Alluvio Aternity Reviews

I work for a managed service provider, and we offer Aternity as one of the main solutions for any customer who needs applications and full end-to-end user experience monitoring.

The main use case is around application performance. Another main use case is related to Teams. Our customers like to know what's happening with Teams when they call in. Is it a performance issue at the backend or within their desktop environment? 

We have its SaaS-based service version. It is deployed on the cloud, but the agents are deployed on-premise. So, I needed to buy stuff.

It is useful for working out whether there are any issues in the network or between the endpoints. It is also useful for working out any performance issues. It has been useful for a lot of stuff around Teams. Our customers like to know what's happening with Teams when they call in.

It is helpful for easily profiling users. It records all the applications that are being used for each user, and you can see what users are doing.

It is very good in terms of performance. You don't have to wait forever to try and get reports or results. It is quite quick to get everything that you need out of the software.

For me, the biggest problem is the price. It is not so much about how much it costs. It is about Aternity only giving you 12 months upfront. So, you got to purchase it for 12 months. A lot of our customers are on a per-user-per-month type billing. They are all OPEX rather than CAPEX. It would be a lot better for our customers if there was an option available for OPEX so that it is billed on a monthly basis than a yearly basis.

They've got only Windows agents. They don't actually have mobile agents. It would be a lot better if they could also integrate Android and iOS because then we can start pulling steps and performance management out of users' mobile devices. That's the biggest addition I would suggest at the moment. A lot of our customers have desktops as well as tablets or mobile devices. We should be able to monitor that stuff as well.

I have been using Aternity for less than three months.

It is very stable.

It is very scalable. We've got several enterprise customers using it, and we provide it as a managed service with the SLAs and stuff wrapped around it. 

We plan to increase its usage. I don't think we would switch at this point. It already ticks most of the boxes. We've only been using it for three months, and we're signing a lot more customers down that path. It is hard for us to change the application or software internally because it requires a lot of internal training and other things. You can't just cross-pollinate. You will have to change every one of them.

We haven't contacted them so far.

It is pretty straightforward. Anyone should be able to do that. 

It is all SaaS-based. You order it, and they set up the backend on their service. You just download the agent and install it on the desktops. It doesn't take a long time at all.

You have to purchase it for 12 months, which is an issue because a lot of our customers are on a per-user-per-month type billing.

There are a few additional costs. A lot of customers only get the essential licenses, and then they get what they call the application add-ons on top. They have to pay depending on how many customers and applications they want to monitor.

We evaluated Dynatrace. The cost of Dynatrace was about two or three times more, and it wasn't giving what we needed it for. Dynatrace has got some aspects, but it was not what we were looking for. We were looking for end-user experience monitoring, not just application monitoring or application performance.

I would rate Aternity a seven out of ten.

We have many use cases for Aternity, but the key ones are that we use it to validate and deploy. One of our big initiatives was converting all of our users within the bank to Office 365. Aternity was heavily used for validation and performance monitoring of the Office 365 project.

We're now able to get a real measurement of user productivity. We're able to use this tool to reduce the mean time to resolution, whenever there is a problem with our end-users. It helps us speed up the time needed to address their issues. When there are any issues with their devices, we're able to use Aternity to very quickly figure out what the issues are, whether it's an issue with a workstation or an issue with a particular application.

Using this tool, we now have visibility, so detection, and the remediation that comes after it, are much faster now. That's instead of being blind, per se, without this tool.

The tool has a very good feature called Validate Application Change, which allows us to validate any changes to an application or infrastructure changes, or even a simple configuration change. It allows us to quickly measure the baseline and gives us a very nice before-and-after view. For example, suppose that prior to the change, the user-experience was two seconds. After the change, using the Validate feature, we can see that it got better and the user response-time is one second instead of two.

This feature helps us make decisions about the effects of changes in two ways. One is that we use it to validate whether a change should go ahead. For example, for our Office 365 migration, we used it to test and validate whether, if we were to convert users into the Microsoft 365 suite of tools, the application performance would be good or not. It helped us make a decision on whether to actually push it out and put it in production for everybody. That was heavily used during performance testing phase.

