because they were performing so poorly, we did accelerate the removal of those devices from our environment, replacing them with a newer model that performs better. The SaaS model has worked really well, because we don't have to manage the infrastructure. Because of COVID-19, everybody started working from home. That gave us a lot of insights around that time as to different performance and stability changes when someone is in the office versus at home. Aternity gives us more device information now than it used to. Also, we can customize the solution now in a few different ways: PowerShell scripts being the newest method. While there may be other tools that get deeper into the device, Aternity gives us an advantage from the user experience side of things. I would rate this solution as an eight out of 10.

Based on my experience, what was key was having Professional Services for at least a period of time. It might not be necessary for the full, end-to-end life cycle of the product, or the period of time that you buy licenses for. But having Professional Services — these are people who know the product intimately, inside and out, and who have a direct line of communication to the engineering teams within Aternity — come and help you set it up, get it out of the box and to start to think of those use cases, is helpful. Because they've got a direct link to the engineering team which is also getting requests from all of Aternity's other customers, they have the capability of bringing ideas back to you and saying, "This is what another customer is doing. Why don't we do this?" It makes the speed with which you can start to really leverage the product so much faster. You start to get value from it much quicker. My advice is that when it comes to implementation, a bit of Professional Services will go a long way. Another big thing for me was that monitoring, prior to us using Aternity, always felt like something that we were doing in very specific ways. If I wanted to look at a network, I would go to one product. And if I wanted to look at application performance, I would go to another product. The thing I learned from Aternity was that if you change the perspective that you are using, you can get a much broader level of visibility. The perspective, in this case, is looking from the end-user or endpoint. Because we had changed that dynamic and we were looking from the endpoint inwards, all of a sudden we could see so much more. That was just "revelationary." I really started to look quite hard at whether or not we needed 10 different monitoring tools. And a couple of those monitoring tools were retired because we found very little need for them after we had built proper levels of monitoring into Aternity. There was just no need to have those point solutions in place because we could already see everything in Aternity. The thing that I learned was, although we bought it because we wanted to see endpoint performance — and that's probably why everyone goes shopping for that type of product in the beginning — what I very quickly learned was that it's much more than that. It's a very wide and capable tool. If you had to choose one tool, if your organization said, "We're going to stop spending money on IT tools altogether, and you're only allowed to have one thing," I would take Aternity every time, because you can do so much with it. It's like the Swiss Army Knife of IT tools. It's the most useful tool I've ever used by a long, long way. There's nothing that I've used that has ever come close to being as useful as Aternity.

Have valid use cases defined, know what you want, and make sure that you talk with the Professional Services team and the product team. Get the demos, ask all your questions, and make sure that their solution will actually meet your needs and your use cases. The Aternity guys do a very good job and they're very upfront and honest with their feedback, regarding what their tool can or cannot do.

Be prepared that you're going to have to build it out to fit your environment and make sure that the expertise is there to understand how to do that. My advice would be to engage their Professional Services. They were really good. The gentleman who helped us was top-notch, and if he didn't have the answers he received the answers for us. That would be my recommendation to help realize the return on investment and get the visibility and the data in the format that you want to see it. That's pretty essential. The biggest lesson we've learned from using Aternity is that a tool like this is absolutely necessary for you to understand your environment. If you ever want to be a proactive company that is trying to get ahead of problems, then you have to have something like this. It gives you that visibility. Without it, you're going to be in the dark and left to people reporting problems through your service desk. That's the biggest learning experience from having this platform. Aternity doesn't currently provide metrics about actual employee experience of all business-critical apps. It's something you have to build out. It's not "canned" that way and there is a lot of configuration that you have to do to the environment to collect the data you want to collect and that is important to you. We plan on growing that side of it. We've only had it for about a year, and since a lot of those things are very unique and specific to an environment, it's not an easy thing where you just click a couple buttons and say, "Now, start looking at this." You have to build it out, and that's one of the pluses and minuses about the platform. There is a basic set of applications that it's monitoring. It's looking at specific activities, such as time to open an application or a certain activity to create a new message or an email within an application. That basic, canned stuff is there, but it requires you to build those out and it's something that's unique to their product, the way that they work it. It's a positive and negative. Aternity doesn't enable us to see exactly what employees see as they engage with apps. There's a little bit of heavy lifting to build out those activities. It's not like, out-of-the-box, it's going to show you everything. It collects a lot of data but presenting the data is up to the administrator and how you use the data. It's not going to necessarily point you to problems, but may help you correlate problems. It does gather the data, but it's not always in a format that's going to make sense to you. The key there is that it's extensible and it's flexible enough to give you the data that's important to you. But it requires the administrator to have a fairly in-depth level of knowledge, using their tools, to build these activities. In terms of visibility into the employee device and into application transactions, all the way through to the back-end, it's really more end-user facing. It's from the perspective of the end-user. Think about it in terms of on a laptop or desktop and the things that users might do within there. You have to build that out. Overall, I would rate Aternity an eight out of 10. It's looking at things from the end-user's perspective, not from a specific application's perspective, although you can do that too. But you try to understand how the applications and things being used are affecting the user's experience. It's all about the end-user experience, where other platforms are not necessarily there. They might just be helping you troubleshoot problems as they come up. It's not higher than an eight because there's still room for improvement. There could be some additional things built for you, out-of-the-box. Certainly building those dashboards is not the most intuitive thing. There's a little bit of a learning curve there.

