We performed a comparison between Apica and OpenText SiteScope 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."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."
"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."
"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."
"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."
"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."
"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."
"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."
"VM monitoring is pretty good showing good visualizations of how VMs are operating within the context of all the VMs running on the same hypervisor."
"The product's readymade templates are perfect. It supports us a lot when we don't have much experience with the product. The templates offers us direction to proceed."
"Simple deployment: The deployment uses protocols such as NetBios, SSH, WMI, SNMP, which means that any device with any of these protocols will be monitored."
"The stability of the Micro Focus Voltage SiteScope is good."
"Simplest tool for monitoring servers, web content, databases and other hardware. Its dashboard is really good."
"The tool has capabilities other than managing web-based applications, like URL Monitor and EPI Script. It is also easy to use the tool."
"The product's ability to monitor systems and applications and send alerts and create support tickets are the most valuable features of the product."
"Our experiences with Micro Focus SiteScope have been mostly positive as we can easily work with multiple monitors and different types of monitors pretty quickly. There are a lot of out-of-the-box solutions for us through Micro Focus SiteScope, so we don't have to do that much custom coding for the vast majority of requests that we get for monitoring. There are some limitations that we've run into and some problems every once in a while, but they've been relatively minor."
"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."
"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."
"The initial screen on their dashboard could have a bit more data, but this is a small thing. It could have more data, so we do not need to drill down to a screen behind that initial information. I would like them to get a little better on the user interfaces that we need to go into."
"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."
"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."
"The having to install an application on your desktop to utilize something like ZebraTester is a little cumbersome. It would be nice to see that become a web-based application. Having the documentation a little more accessible, and easier to digest by people who are just learning how to use the framework, especially when it comes to more complex or more edge-based cases would be really helpful to have."
"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."
"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."
"It may lack some features other products in the category have like more detailed transaction tracking."
"In terms of issues with Micro Focus SiteScope, some that we've run into were unintended, for example, extra executions of monitors and some false alerts when there were problems connecting to endpoints or there were issues with the application that sometimes resulted in false positives. We had a few issues with the way time zones were configured when the system time differed from the time indicated during the monitoring, but those were just little things that weren't too bad. As far as the limitations of Micro Focus SiteScope, the types of scripting files that can be executed are rather limited unless you go to some third-party plugins. These are the areas for improvement in the solution."
"Direct integration with an SMS gateway for sending critical alerts to the support SME. This will help customer investing in third party middleware solutions for SMS."
"The lack of an agent means that remote monitoring requires multiple firewall ports to be opened."
"SiteScope isn't productive if you want to monitor RAM or if you want to monitor some URL."
"They should provide more templates for new vendor devices."
"We have four or five data centers around North America where we have it deployed into a single or a two-server primary backup type of deployment. All those are made available under a single GUI provided by Micro Focus that allows you to put them all together. A room for improvement would be an appliance or a server that would manage all of our other servers so that I don't have to remember to log on to all different servers and data centers. I could manage them from a single location."
"The graphs and dashboard in the solution are areas that need improvement."
Earn 20 points
Apica is ranked 55th in Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability while OpenText SiteScope is ranked 25th in Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability with 24 reviews. Apica is rated 8.6, while OpenText SiteScope is rated 7.6. The top reviewer of Apica writes "Their support makes the product so much easier to use. They sped up our migration process". On the other hand, the top reviewer of OpenText SiteScope writes "Doesn't require much custom coding and can run on different platforms, but the types of scripting files you can execute on it are limited". Apica is most compared with Datadog, Dynatrace, AppDynamics, Apache JMeter and OpenText LoadRunner Cloud, whereas OpenText SiteScope is most compared with SCOM, Dynatrace, AppDynamics, Prometheus and BMC TrueSight Operations Management.
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