The second is that it gives us a way to validate whether a change was successful and meets our bank's current SLAs.

Using the solution we know what the full transaction experience or performance is like, how much time it's taking, and where any bottleneck is. If there is an issue with the backend, or there's an issue with the network, or the issue is with the client side or workstation, if the root cause resides in the client or workstation, it has the troubleshooting capability to specifically figure out what the root cause is.

The main feature, what we really like about Aternity, is that it can monitor the actual user experience, meaning their actual response times, volume, and when they did what.

Another key feature is with regard to the current situation with COVID. A lot of people are now working from home and Aternity has been a very good tool to monitor and measure the performance of the VPN.

Other features we use heavily are the WiFi analyzer, the Skype for Business analyzer, and the troubleshooting functionalities. We also use the Device Health quite religiously here for troubleshooting devices that are unhealthy, when we're talking about things like high CPU or memory consumption, or file system problems within the users' workstations.

When it comes to a lot of the features that I would want, they will tell you they are in their SaaS version, which we don't use. We are planning to move to the SaaS solution to get those features. 

But the issue is how Aternity, as a company, works their roadmap. They put all the new features on the SaaS solution and that's where you get the latest and greatest stuff. But some of those features are not available for the on-premise users, which is what we are. Why not have those features available for on-prem users?

We've been using Aternity for about six years. Our first engagement was about six years ago but in the last two years we have had more dedicated focus in using it on a larger scale, using one of their latest versions.

It's very stable. We haven't had any downtime because of the tool.

Scaling it is very easy and intuitive. It's just a matter of acquiring a server. It's very well documented on their portal; how to scale and what all the numbers will be.

Their technical support is very good. They're extremely knowledgeable about their product and the support has been great. Their responses are very timely and they'll fix the issues.

From my end, the initial setup was very easy because we engaged their Professional Services to help us.

Our deployment took three days.

At a high level overview, our deployment strategy included acquiring the necessary servers based on Aternity's documentation. Aternity provided sizing consulting to review and make sure that we got the right hardware and sizing and capacity. Once that was acquired, it was just a matter of installing it in a test environment and then moving on to the production environment.

Our experience with their Professional Services was very good.

We have definitely seen ROI in terms of cost savings. Implementation times and remediation times are all cost savings, when it comes to operational readiness and day-to-day operations.

The pricing is fair. Their salespeople are very good and they will work with you in terms of getting the best price for you.

We looked at several other solutions. We picked Aternity because of ease of use, ease of setup, ease of configuration. Also a lot of this stuff is automated in the sense that once you install the agent, it's smart enough to measure and collect and monitor all sorts of stuff with the user's devices. With other products there is a lot manual set up and a lot of manual overhead to configure them, to get them to work right. 

Not only was it the ease of use, but it collects and monitors a lot more metrics. It also provides a very flexible interface to do custom reports and monitor and customize internal applications, relatively easily.

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.

We have a big number of devices and we use it to get a pulse check of how our desktops or workstations are behaving across the enterprise. We don't have it on every device. We have it scattered across all locations where we have a presence. We get metrics such as CPU information, memory utilization and, most importantly, the application performance that comes out-of-the-box with Aternity.

Let's say we release new hardware. We have a testing team and they want to see how applications will behave on that new hardware. They install Aternity and they look at the metrics — the CPU, memory utilization, and application response times. That's how a lot of our businesses use it. There's another area where we just focus on how our application is behaving. So the two core uses are hardware performance, based on a new release of hardware, and application performance, regardless of the hardware.

We used to have the on-prem Aternity solution, but now we are using their SaaS solution.

One of the features that Aternity has is the boot time. It measures how long a workstation takes from when you first power it on until the device is usable. We were able to provide our engineers and our developers that information. We've seen situations where these services are taking a longer time. These applications take up some of the CPU. We've shown them the data and they have come and said, "Okay, we can probably improve in this area."

