We performed a comparison between Apica and Azure Monitor based on real PeerSpot user reviews.
Find out in this report how the two Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability solutions compare in terms of features, pricing, service and support, easy of deployment, and ROI."There are several features that are really good. The first one is the flexibility and the advanced configuration that Apica offers when it comes to configuring synthetic checks. It provides the ability to customize how the check should be performed and it is very flexible in the number of synthetic locations that it can use. It allows us to run scripts from different locations all over the world, and they have a really good number of these locations."
"It helps with releases because we monitor them in staging. We can tell if something is critically wrong before it gets into production, e.g., if it was load related or function related and also what was different in the dev stage. It then alerts us straightaway inside of our production monitors once it has been released. Therefore, it has improved how we run our systems since we monitor multiple environments."
"We see the benefit almost every day. It allows us to be alerted whenever there is a store that is not responding properly around the world. We do have a network operation center (NOC) who receives these alerts, immediately checking if everything is okay."
"One of the biggest advantages of moving to Apica is the ability get to a hybrid model with the architecture in the cloud and our agents on-prem. We also have access to Apica's cloud agent across the globe. That has changed the way that we have our load testing setup at this point. Previously, it was always internal. Now, with this change in the way it is implemented for load testing, we can test anywhere across the globe and from the list of agents available within Apica's cloud. If I don't have an agent available in a second location, it just takes an email to their customer support, then it is spun up within 24 hours. That flexibility has changed the way that we perceive our load tests, not just in the US, but globally."
"Our application SREs do script checks in such a way that closely mimic our customers' actions using the platform. Because there are so many different ways and options to be able to configure checks to closely mirror your applications' capabilities, it provides a lot of optionality for teams to create the right type of check that can notify when there are any issues. At the end of the day, we want our monitoring tools to be able to catch any outage before our customers do. This is where Apica Synthetic does a great job."
"The GUI is powerful and doesn't require scripting or regular expressions. It has a vast finder for correlation, which is easier than other tools like JMeter and LoadRunner. It's also easy to integrate with other tools with a separate execution environment. The tool is also easy to use."
"It is easy for beginners to learn and use Apica."
"With the ZebraTester, the ability to have and store dynamic variables, when setting up the monitors, means you can extract that value and use it in a subsequent service call. This is something that has made our lives easier... This is one of the features that I like the most because it helps us in configuring these services, in a certain flow, without the need to re-record the whole thing."
"One of the most useful aspects of this solution is the out-of-the-box functionality on all areas, especially on Application Insights, zero instrumentation, and artificial intelligence for event correlation."
"The most valuable features of Azure Monitor are the login analytics workspace and we can write any kind of custom queries in order to receive the data that is inserted into the login analytics workspace, diagnostic settings, et cetera."
"Azure Monitor is very stable."
"The solution's most valuable features are its ability to focus on delivery and maximizing the performance of applications and services."
"It's a Microsoft native tool, so it works well with other Microsoft technologies, which is predominantly what our customer end-user base is."
"The tools for logs and metrics are pretty good and easy to use."
"It's a service from Microsoft, so it will scale."
"Azure Monitor's best features are its graphs and charts, the different visibility options, and reporting."
"We could use more detailed information in the request and response sections."
"The tool does not provide automatic correlation features."
"When it comes to the way the internal agent is installed, because you can install an application on a server, I would love to see the application Docker-ized. If you could install internal agents using Docker or using containers, it would be easier for us to manage them and spin up internal agents."
"Apica should add more features and integrations with different tools and certain ticketing systems, like ServiceNow."
"There are some components of the user interface that are not up to date. Just to give you an idea, today we have web applications that are called single-page applications that are much faster than the old style of web application. If we can move faster into the flow of the graphic user interface, and in a more effective way, it will save us a lot of time."
"Apica was a relatively new tool when I started using it. Although Apica had good documentation, it still felt less developed or advanced than a tool like LoadRunner."
"Learning the tool has always been a little difficult from a scripting perspective because the framework is proprietary and unique. Once we became used to what it does and how to perform it, then it became easier for my team and me. I would like to see some of the testing steps be part of a more well-known language, like Java or Python. That would be a big improvement."
"Alerting needs improvement. It's a little noisy. It needs some better options. Currently, they have an issue, when you set up a synthetic monitor, you can set up where it's monitoring from, a data center that Apica owns."
"We encounter some difficulties in monitoring the operating system on its own."
"Azure Monitor's integration with applications could be improved."
"Setting up this solution is complex. It's also missing the functionality of assigning alerts."
"There are a lot of things that take more time to do, such as charting, alerting, and correlation of data, and things like that. Azure Monitor doesn't tell you why something happened. It just tells you that it happened. It should also have some type of AI. Environments and applications are becoming more and more complex every day with hundreds or thousands of microservices. Therefore, having to do a lot of the stuff manually takes a lot of time, and on top of that, troubleshooting issues takes a lot of time. The traditional method of troubleshooting doesn't really work for or apply to this environment we're in. So, having an AI-based system and the ability to automate deployments of your monitoring and configurations makes it much easier."
"The price could be lower but it is not a must."
"n comparison to New Relic, which I've used before, it's a bit more complicated. It's not as easy to use. It also took some time to get it working. The implementation needs to be simpler."
"They need to work on a more hybrid deployment that will allow us to monitor local on-premise deployments and connect to different systems. I would like to see more integration."
"We cannot use AI services with the solution."
Apica is ranked 29th in Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability with 8 reviews while Azure Monitor is ranked 4th in Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability with 45 reviews. Apica is rated 8.2, while Azure Monitor is rated 7.6. The top reviewer of Apica writes "Validates content and perform login functionalities on front-end applications". On the other hand, the top reviewer of Azure Monitor writes "A powerful Kusto query language but the alerting mechanism needs improvement". Apica is most compared with Dynatrace, AppDynamics, Apache JMeter, OpenText LoadRunner Cloud and Splunk Enterprise Security, whereas Azure Monitor is most compared with Datadog, Dynatrace, Sentry, Prometheus and Grafana. See our Apica vs. Azure Monitor report.
See our list of best Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability vendors.
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