Alluvio Aternity Reviews

It has helped to identify several problems and performance bottlenecks in different applications through the code-level instrumentation and its features, and sometimes also through the detailed infrastructure metrics in one-second granularity, including memory, heap, and GC statistics.

This is a review of Aternity APM (formerly "AppInternals") on-premises version 10.21 only.

The infrastructure metrics, especially the CPU and memory data etc., are available in per second granularity, and this for quite a long time, which makes it outstanding as compared to other solutions. Its licensing cost is very low for us. For the use of the agent in infrastructure mode only (without code-level instrumentation), no licence is consumed. A license is only consumed when code-level instrumentation data is harvested, or downloaded from the agent to the Aternity APM server.

The code-level instrumentation has been quite helpfull in many cases, including the ability to record and analyse database SQL requests with bind values, and exceptions.

Its user interface and features should be improved. They don't support new versions of certain Linux editions. That is one of the reasons why we have to move to another solution.

In terms of a new feature, it would be good if we could restrict a user to a specific application or server. We have several customers, and we have to set up one or two servers for each customer. We have to set up one server for production and one for the test environment. Each user at the customer level can see all applications and the data of all applications, which is not really useful and good. We should be able to restrict user access at the application level or server level.

Their technical support should be improved in terms of response time. Its stability should also be better. We are currently using version 10, and its stability is not so high. The server crashes from time to time and needs to be restarted. Sometimes, you also have problems with applications.

Version 11 only allows for one AD/LDAP server to be connected to. Version 10 can connect to several LDAP servers, a feature we need; that's why we did not upgrade to version 11.

The on-premises version lacks some features compared to the SaaS cloud solution of Aternity APM.

I have been working with this solution for two and a half years.

Its stability is not so high currently. We are still using version 10. We have not switched to version 11. The server crashes from time to time and needs to be restarted. Sometimes, you also have problems with applications. Once they are instrumented, they have to be fine-tuned because of the problems. 

We are not satisfied with their technical support. If there is a problem, you have to wait for several days to get a response.

Its initial setup is relatively complex.

Its licensing cost is very low. That's one of the reasons why we have kept it for so long. We get more than a 70% discount on the maintenance licenses. Its cost is very low for us, but if you buy it new, it would be much more expensive at the retail price.

We are currently evaluating Dynatrace, which has a lot more possibilities. It has a better user interface and fewer errors or problems with instrumentation features.

I would rate Aternity APM a five out of ten. We are not very happy with it, and we are considering a new solution.

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.

It's a monitoring tool. Specifically, it monitors very well the ability to sort large amounts of data into something that is actionable. Once you know how to use it, it's very good at identifying trends underlying in large amounts of data.

It's used to monitor our application performance. Desktop health, network health, things of that nature. We have used it to identify issues impacting large amounts of end users with applications, issues with our network, issues with our group policy setups or exchange, all sorts of stuff.

We've built a task force that I was the head of to resolve some longstanding issues with our existing Windows 7 image. The Aternity application was a key product in helping us not only identify the issue, or at least quantify the issue and begin to narrow down the likely causes of it, but it also allowed us to measure how successful we were at implementing changes, moving the needle in the right direction. It's helped us stabilize our exchange environment.

The latest thing we did with it, specifically, was track down an issue in which our end users were disconnecting from Exchange on a alarmingly frequent basis. It allowed us to figure out what was going on, implement a solution, and then validate the solution was in fact working.

The product itself is actually extremely solid. The support of Aternity, specifically their client success management and after-sales support and training leave a lot to be desired. They've gotten better with my last engagement with them, which was beginning in May.

We're still ongoing with a little bit of training. We recently switched from their on-premise Aternity 7 version to their cloud SaaS-based Aternity 9 product. Largely, once you get the product and you have it set up and get it installed, the relationship management after-sales leaves a lot to be desired. The product itself is actually really, really fantastic.

Between the Aternity 7 and the Aternity 9 version, they've made a whole repolish of the UI. They rethought the entire UI to make it usable for folks that haven't spent 40 to 60 hours training in the product, like I have.