The business or department that is responsible for that software or device can look at the actual metrics that we are able to provide and say, "Okay, this is actual data, not just anecdotal data from users who say, "My email is slow." They can act on it. That's the beauty of it, the metrics.

DEM-Q (Digital Experience Management Quadrant) is very useful. This is where they stand out with their dashboard, because it gives us a picture of how our company is doing compared to the other businesses out there. We're one of the big five or six banks in Canada. We are able to see how we are doing compared to the other financial industry companies out there. We don't want to compare ourselves to, let's say, technology companies or retail companies. We can compare ourselves with the financial industry. At the same time, we can also compare ourselves with the rest of the globe, but in our case, having that ability to compare ourselves with other financial industry companies is important.

The application monitoring is the most important feature. For example, how long does it take to open Outlook, or how long does it take to send an email or preview mail? How long does it take to open Word? When it comes to launch time, how quick is the application?  We use that for a lot of our Microsoft applications. The ability to measure response time is the best feature.

There are also built-in activities that let you measure things like preview mail, open address book, and send mail. Those are the activities that we are able to get measurements on, and those are things we have not seen in other software monitoring tools.

Aternity enables us to see exactly what employees see as they engage with apps. That means we use Aternity in a reactive mode. When we get a call to our help desk saying a machine is slow or acting up or not behaving as expected, we monitor the device for a couple of days, and then we make our diagnosis based on the reports. We use Aternity to troubleshoot user complaints.

We are waiting for the GA release of their agent. I hope they can do better when they release their endpoint agents. Right now, we are not able to measure some applications, core applications, because it's relying on a specific version of the agent and that agent has not come out yet and there's no ETA. I would like to see them speed up time to market when they release agents.

We've gone through many iterations of their software. We have been using it for at least five years.

We haven't had any outages of the SaaS environment, but what we're struggling with now is the stability of the agent. We've been using a GA version. They came out with a beta version and another beta version only to scale back and remove the beta version. Now we're back to the GA version. The back-end of the SaaS is solid. It's the connector, the agent piece, where we are struggling. I have been opening tickets with Aternity because we are not getting, rather we're losing data. Our endpoints are not reporting data the way they did before when we had a more stable version.

Because it's a SaaS version, it can easily adapt and scale. If we have 2,000 agents, we can easily scale to 10,000 and to 50,000 without having to consider the back-end. Scaling is very easy. I trust that their back-end will support when we scale up.

We are licensed for 2,000 end-points and we are currently using 1,000. We are waiting for the GA version of the agent before we can utilize the other 1,000. I don't want to use the remaining 1,000 on an unstable agent.

Aternity's technical support is excellent. When you open a case, you get a response right away. I find their technical support very responsive.

We did not have a previous solution.

The initial setup was very straightforward. We signed on with our Microsoft Azure environment and had access to the SaaS version. We got the metadata. We integrated this metadata with our Azure, set it up on our Azure side, and off we went. It's very simple.

Deployment took about two weeks, including deployment of agents. It's not just a one-day task to deploy the agents. There were multiple deployments. That included setting up the single sign-ons and the dashboard.

To manage the environment we have two people involved right now, managing the console. But when it comes to the tool for getting reports and metrics, there are about 15 to 20 people doing so in different lines of business. 

We did it ourselves, in-house.

We have seen return on our investment with Aternity. We've seen how our applications behave, especially the core applications, so we are getting a very good return on our investment.

We looked at a competitor, Lakeside SysTrack, but I found that Aternity gave more bang for our buck and it was going to give us the information that we need.

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.

We use it for end-user computer performance monitoring and troubleshooting.

In short, Aternity gives us the actual user performance data. This is very different, because typically a lot of the end-user device performance was handled by experience. The client service engineers would base their evaluation on their experience, and of course, typically they would say that the secret of IT is "restart." When they would troubleshoot a user's computer problem, they would tend to go with restart or reinstall or reimage, which is the ultimate step. If they could not solve all the problems, they would just reimage the whole thing. 

