Alluvio Aternity vs Grafana comparison

Alluvio Aternity full-spectrum Digital Experience Management provides insight into the business impact of customer and employee digital experience by capturing and storing technical telemetry at scale from employee devices, every type of business application, and your cloud-native application service.

It also helps you resolve issues quickly by showing you response time breakdown between client device, network, and application back ends. Aternity provides AI-powered visibility into the end user experience of every cloud, SaaS, thick client, or enterprise mobile app, whether it runs on a virtual, physical, or mobile device.

Aternity Features

Aternity has many valuable features, including:

• Automatic discovery of every application in your enterprise portfolio, including SaaS and Shadow IT apps.
• Click to render - measuring users' interactions with applications in the context of a business process.
• Change validation - validating the impact of any type of device, application, or infrastructure change on end user experience.
• Self-healing - automated remediation actions to recover from the most commonly expected user experience issues.
• Anomaly detection - proactive notification of end-user issues
• Transaction tracing of distributed applications - including cloud-native apps, via OpenTelemetry
• Application troubleshooting - identify the cause of application issues

Aternity Benefits

Some of the biggest advantages the Aternity offers include:

• Resolve problems quickly: With Aternity, you can monitor client-side latency, analyze the health and key metrics of the end user’s device, and correlate app performance to the virtual systems they are running on.

• Reduce virtualization sprawl: Aternity helps you eliminate under-utilized resources with its ability to correlate the inventory of virtual desktop infrastructure to actual usage.

• Experience level agreement (XLA): Aternity’s XLA feature can help your organization prove quality of service. Specifically, the XLA validates that business activity performance across all applications meets expectations by geography, department, and data center.

• Mitigate IT transformation risk: Aternity helps you achieve success of both strategic and tactical IT initiatives.

Reviews from Real Users

Below are some reviews and helpful feedback written by Aternity users.

PeerSpot user Ryan P., Head of Cyber Security Engineering & Oversight at a media company, says, "The most valuable thing that you get from Aternity is very broad visibility. You get visibility of your network, of your endpoints, of your software usage, your application performance, capacity, in one pane of glass. We had 20 to 30 IT tools, including application performance monitoring, network monitoring, security, endpoint detection, network protection, capacity management, service management — every kind of monitoring you can imagine. But Aternity was always the first place that I turned for anything, because you can see everything in it."

An Endpoint Administration Manager at a financial services firm mentions, “It gives you the ability to filter the comparison by geography, industry, or company size.” He also adds, “We have absolutely seen ROI. It's really given us a very high level of visibility that we've just not ever had.”

A Regional Network Manager at a recruiting/HR firm comments, "Aternity provides metrics about actual employee experience of all business-critical apps, rather than just a few. It does some out-of-the-box monitoring for the Office suite, but you can create custom monitoring for any of your applications, whether a web client or a desktop application."

A Sr. IT Manager at a manufacturing company states, "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."

Grafana is an open-source visualization and analytics platform that stands out in the field of monitoring solutions. Grafana is widely recognized for its powerful, easy-to-set-up dashboards and visualizations. Grafana supports integration with a wide array of data sources and tools, including Prometheus, InfluxDB, MySQL, Splunk, and Elasticsearch, enhancing its versatility. Grafana has open-source and cloud options; the open-source version is a good choice for organizations with the resources to manage their infrastructure and want more control over their deployment. The cloud service is a good choice if you want a fully managed solution that is easy to start with and scale.

A key strength of Grafana lies in its ability to explore, visualize, query, and alert on the collected data through operational dashboards. These dashboards are highly customizable and visually appealing, making them a valuable asset for data analysis, performance tracking, trend spotting, and detecting irregularities.

Grafana provides both an open-source solution with an active community and Grafana Cloud, a fully managed and composable observability offering that packages together metrics, logs, and traces with Grafana. The open-source version is licensed under the Affero General Public License version 3.0 (AGPLv3), being free and unlimited. Grafana Cloud and Grafana Enterprise are available for more advanced needs, catering to a wider range of organizational requirements. Grafana offers options for self-managed backend systems or fully managed services via Grafana Cloud. Grafana Cloud extends observability with a wide range of solutions for infrastructure monitoring, IRM, load testing, Kubernetes monitoring, continuous profiling, frontend observability, and more.

The Grafana users we interviewed generally appreciate Grafana's ability to connect with various data sources, its straightforward usability, and its integration capabilities, especially in developer-oriented environments. The platform is noted for its practical alert configurations, ticketing backend integration, and as a powerful tool for developing dashboards. However, some users find a learning curve in the initial setup and mention the need for time investment to customize and leverage Grafana effectively. There are also calls for clearer documentation and simplification of notification alert templates.

In summary, Grafana is a comprehensive solution for data visualization and monitoring, widely used across industries for its versatility, ease of use, and extensive integration options. It suits organizations seeking a customizable and scalable platform for visualizing time-series data from diverse sources. However, users should be prepared for some complexity in setup and customization and may need to invest time in learning and tailoring the system to their specific needs.