AlertSite vs NGINX API Gateway comparison

SmartBear's AlertSite is an application performance management and system monitoring software. AlertSite is an early warning system that users can rely on to monitor their websites, web apps, and APIs from any physical location as well as from within their private networks. It offers real-time alerting with root-cause analytics and robust reporting. AlertSite allows you to proactively monitor from an independent network of over 350 monitoring nodes worldwide.

Here are AlertSite’s 6 use cases: 

1. Monitor web: AlertSite monitors beyond availability to detect performance anomalies and notify the appropriate people when deviations occur, whether it's online apps or websites.
   
   
2. Monitor APIs: Check to see that your internal, external, and third-party APIs are working properly, returning the correct content, and performing as expected.
   
   
3. Monitor apps: With nearly any action, monitor your online sites and applications using actual browsers, just like a consumer. There is no need for scripting.
   
   
4. Monitor mobile: Monitor your mobile-friendly websites, native mobile apps, carrier-based nodes, and network speeds with real devices (3G, 4G LTE).
   
   
5. Monitor SLAs: Make sure you're meeting service-level agreements' requirements. SLA requirements are monitored and reported on by AlertSite.
   
   
6. Monitor cloud: Monitor your cloud-based applications to improve mobility. AlertSite monitors your apps across public and private clouds, giving you complete visibility into their status.

AlertSite Features

AlertSite has many valuable key features. Some of the most useful ones include:

• Enables a comprehensive view of UI and API performance.
  
  
• Monitoring coverage from 350+ worldwide nodes and private networks.
  
• Integrates with DevOps and Ops tool stacks.
  
  
• Displays availability and performance data that assist in determining the root cause of performance problems.
  
  
• With AlertSite's Single Sign-On (SSO) support, you can assist your authentication procedures.
  
  
• Free training and assistance. AlertSite’s responsive team is always there to assist you, from the initial rollout through day-to-day support.
  
  
• Eliminates the stress of false alerts using these key features:
  
  
  • Tracks the performance of your apps, APIs, and websites.
    
  
  
  • Sets up monitor and alarm schedules, as well as blackout periods and retry choices.
    
  
  
  • Sets alert thresholds that are both static and dynamic.
    
    
  • Calculates the number of failures needed to set off an alarm.
    
    
  • After the first failure, retries logic.
    
  
  
  • Based on error code, sends an alert to recipients and group routing.
    
  
  
  • Tests from over 85 different locations across the world, with internal and external monitoring.
    
  
  
  • Defines assertions and validations.
    
  
  
  • Integrates with PagerDuty, Slack, Splunk, VictorOps, and more.

• Easy configuration with help from these key features:
  
  
  • DejaClick is an intuitive, seamless plug-in for documenting web transactions and user journeys.
    
  
  
  • Use the point-and-click script creation for website, web, and mobile monitor scripts.
    
  
  
  • Benefit from using native API monitor creation.
    
  
  
  • Scripts for functional tests can be reused.
    
  
  
  • Automate monitor creation by using Swagger Specs or OpenAPI Specification files.

The NGINX Plus API gateway authenticates API calls, routes requests to appropriate backends, applies rate limits to prevent overloading services and to mitigate volumetric attacks, offloads SSL/TLS traffic, and handles errors and exceptions. NGINX's API gateway takes all API requests from a client, determines which services are needed, and delivers the result in a high‑performance manner.

NGINX Plus API gateway is used to protect APIs with rate‑limiting policies, enforce specific request methods, and provide fine‑grained access control:

• Ensures application backends are not overwhelmed by a problematic or malicious API clients through rate limits based on attribute of the request.
• NGINX Plus allows only specific request methods for app services. For example, you can accept only the GET method to ensure that access to your inventory service is read‑only (just returns the inventory).
• Controls access to specific resources using JSON Web Tokens (JWTs). For example, you can allow write access to a service for API clients with admin credentials, but only read access for clients with standard user credentials.