Aternity gives us the capability to troubleshoot, to find out exactly where the problem is. It enables us not only to fix the current problem, but it gives us the knowledge to prevent similar problems in other computers. That gives us the capability to provide proactive end-user support.

The most valuable feature is the application performance troubleshooting because Aternity is able to provide the performance from the end-user perspective. It doesn't just give the standard application logon time, etc., rather it's also able to measure the performance inside the application, the performance of specific transactions in the application, and break it down into three elements: the client time, the network time, and the server time. This gives us a lot of insights into what we need to focus on to improve the performance of an application.

Another area is the before and after comparison. Before and after any change, we can use Aternity to compare the performance. For example, when we implement a big application on our infrastructure, or even let's say when they moved the office, we had the user performance benchmark in the previous office location. Once they moved to a new location, we could look at Aternity and the overall performance and see if there was any change. We find that's a very helpful feature. 

The new office was supposed to have newer hardware, bigger than what we had, so the performance was supposed to be better. And it turned out, after the move, that user feedback was mixed. They couldn't really spell out what the real issue was and we didn't know if it was based on their feeling. But from the Aternity data we could tell that the network performance actually dropped. Then we started to look into what could be the problem and what we found out that the network equipment was misconfigured. That led to the correction of the error and we could see from Aternity that the performance was getting much better. That was one of the experiences we had using it for the before and after comparison.

A third valuable feature is the end-user device troubleshooting or the performance monitoring. For example, when we look at a computer that has slow WiFi connectivity, we are able to see what is the actual transmission speed, what the WiFi signal strength is, etc. We are able to find out what the possible causes are of the user performance issues. This gives us great insights.

Also, all the way to the back-end from the server, Aternity provides visibility into the employee device and into application transactions, in the SaaS version. We haven't fully tested that yet. But Aternity has the capability of analyzing the server side and to break it down further into different processes and different procedures that have longer lead times.

In addition, the Digital Experience Management Quadrant (DEM-Q) to see how our digital experience compares to others who use Aternity, has gained a lot of attention, not just from IT staff but also from management. We are looking at it and trying to understand what the numbers mean and, more importantly, what the costs are. It tells us we are in a certain quadrant. Why are we there? What can we do to improve? It's very interesting. I wouldn't say it's helpful yet, because we haven't fully understood it, but we are very interested in it.

Aternity does provide performance numbers, the data. However, it doesn't tell you what you can do about it. It just presents the facts. How to interpret the data, and how to draw conclusions from a lot of the data, requires knowledge and experience. That's the part that I would hope Aternity can continue to explore and give us that kind of capability.

I understand it's challenging. A lot of things may not be due to a single factor or make it easy to draw out an action plan. If, for example, we look at the stability index and it's low, there could be many factors involved. Right now, Aternity doesn't tell you that maybe by doing this or that sequence you can improve your stability next. Not yet. That's the area I'm hoping for. For the time being, I'm developing the team who will have the experience and knowledge and provide that part of the capability.

It is an area that I would love to see Aternity make more progress in, but I also understand it's challenging. There's definitely the room to continuously explore it. It requires very good experience with the hardware and also requires a lot of intelligence. It's going to be very exciting if Aternity can make more of a breakthrough in that area.

We are also trying to integrate it with ServiceNow. We are still learning that process. It would be easier if they had more configurations or the capability to inject the logic into the interface. For example, right now Aternity creates alerts that can turn into ServiceNow tickets, but there are a few areas that can be improved.

First, the alert is pretty much defined by Aternity. An alert has to be created to be converted to a ticket. But if I don't need to create an alert, can I make a dashboard and create certain parameters and convert from those parameters into a ticket? That would be very powerful. Right now, only alerts can convert to tickets.

Second, when they convert to tickets, it would be helpful if they put in a lot more logic which we can easily configure. For example, when a user is from a certain region, it would be good if we could automatically assign the issue to the specific IT group in that region. We are still working on this. Right now, the scripts for the integration are still rather complex and we are still trying to understand this part.