It is a very powerful tool. We are still learning it. The solution is very helpful to have. Companies look at the application monitoring and performance. Aternity gives you the ability to see end-to-end, so you just don't see applications; you see the user experience of an application. Because you could have the best application in your data center, but you might have problems accessing it. Or, if the computing devices are not optimal, they don't benefit from having fantastic applications on the back-end. So, it gives you the holistic view of your overall end-to-end journey. I would rate the solution as an eight or nine out of 10 because of the improvements that I suggested.

Evaluate it, look at the pros and cons, define what you're looking for and, if it fits your needs, go for it. It's a very helpful tool to have in the bag. I would highly recommend it. The biggest lesson I have learned from using Aternity is how our core applications behave. Before, we did not have any sort of metrics. Now, we have visibility into how our applications behave so we can actually tell the owners of the applications how to improve their applications. Aternity has its own calculation for measuring user experience. Out-of-the-box, it does measure the user experience for Microsoft Office suite and the browsers that are out there: Microsoft Edge, IE, and Chrome. It gives you a number, and it's just a good number to see, but it doesn't really tell you the whole picture. If it gives us a rating of nine, what does that really mean? User experience is very hard to quantify because it's an aggregate score of different measurements, but it does give you an indicator of how your applications are performing. But for me, the true metric is the response time, the actual numbers that show when the user opens Outlook that it takes three seconds. For me, that's a better definition, than a rating of one to 10, for user experience. I'm not discounting Aternity's user experience metric because that is the way their competitors do it as well. In terms of the solution providing visibility into the employee device and into application transactions all the way through the back-end, it's "yes" and "no." The solution does provide workstation performance matrix — CPU, memory, I/O read, I/O write, and network information. For all the way to the back-end, they have another solution, an APM that we are not currently utilizing. If we integrate our Aternity with APM, that's when we'll see from endpoint all the way to the back-end. But because we don't have the integration with the APM, we only see the front-end. We don't see all the way to the server side. Aternity hasn't helped us to reduce hardware refresh costs by considering actual employee experience rather than just the age of the employees' devices because we've always had some sort of logic for when we refresh our device. It's a three-year cycle for our desktops and a four-year cycle for our laptops. Aternity has not changed that model. The fact that other solutions may provide deeper visibility into device performance comes down to a few factors. Price — how much that other solution costs; ease of use — how easy it is to deploy to our fleet; and the quality of data. I'm sure that there are other tools out there that can do what Aternity's doing, but in our case, we are happy. We are satisfied with the data we're getting from Aternity, with its ease of use and how agents are deployed.

My advice would be to push the support people to help you. Engage the vendor early in the process, via Pro Services or via the support, to help with the implementation. Aternity support requires you to press a little bit to get what you want. If you want to get support, you have to engage them strongly and be very assertive. Have a solid list of objectives for what applications and what activities you want to have monitored. It's easy to get lost in "Let's look at everything" without understanding what your key, business-critical functions are. Have a top-10, top-20, top-50 list of activities and attack them that way. That's been a bit of a weakness in our implementation. The fact that other products may provide deeper visibility into device performance does not concern us. We've had very few cases, to date, that have required any deeper level of device performance metrics. Right now I would rate Aternity at about a seven out of 10, and with the potential to go right up to an eight-and-a-half or nine if we get our version 11 implementation completed the way we're planning.