We're getting a lot more value out of the product from every single level of IT, all the way from our service desk up to our executives and back down. They've done a very good job at innovating on the product. It's more so the support and professionalism of their client success managers and after-call support that leave a lot to be desired.

Their product is a 10. The support is a five. I'm going to average them out to about a seven and a half to an eight. I hope they're able to continue to improve. I want to make clear they have improved and I've been much more impressed with their support recently than I was over the last three years.

I hope that's not a function of an ongoing engagement and additional large sum of money that we've tossed at them in order to set up the new product. If they can improve on their support, then they would be in a really, really good position.

I have been using this product for close to three years.

We did have some issues with the SQL database side of the product, when it first stood up, and the application server would lock up. Not always, but there was a period of maybe six to eight months when the application server - or the IAS services specifically - would stop functioning, or we would get some deadlocks on the database. It was a task to deal with Aternity support to really identify those particular issues, but overall, the stability of the product was pretty good. I think we'll have less of those issues now that we don't have to maintain our own servers. It's all handled in the cloud. I imagine that since it's a high-availability service, considering it's a cloud-based application, that we will likely not see those issues moving forward. If we do, I won't have to fix them.

I have not had any scalability issues at all. The deployment of the actual monitoring agent is probably the easiest thing we've deployed through SCCM in years. It's very, very simple. It's easy for us to upgrade. It's silent. It doesn't impact the end user when we install it. It's extremely scalable. We currently have it monitoring all of our end user workstations, which is approximately 1,600 computers.

We do have it on some of our servers, but not all. We're looking to scale that up in the new environment, which will equate to roughly 800 servers, as well as another 12 to 15 for our Citrix infrastructure. Overall, we're close to 3,000 total endpoints being monitored by the product, and it's extremely easy to install and configure. We package it. We put it in SCCM and it installs. It's really, really simple.

Recently, technical support has been fantastic. Prior to us being involved in an ongoing engagement with them, it was a little rough. We had to constantly follow back up with them. My calls and emails, depending on urgency, were not necessarily met with what I believe would be an acceptable SLA, especially considering the expense of the product. It's not a cheap product by any way, shape for form. Recently, the engagements that I've had with them have been far improved. We had two particular issues with the product when we moved to the Aternity 9 environment.

The first one, the installation of the agent itself removed a couple of registry values on our end users machines that caused a piece of our Citrix to not function for our entire environment. They not only identified the issue, provided me a solution I could deploy over group policy within less than three hours, but they also delivered me a new agent version the next day that had the issue resolved, which I was extremely impressed with. I had a four-hour down time. They did a really, really good job of taking care of that for me.

Then I had an issue where the application was not displaying fully correctly in Internet Explorer. Once I submitted the ticket for that, and it was a lower priority, they contacted me within 24 hours, and we had a solution implemented within 48 hours. I would say they're definitely trending in the right direction. My hope is that it doesn't fall off once we're done with our active projects.

Previously, we had several monitoring applications, but nothing that really is able to draw a large picture the way that Aternity is. Did we use other products? Yes. To any level of success? Definitely not. There's really not anything like it on the market that we've been able to find. The algorithms that it uses and the ability to aggregate such a large amount of information in a way that make it really, really easy to use for every member of IT. I use this product every single day. I'm probably the most knowledgeable user of the product, and it's extremely powerful. I really don't know of anything on the market that's like it. The product is phenomenal. I really can't speak highly enough about how powerful the product is, and recently they cleared the one major hurdle with the product in that it wasn't very user friendly.

The on-premise setup was relatively complex. The transition to the cloud platform was really easy. Really, really, easy. One, because the professional services team did all of it for us, but just by the nature of the product and how it functions, the setup of it is always going to be somewhat complex. Specifically, in designing the signatures and the monitors for very specific activities and actions that are undertaken within an application, or on a server. There's always going to be a level of complexity.

Once you set it up, it's very, very easy to maintain. It's considerably easier to maintain when you don't have to maintain your servers, which is where we're at now. There is always an inherent level of complexity, but the upgrade from our on-premise environment to the cloud-based was extremely easy. They were able to import all of our existing settings, with a few exceptions, into it. The training on it has been absolutely fantastic. It's pretty easy. They even gave us training on how to author and signature the monitors themselves, which has allowed us to expand our ability to support and customize the application in real time in a way that allows us to get more out of the product then we were already doing. We were already getting a very large amount of value out of the product.

