AlertSite vs Sematext Synthetics 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.

Sematext Synthetics provides the ability to actively monitor APIs, Web URLs, websites, and user journeys/click flows from multiple locations around the globe. Synthetic monitoring helps you ensure the availability and performance of your APIs and websites. Synthetics will help you identify downtime and performance issues by simulating user requests and interactions with your web page.

No agent installation is required and there is no need to change your application code.

Sematext Synthetic Benefits

• Fix performance issues before they affect your end users
  Synthetic monitoring allows you to simulate user interactions at different locations worldwide. Synthetic performance monitoring monitors all your APIs, web applications, and mobile apps, no matter how many users they are. With Sematext, you can customize Dashboards and Alerts to monitor critical infrastructure aspects and trigger them when they malfunction. This will help you spot problems before they arise.
  

• Benchmark your website
  Synthetic monitoring solutions let you look at your APIs from different places during the day. Then you can use this data as a baseline for benchmarking since it helps you figure out what needs to be improved, and lets you compare your service to the competition.
  
• Test your scaling capabilities
  A website and application are built to respond quickly to users, but your server needs to be ready when traffic spikes unexpectedly. You can run artificial tests to determine how your server will behave under load with synthetic performance monitoring. Once you have this data, you can decide what steps to take to scale gracefully.
  
  
• Test new product features before launching
  If you're launching new features, synthetic monitoring lets you run a full test suite before releasing them during peak hours, which is a great tool to have. You'll be able to see how the application reacts under load and whether any of the recent changes will impact a 3rd party API you might use.
  
  
• Monitor third-party APIs and critical business processes
  If you don't use any third-party tools in your business, you run into a number of problems related to their availability. You need to keep an eye on them and get an alert the second things start to slow down. Monitoring API metrics is not enough to ensure your users get the best experience possible. Make sure your application works as expected, including logging in, searching, and checkout.
  
  
• Ensure SLA compliance
  Whatever side of the SLA you are on – the key is to make sure everyone in the contract adheres to the contract. To understand the performance limitations of your application and set realistic expectations, you should use synthetic monitoring tools if you're a service provider. Customers want to know that the vendor can fulfill his promises.
  
  
• Reduce MTTR
  With synthetic monitoring software like Sematext Synthetics, you can lower your MTTR by sending out alerts before the issue becomes a problem. In addition to being notified sooner, you'll also learn what's causing the problem and how to fix it.

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Just some of the things you can do with Sematext Synthetics

• Monitor & track the availability & performance of APIs
• Monitor SSL certificate expiration time
• Monitor websites and track various web performance metrics like page load time, paint metrics, etc.
• Monitor website uptime
• Monitor individual resource performance in a website by domain, type, and response code
• Create public status page showing the availability of your selected web services and share it with your customers
• Identify slow resources
• Monitor third-party resources performance
• Investigate slow pages & identify bottlenecks using a waterfall chart
• Create user journeys with custom assertions based on the content of the webpage
• Collect and track custom metrics from your sites
• Benchmark against competitors
• Create custom dashboards and alerts based on gathered performance metrics
• Debug downtime with end-to-end visibility of application performance
• Get alerted when things fail via multiple alert channels like email, Slack, Pagerduty, webhooks, etc.
• Monitor websites behind firewalls and on private networks with Private Locations
• Check out the full product update.

At Sematext, we’ve also had the need to monitor application availability. We use Synthetics actively to monitor our own applications and it has helped us uncover issues with our APIs on multiple occasions.

Where to go from here?

Sign up for a free trial and try it for yourself. Pricing starts at $2 per month for HTTP monitors and $7 per month for browser monitors. We have pay-as-you-go pricing if your usage changes or fixed plans if you can estimate your usage.