On another topic, if they had an easier way to claim back a license, that would be beneficial to us, but it may not be very beneficial to Aternity, because we might not need to buy so many licenses. For some computers, once we finish troubleshooting, we probably don't need Aternity on them all the time.

I have been using Aternity for at least the past five or six years. We were using on-prem Aternity for many years, and only this year we've migrated to the SaaS version.

Generally, it's quite stable. 

There have been some incidents where the agent was deployed but didn't report back the data. In those cases, redeploying the agent typically resolved the issue. Overall, the stability is good. I don't have much of a concern about that.

I do notice, in terms of the timeliness of the data, it may not be what I expected. I was expecting data for what happened 10 minutes ago, but that may not be there. So the timeliness may not be real-time.

Scalability is mainly the cost side of it. To roll it out to more users, it's pretty straightforward. You just deploy the agents.

Currently, we have about 1,000 devices in the solution. Whether we will increase our usage depends on how well we can prove the value of Aternity to the users, to IT, and to management.

Most of the time we get quite a good response. The people that we have worked with, from our collaboration with their accounts team and the presales team, are excellent. We met a number of the people and they are extremely friendly and helpful, and they're very patient. I'm very impressed by the people.

We didn't use any other similar solution. Aternity is the one that we have used for the end-user performance, monitoring, and troubleshooting, all these years.

The SaaS version is pretty straightforward, there's not much of a set up, per se. The setup is more about the client deployment. 

When we switched to the SaaS version, the deployment took at least one month. The reason was not just the deployment. The reason was more about the internal process, because we don't have enough licenses for every computer. That meant we had to identify the end-user devices to which we would push the agent. That took time. It's not the complexity of Aternity, it was our decision on whom to push it to.

In terms of selecting the users, we went by different categories. Every company can certainly make its own decision about whom they want to deploy to. We wanted to deploy to some of the VIP users, and we also wanted to deploy to users who had more frequent use of certain key applications. We also wanted to deploy to the users who tended to have more issues. And we also deployed to the Citrix users.

For deployment of Aternity we don't require much staff, but we do for support. We definitely need people to constantly look at it, to analyze it, and to generate the reports. We have a team to support Aternity. The core team is about four people but we leverage the client service team as well. We are trying to develop the client service teams in the different regions to be able to analyze the user performance data for that region and for other regions, and to take care of the device issues in their region. For us, Aternity is a tool to give out the information. As I mentioned, the action part still needs to be taken by our IT folks.

We did it ourselves.

I'm trying hard to justify Aternity, but sometimes it's very hard to come up with a return of investment for it. It's hard to calculate the value of, for example, the performance improvement of your competitor. I haven't come up with a good way of calculating the return on investment yet.

Pricing and licensing is pretty standard.

Ever since I have been using it and have been the main advocate of Aternity, I haven't evaluated other solutions, even though I do hear about other solutions. I look into some of the comparisons, but I haven't really done a thorough comparison.

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.

The introspection into the desktops, there's nothing else that we have that will do that. While it also provides desktop metrics, the main thing we use it for is monitoring our applications. I would say we use the application side of it the most.

The biggest improvement would be the ease with which you monitor applications. It's a little clunky right now; it takes a little bit of time. It's very manual right now; maybe it can be automated more. I’m not even sure that they can make it better, but they have started to. There's a weakness, but it's kind of due to the type of tool it is; it's going to be there. It's probably always going to be there, no matter how easy they make it.

Also, when you call in to support, a couple of times they haven't had the best of luck as far as getting the answer right away. It has taken a little time. I don't think it's any worse than any of the other tools we have, but there's always room for improvement there.

Some of the dashboarding and reporting on the analytics side could be improved. I think they realize it. Obviously, some of the desktop monitoring metrics always can be improved.