Because we can proactively see the productivity and performance of employees and people working on behalf of the company, we're able to see degrading performance and address the root cause prior to business impact.

The most valuable feature for me is being able to monitor the productivity of every employee in the company as well as third-party, outsourced companies that work on our behalf.

And I also monitor cloud services. It can take that much workload.

I would improve the dashboard, the presentation player.

I did not encounter any issues with stability.

We have it right now pretty much enterprise-wide, so it's very scalable.

Technical support has been top-notch.

We evaluated other companies such as a product from a company called Lakeside Software.

Initial setup was straightforward.

I'm rating this solution as high as possible because of the unique insight that it provides and the dynamic nature of the product.

If we have an application that appears to be causing problems, like if users are seeing slowness, we'll go back to Aternity and look at the data. From there we'll try to get info about where things might be going wrong and then send it to whichever team needs to take a look at it, such as the network team or the application team. It could be a desktop issue, in which case we can try to see at least where the problem is using Aternity.

The item we use the most and what upper management wants is the SLA reports. It's a good summary of how the applications are performing over time from month to month.

We're two versions behind so some items have probably been taken care in the newer versions. In our current one, I think the workflow needs improvement. I wouldn't say our desktop is an issue to be able to click into it deeper and then move to where the problem is on the desktop site. From what I've seen in the demos of the newest version, have already improved on that.

On the server side we had a web app for a while, the web portal into the Aternity console would just freeze and crash, and then we had to reboot the servers and then it would come back up. I contacted support and they were able to find out what the problem was and we got it resolved.

We haven't grown all that much really as far as number of workstations. We are having more and more people jump into the console side of it and I don't think there's any issues there.

It's pretty good. Sometimes the response could may be a little better but overall it's pretty good.

This is the first solution we had.

I don't know because I wasn't involved with the initial setup. I came into it a little after the initial setup but I have done upgrades since then and those are done through support hours and Aternity just walked us through it. They remote into the machines and then we just let them do the upgrades for us, so I would say pretty simple then.

Make sure you're set up correctly. In order to get the actual full view of what's going on we would recommend to deploy the agent to all of your computers instead of just some of them.

The version that I've seen, the one thing it doesn't do which I don't know if it's really meant to do is that you're getting all the view from the client side but sometimes it's not possible to look on the server side at anything that's happening on that side of things. It's good to see what the users are seeing but doesn't do a great job of digging into what the problems could be on the backend. It'll kind of tell you if it's the backend or not but from there it's limited.

One of the things we wanted to do is we have a number of call centers that are at a disparate, some of them are partners, some of them are owned and operated, and when we have an issue reported from a call center, we could end up with forty people on a phone call trying to figure out what was going on. They're running around, w'ere reporting in individual workstation, this agent says, "Hey, I got this problem and it's over here," and you got to stop and document that. Then they have another guy who says, "I got this problem over here," so you have all these disparate pieces of information that you have manually correlate with a bunch of people on a phone call for hours and hours and hours.

With Aternity you can gather that perspective quickly, it's gathered automatically, so that slow response time or issues with the application, hung workstations or network issues, you get that perspective right away. It eliminates a lot of the time spent troubleshooting.

All of it, but it depends on who the end user is. The folks that support the applications, like the signatures that we've developed, it gives them feedback on their application performance. The folks that deal with the IT with their desktop in the call centers like it because it gives them visibility into the desktops that they wouldn't otherwise have. Then the guys that are responsible for our mobile devices like the mobile aspect. The reason they like the features is they didn't have them beforehand - it's visibility they didn't have prior to this tool.

For instance, the folks in the call centers if they wanted to look at a workstation that wasn't performing or was having an issue, they had to go to the workstation or remote into the workstation. They had an agent that kept having issues with her machine and they couldn't tell what was going on, every time they looked at it it'd reboot. With the Aternity tool they were able to see she was actually powering the thing off and then saying, "Hey, I can't do my job," so there were some shenanigans. It gives good visibility into what the behaviour is of the agent interacting with the workstation as well as interacting with the applications.

