We played with Micro Focus SiteScope, Splunk, and various other tools. They're all very good in their own right for certain elements, but Datadog didn’t exist then. Geneos seemed to do everything we wanted in one place, to create that single-pane-of-glass view that we didn't have.

Open-source tools have become more popular in the last 5 to 10 years. Linux, for example, comes with Prometheus, a monitoring tool. However, these open-source tools are not suitable for global monitoring and cannot be used across the bank. We cannot create a dashboard out of it where it links multiple applications hosted on different environments and different kinds of applications. We needed some sort of proprietary tool or a license-based tool that can be used as a global tool for the whole department, or for the whole BU, not just specific to the product or applications.

Geneos enables us to identify all the issues happening within a given period. Though it lacks some advanced monitoring capabilities that other tools have, it's the best dashboard for our purposes. We tried Prometheus and one of the open-source tools. We also evaluated Nagios. None of those solutions had the same dashboard capability.

We have never considered any lower-cost or open-source alternatives because the team is comfortable with the current system. The L1 monitoring team is the team that checks the dashboards and provides alerts. They are so familiar with the system that we have never thought of getting away from it.

I've been monitoring the same area for the past 17 to 18 years and have used a variety of products, such as AppDynamics, Dynatrace, and BMC. ITRS Geneos is the only tool that covers all layers of monitoring, from the hardware to the business layer. No other tool can match its coverage. AppDynamics is the best monitoring tool for latency monitoring. BMC is the best tool for infrastructure monitoring. ITRS Geneos is a tool that offers end-to-end application performance monitoring, from the hardware to the application.