We performed a comparison between Apica and AppDynamics Browser Real-User Monitoring based on real PeerSpot user reviews.
Find out what your peers are saying about Datadog, Dynatrace, New Relic and others in Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability."From our standpoint, there are a number of valuable features. The WebHooks are obviously really great. The alert framework is really good and then the reporting and visualizations that you get from the dashboards is good. Those three areas are primarily what my team's focused on in terms of usage from day to day."
"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."
"What I like the most is that Apica can simulate different browsers and different versions of desktop or mobile browsers."
"You can tell from the operational space of people who are using and consuming this data that they are more integrated. It is not dependent on one team anymore. It saves a lot of time by capturing and pinpointing the exact problem that is happening quickly. We have moved from getting escalations manually to getting escalations synthetically."
"As always, within the IT industry, everybody's always looking to upgrade and update everything else like that. Apica has been one of those things but it's really hard to replace because it offers us the unique capability to see what the customer is seeing. A lot of other ones can do Selenium script and things like that, but there's a lot in Apica that we use right now. We utilize a lot of the scenario options in Apica right now, and there's a lot of other ones that do parts of it, but it doesn't do everything that Apica does."
"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."
"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."
"I like the transcript download feature. And with UI scripting, it's helpful that Apica handles a lot of the backend work automatically. I don't have to tag everything manually, though I can tag elements later if needed. It's really good at recording the steps."
"One noteworthy feature is user journey analysis, which enables tracking user interactions and conversion paths on a website."
"We can see the customer's path from their computer to the backend systems."
"The feature we find most valuable, is that the solution creates a unified platform making it really easy to pinpoint a problem, and then drill down into a transaction to resolve the issue."
"It provides a lot of data, so it helps businesses identify their user base."
"AppDynamics Browser Real-User Monitoring provides smooth connectivity to different applications."
"The most valuable feature is the one that enables you to have visibility into the end-users journey."
"The most valuable feature is that we can see how our end-users are interacting with our application across regions."
"The most valuable feature is the end-user monitoring."
"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."
"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."
"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 should add more features and integrations with different tools and certain ticketing systems, like ServiceNow."
"We could use more detailed information in the request and response sections."
"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."
"The reporting part that we use for our executives needs a bit more customization capabilities. Right now, you can use only the three main templates for reporting. We would like to be able to customize them."
"We have been focused on reducing polling times for synthetic checks. We have gone from 10 minutes down to five minutes for a pretty broad swath, but there is some appetite to reduce that further, which could be an improvement."
"I would like to have customizable dashboards to use when I am monitoring certain applications."
"AppD is really cool and a unified solution for both APM and APM centric Analytics side. We can show almost all business data within the APM context from the end-user perspetive. But this process is a little bit manual. If they catch and map business journeys based on customer interaction on the browser automatically, it should be really fine."
"What could be improved in AppDynamics Browser Real-User Monitoring is for the synthetic jobs or synthetic agents, in particular, you can't do a lot of tests with just one agent. You have to install a lot of agents if you want to do more tests, so this is an area for improvement in the solution. Another area for improvement in AppDynamics Browser Real-User Monitoring is that you're only able to see basic metrics in the absence of server or database visibility. For the SaaS version of AppDynamics Browser Real-User Monitoring, my team just downloaded then installed the extension in an application in Azure to see the application on the controller, so if this can be done in the on-premise version of the solution as well, without needing to install the agent on the machine, then it would make AppDynamics Browser Real-User Monitoring better. Currently, the .NET agent consumes the CPU or memory and clients usually raise this issue with my team, so it would be good if the on-premises version doesn't require agent installation on the machine. Another functionality I'd like to see in the next release of AppDynamics Browser Real-User Monitoring is for it to receive updates from the file config without needing to reset IIS because right now when you do a modification in IIS, you have to restart IIS. When you add a service to the agent config, you have to restart IIS. For the product server, it's not possible to reset IIS after you make changes to the config file, so if this could be improved, then it would make AppDynamics Browser Real-User Monitoring a better solution."
"If you have a single URL and all the operations are coming in as part of the header, you will not be able to segregate them for different actions."
"While I am not expecting it in the next release, I would want more centralized management of the agent in the platform and better support."
"I would like to see support for mobile testing and mobile monitoring."
"AppDynamics Browser Real-User Monitoring needs to offer an end-to-end experience, including the internet layer and third-party elements that come into play on websites."
"The pricing falls within the mid-range category."
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Earn 20 points
Apica is ranked 55th in Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability with 2 reviews while AppDynamics Browser Real-User Monitoring is ranked 22nd in Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability with 14 reviews. Apica is rated 8.4, while AppDynamics Browser Real-User Monitoring is rated 8.2. The top reviewer of Apica writes "Offers transcript download feature and easy to set up and configure tests but not very user friendly". On the other hand, the top reviewer of AppDynamics Browser Real-User Monitoring writes "End-to-end visibility, feature-rich, but the support could be improved". Apica is most compared with Dynatrace, Datadog, AppDynamics, Apache JMeter and OpenText LoadRunner Cloud, whereas AppDynamics Browser Real-User Monitoring is most compared with Elastic Observability, New Relic and AWS X-Ray.
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