We had one conflict with a version of an application I believe we were using. We had a conflict with one of the variables that Aternity didn't anticipate a variable getting wiped out, and it did. It would actually hang one of the applications, but they corrected it very, very quickly. To completely solve it and get us an actual fix for it, it took maybe a couple of weeks. They actually figured out what it was and knew basically how to mitigate it, how we could avoid it, within a day or two, it wasn't very long.

I have not encountered any scalability issues. We're right around 7-8 thousand desktops right now. We're just now getting ready to scale that up a little bit. We're probably doubling that soon. Aternity should be able to handle that many users eventually. I don't see any issues there.

I'd say technical support is an 8/10.

We didn't really switch from another product to Aternity. We actually added Aternity because it's a niche product with it being able to introspect in the desktop. We have tools that will do application monitoring, just not from the desktop, to provide the desktop perspective. It's actually an add-on for us.

Initial setup was very straightforward.

Before choosing Aternity, we actually looked around and we didn't really have anything that met the need. We couldn't find anything that met the need that Aternity does.

Definitely plan on monitoring the application. If you're doing a lot of customer applications, you'll definitely need to have that relationship with your app teams already in place, or it's going to be very difficult. You probably need to have that plan in place before you buy a product like this.

On your side, in your IT team, you need to integrate your application developer teams into the process right from the beginning. You need to have that in place. If that's not in place, it's probably not going to work well.

The application response time. That's what our business has been having a problem with.

It hasn't improved the way it functions. It has improved the ability to troubleshoot on the backend.

When maneuvering between certain applications, it might have been slow, but it was actually not the system. It was the associate that was slow. It's caused a little bit of a training change for us.

• Dashboards and reporting features: They are not user-friendly
• Reports were a lot easier in the older versions
• They need to revamp their whole sales, management, and technical support. Their technology is fine. It's the associates around it that make it not worth my while.

I have been using Aternity for two years.

We have not had stability issues.

Scalability is fine.

We have had a little bit of help from them. I am not too impressed, to be honest. I would give them a rating of 2/5, because they don't respond very quickly.

We've talked to sales reps and we've talked to managers. We didn't talk directly to a technical manager, but we had problems with communication as a whole from the company, whether it's technical support, sales, or management.

We didn't have a previous solution.

The implementation was pretty straightforward. There were no problems.

Pricing is a bit high. Don't take that as the "be all, end all".

I have not had any training yet, so I really can't commit to that. The newer version is a lot harder than the older version. We didn't need training with the older version. That's why we didn't do it. That's why I'm saying training is key for this.

The training that I think everybody should take on creating signatures. Don't rely on them to create your signatures. It takes way too long and costs way too much.

I can't remember the name of the product we evaluated. There were only two out there at the time and Gardner recommended one of them.

Have the right training upfront. That's really about it.

• We can solve problems before they grow to be a larger problem
• We can identify trends
• We can assist a user with a problem that they haven't told us they have yet

It's all about being proactive and solving problems before they're big. It's also a customer service perspective, too. If we know someone's hard drive is about to blow up and they haven't even called in the service desk yet, it's pretty cool that you can go and say, "Hey, your hard drive is about to blow up." They respond, "Well, how did you know that? I've been having problems." It's pretty cool.

Being able to proactively identify issues on user systems.

When they moved from Version 8 to Version 9, the customers lost so much control of what they could do with the product. They need to give back what they took from us. In the previous version:

• We could create our own monitors easily
• We could set incidents easily
• We could look at the thresholds for our configuration and change them accordingly

We can't do any of that now.

Scalability didn’t seem to be a problem.

Their technical support structure is terrible. I would give them a rating of 2/5.

We did not use a previous solution.

The setup was what we expected. We had to configure the product to work and to detect things in our environment. That took some time. It wasn’t just come in, install it in one day, and you are done. It's come in, install it, and then, let's really configure the product to meet your needs. That took some time.

It's very expensive. I think it's overpriced. If they want to get the full value out of the product, they need to be able to dedicate people to train, to learn how to create monitors themselves, and have people assigned to look at the data. That takes time. Depending on the size of your organization, you must have one or two people just doing this. In some cases, that could be a lot of money.