From the application owners perspective, we have real user monitors out there in the call center and we've got sniffers that capture the transactions as they come across a network, and synthetic transactions and that sort of stuff going on, but it really didn't give them that view from the call center agents workstation. It gives them a more realistic picture of what's going on than from a networks perspective. You're actually now getting it from the workstations perspective. Then the wireless guys, (the people that are dealing with the handhelds), that's just visibility we didn't have and there are a number of tools. Since we already had Aternity deployed in the call center, it was a natural extension.

Signature development process requires deep technical expertise in the application and in the use of their studio tools that help you create it. I know they're aware of that and I know they're focused on making stuff simpler. I think in version nine we'll probably see improvements. That's the biggest thing for us, and unless you're creating those signatures on a daily basis, that needs to be your full-time job to maintain the expertise to do it properly. We're still depending on their professional services to help us with that.

In v7, we had some stability issues and those all got resolved, but the first six months of being up we had some stability issues. Now we're on v8, and looking to upgrade to v9. So far, it has been rock solid. It's completely stable, I can't believe it's stable as it is.

Well we overbuild. Our environment is overbuilt, we're built to handle twice the workload that we have. Our model is you live and die by your peaks. All of our stuff is built to handle those peaks. That's just a natural for us, we overbuild it. We haven't had workload related issues.

It was good. One of the things that just for me, I came from a field service background, I worked for Digital Equipment back in the '80's and '90's, and there when you provided customer service you had a fifteen minute call back time. Nowadays you send an email or open a ticket online and you hear back in four hours and so your primary communication mechanism is by email or by updating a ticket on a website. I like phone calls, and that's just a general trend in the industry. I like a phone call back, but that's not anything anybody's doing, so that seems to be lacking in the industry. There are no better or worse than any other, as far as response time.

We didn't use a different solution.

It was straightforward. We used their professional services to do it because we hadn't been exposed to it before, and our environment is sizable. It's not like we installed the app on one box, it's broken up into six components plus an Oracle backend database, so it's a pretty sizable implementation. It's not that complex to manage and maintain. Regarding the installation - unless you're doing it every day, you probably want their professional services to help you.

We evaluated some different solutions. One that we looked at was more for agent behaviour evaluation than it was for monitoring. The analysis there was too deep for our purposes. We wanted the instrumentation that would tell us when there's an issue, and you can certainly do that with both tools, but the other tool is a lot more about understanding that agent's individual actions, and it was just a different tool. We do have other tools, there's RUM and Synthetic Transactions going on as well. This was an enhancement to that.

The first thing I would do is the application owners need to put monitoring and managing the signature set, or the monitor set, that you develop for the applications into their release process. When you do a release for an application, you need to include developing and testing the existing monitors, testing the existing monitors and fixing them if the application breaks them and if the release breaks them. You need to manage your monitors along with the application releases.

We were able to identify bottlenecks in the application code that we had. A good example would be JavaScript, as we found that we had inefficient JavaScript in some applications.

Desktop monitoring, and being able to understand the performance of applications that runs on the desktop.

The thing that I think most companies like ourselves would want would be an easier way to customize custom scripts. It does a lot of out of the box standard monitoring, but there are special applications that every organization have, and right now, creating the custom scripts requires technical resource support from Aternity.

It's fairly robust in terms of its architecture design and development.

We haven't really scaled it as we've only installed it on a customer base of about 300 desktops.

It was straightforward. Because it was a very small agent that we deployed, and did not require a lot of customization. By small agent, I mean the footprint of the agent was very small to install, and it didn't really require a lot of customization.

The product is kind of unique. We used other products in the past, I don't even know the names of them because they were old IBM products dating back to the 60s and 70s. Aternity sort of fits a niche in the marketplace. I don't know of too many tools that do what they do.

I think the nature of, and it's not only desktops, but people that are doing mobile development, that the industry is changing whereby the applications that are being developed today are using more and more of the local processing resources on the client. Because of that, it's important to have tools that can monitor the client performance and look at resource utilization, things such as JavaScript run locally on the client.