Getting the most value out of it depends on your use case: if you're using it more for service desk agent support or if you're using it for business-level reporting on application performance. My advice would be to learn about all the different use cases there are because it continues to find ways to generate new value for us. Understanding user behavior is probably one of the most enlightening things that we've gotten from the tool. We're seeing that there are certain applications they spend a lot more time in than we may have ever realized, and certain periods when they're active that we may not have realized before. The solution’s Digital Experience Management Quadrant (DEM-Q) to look at how your digital experience compares to others who use the solution is a relatively new feature. They just rolled it out a couple of months ago, so we've taken a peek at it. I've shared it with my upper management to show that we're actually in the good quadrant. We're running above other industries. It's useful to give you a "sanity check," but there's not a whole lot of information out there; it's pretty high-level. It's good to see where we are versus other corporations. In terms of seeing the employee experience, it doesn't do screen recording to see what they're experiencing. It gives a representation of the transactions that they're doing and what the performance for those transactions was. In some cases, but not in all, it provides a good enough picture to understand what they're going through. Sometimes we have to do a screen share to really understand what the user is trying to accomplish and what issues they're having. But the good thing about it is you can always go back in time with Aternity. If the user has an issue, by the time they call the service desk and get a hold of an agent and start to troubleshoot, they may not have the problem anymore. But you can always go back and look at the history of those transaction metrics. Something else we're starting to work on now is the automated remediation actions that the service desk can do. Those weren't even part of the initial review, but because of the value of having all that data together, it's been very beneficial for them. There are scripts so that if a user runs into an error on the screen, we have a fix that we know we can deploy. The help desk can just right-click and run that auto-remediation script. We've done some initial testing with it, but it's next on our list. Overall, I would rate Aternity a 10 out of 10. It's such a powerful tool with so many different uses. We don't have an infinite budget for IT. A lot of times, investment in tools is really something that's at the bottom of the list. So to get one that has so many capabilities built into it and that is so flexible — we can even convert, and we have converted, some of our extra end-user licenses over to the server-side monitoring piece — is incredible. It's like we were going for one product yet we could roll it into a completely separate product which is comparable to Dynatrace. For sure, it's quite impressive. I'm a huge fan of it. It's definitely a great product and it sets the stage for some advanced capabilities in terms of the metrics that they're collecting. They're starting to look at more of the machine learning and AI side. I have a lot of hopes that the product is going to continue to grow into something new in the future.

I do recommend the SaaS version, which has a lot of very good features. And I recommend the team, it's very friendly and helpful. But I would also caution that you need to put in the effort to learn the tool. It's not something that, when you have the tool, all the problems go away. It only tells you the data. How to use the data, how to derive the action and how to improve, still relies on the people who are reviewing the data. It's like the weather forecast. They tell you the weather forecast, but it's your decision, whether you still want to go out or you want to climb a mountain. Aternity does require effort from the IT team. They need to spend time and learn how to best use the tool. There is definitely a lot of reward from doing that. The solution hasn't yet helped us to reduce hardware refresh costs by considering actual employee experience, rather than just the age of the employees’ devices, but it's an interesting point. I would like to explore it more. Even though we have been using Aternity for a few years, we were not able to justify the value very well in the past, when it was on-prem. This year, with the Aternity SaaS version, we are paying a lot of attention to it. I hope we can derive all the value from Aternity, including reducing refresh costs. It makes sense that if we analyze the user's performance and it is still functioning very well, we probably don't need to replace it based on the number of years the device has been in use. But we are talking about the end-user device as the primary focus. Their failure is not just in application performance alone. It could be the monitor having a problem, or it could be the battery having a problem, or it could be the motherboard having a problem. I would like to see whether Aternity can help us to reduce and avoid unnecessary refreshes.

I would definitely recommend this product if you're looking to get on-time, real-time alerts from the end-user point of view. Your application may be good with hosting in Azure or AWS, but when it comes to the end-user, it's important to know how your application is behaving. What is the performance like? What is the user interaction like with your application? It is not only for monitoring. At an enterprise level, the 10,000-foot overview, we can see a lot more details. We can generate a lot more stats for the enterprise. We can see the software inventory and how long it has been in use. For example, if anybody is using Microsoft Visio or Word, the licensed products, we can decide to move them from inventory and save some money. We can also look at how the Macs are performing compared to Windows. We can run queries and it can generate a lot more data about the end-user. We are dependent on Aternity. We get daily alerts and they help my administration team and my support team a lot. They get to know things in advance and that way they can isolate the problem and start working on it. I would rate the solution at eight out of 10. The two points that I'm not giving it are because a little development knowledge is required for configuring desktop applications, and to create some dashboards you need some Tableau knowledge. It doesn't require much scripting; it's easy, drag-and-drop, but people should be aware that some development knowledge is required for creating advanced dashboards.