You also have to develop systems and processes around reacting to that data. For example, if the solution detects that someone has low space available on their computer, it is not going to call that user and help them automatically delete some files so they have more space. There has to be a process in place to have somebody view that data and to take action on it. That's my point. It gives you good information. You have to build processes and take the time to look at the data. That just requires people, and people are money.

I don't remember if we looked at other options. I don't think there's another product on the market quite like Aternity.

This is a product that needs to be managed and monitored. To really pull the value out of it, you have to use it. It's not magically going to fix everything for you. It does a lot very well, but it takes people to look at the data and to react to what the tool is telling you.

Having data from the user perspective has helped us target our activities. Otherwise, we're operating off of a lot of anecdotal evidence. Users would say things like, "Oh, my computer's slow or it's crashing a lot." We wouldn't have that actual, quantifiable data from that user. We also wouldn't have it from the high-level perspective to understand.

There are two most valuable features:

• The ability to monitor crash and health event issues at a user level
• The ability to get performance data, customized performance data from our enterprise production apps, third-party apps, specifically like Microsoft and HP and so on

Most of the other APM solutions don't really monitor third-party apps as much. They can't go in and do the normal monitoring of, for example, Microsoft Word, or something similar.

I think they need to focus more on ad-hoc and customized reporting. They also need to allow the users to be able to create their own dashboards, rather than only be able to use what's out of the box. I do know that this is on their development roadmap, but those were the two things, from our perspective, that jump out.

I'd like to be able to pull data out of Aternity a little easier. It all comes in pretty nice looking charts and things, but we have a hard time pulling out hard data, which is usually what you'll need if you're trying to be actionable.

To deserve a higher rating, we would need some additional data, access to additional data around crashes, and they would need to add more robust reporting or ad-hoc reporting module and customizable dashboards.

I did not have any stability issues in this time span.

I have not had any scalability issues. It's an awesome solution. From a performance perspective, we haven't seen any issues. The agents on each machine sometimes will start eating up too much CPU, but they have a self-moderator and if they do that, they shut off. We haven't had any issues there. From a data perspective, it gets more effective the more data you have, the more you scale up. No, there aren't any scalability issues.

We have run into some issues and we have contacted technical support, which has been adequate. However, because it's such a short time frame, we're still often dealing with the implementation support team, rather than their standard support team. So I don't really know what their support would be like in a normal function.

We have a tech assigned to us, since we're still in the implementation phase. I can't really speak to what their standard support is like.

We were looking for the ability to get some performance data from our third-party enterprise apps, like our Microsoft Office, our internal document management system, and so on. We wanted some data on, from a user perspective, how long it was taking to open, how long it was taking to do specific tasks within the applications. We wanted some data to be used internally for SLAs and to develop KPIs and items of that nature. We have pictures from the backend, from a network or a server perspective, but we didn't have any user data. Collecting that data manually was pretty time-intensive and relatively inaccurate. With Aternity, we now have the data.

I think the next steps, since it's essentially a net new function, we have to start integrating the data as far as developing how we're going to handle SLAs and how we're going to handle the KPI reports and things like that. Immediately, we're using it also as a secondary function to assist with problem and incident identification and resolution, using it there as well to monitor crash data firm-wise and so on.

Initial setup is pretty straightforward for the actual install. We used SCCM to deploy. That was pretty easy; it came in a pre-packaged MSI. I think the more difficult part is training and having your team members understand how to utilize the tool. Their training programs could probably use a little work. I'd say that was about it. From a technical perspective, the implementation was relatively seamless. But from a process perspective, especially if you're not replacing something, it was difficult. So we're still working through that.

Make sure that you have a well-developed plan for integrating it with your existing processes before you roll it out. Other than that, I wouldn't say much. It's pretty easy to roll out and it's really just leveraging it as effectively as possible is what I think you want to make sure you focus on.