We performed a comparison between Apica and Quest Foglight for APM [EOL] 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."
"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."
"What I like the most is that Apica can simulate different browsers and different versions of desktop or mobile browsers."
"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."
"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."
"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."
"There are several features that are really good. The first one is the flexibility and the advanced configuration that Apica offers when it comes to configuring synthetic checks. It provides the ability to customize how the check should be performed and it is very flexible in the number of synthetic locations that it can use. It allows us to run scripts from different locations all over the world, and they have a really good number of these locations."
"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."
"With the APM you can replay the end user session and see issues quickly by viewing the session."
"The most valuable feature is drill-down monitoring, which shows us from one interface the transaction chain from the front end to back end."
"At a glance I can easily see what is going on with all of my VMware ​environments, including top consumers of resources."
"Real time database monitoring and alerting are valuable."
"It provides a history of the activities on our SQL servers."
"FxV is valuable as we can playback the session."
"The ability to track performance of an application or application suite over time is extremely valuable to our business partners and for our application development team with near real time results."
"Having standard monitoring features and a central repository saves us a lot of time and reduces risk of incidents."
"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."
"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."
"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."
"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 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."
"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."
"Being able to incorporate other bespoke monitoring into Foglight would have made the tool even more useful."
"It needs a more intuitive way to create and implement custom "Cartridges" to be deployed through out a Federated environment."
"The version compatibility needs work."
"I think installation and setup needs little more improvement especially when you are installing with external database."
"We are running a Webmethods stack (Software AG) and Foglight is unable to instrument. We are in a POC with Dynatrace and it was able to instrument with little effort."
"I would perhaps like to see more SSMS connections."
"I want to see mobile access application in the next release."
"SQL agents often failed but again this may have been addressed in future versions."
Apica is ranked 55th in Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability with 2 reviews while Quest Foglight for APM [EOL] doesn't meet the minimum requirements to be ranked in Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability. Apica is rated 8.4, while Quest Foglight for APM [EOL] is rated 8.0. 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 Quest Foglight for APM [EOL] writes "We evaluated other options including BMC, but chose Foglight for it's notifications & the ability to review the history". Apica is most compared with Dynatrace, Datadog, AppDynamics, Apache JMeter and OpenText LoadRunner Cloud, whereas Quest Foglight for APM [EOL] is most compared with Catchpoint.
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