We evaluated SolarWinds and Dynatrace. Dynatrace is more focused on application monitoring, but we use Geneos for dashboards in spite of its other limitations. Geneos is our dashboard and front-end monitoring application.

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 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.

I believe they did consider open-source or lower-cost alternatives. The topic also has come up when licenses would be renewed, et cetera. We know what we are paying for, and we're getting value for the money as well.

I work with other products like Dynatrace and they are lacking in that they have a minimum interval and are still evolving to increase their real-time monitoring. However, they are working on specific features to improve that. Currently, they don't have the real-time monitoring that ITRS Geneos has.

When we were evaluating or comparing other products, we found that some products for installation and data collection require another Java virtual machine. The base was set up as a Java virtual machine on the client machine and then extracted the data collection. ITRS Geneos directly uses operating system calls to fetch data, so it doesn't need another layer or another software installed. With other solutions, it becomes difficult sometimes because a Java virtual machine itself requires some resources, CPU, and memory. This can cause delays or affect the actual application running.

There was a comparison going on between BMC tools and ITRS Geneos. The bank's strategy was not to rely on one tool but to use ITRS Geneos for critical applications that require timely messages, instead of relying on the in-house monitoring tools. Banks don't mind paying the license fees for the solution instead of using the infrastructure-provided monitoring tool or custom in-house builder monitoring tools.

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.

We looked at some other tools, predominantly AppDynamics. It comes in a slightly different perspective. It is aimed more at performance monitoring. It was a lot harder to derive the value out of it, than what we have done from Geneos. Geneos was an easier tool for the teams to get used to, on-board, and immediately get value out of it. AppDynamics was one of those things where you have to spend an awful lot of time before you can get value out of it. It is also more suited for certain applications than others, where Geneos is a bit more generic and can probably work in most spaces.

We were also evaluating some home grown solutions, which were lower cost solutions. In my opinion, Geneos wins against homegrown solutions, as it has been around for a number of years and a lot of people have fed into the ideas. So, it has evolved due to feedback from various clients, because there is a dedicated team behind Geneos product. Whereas, if you think about home grown solutions, they are limited by your experience and rarely mature as funding ultimately becomes an issue, so end up not as function-rich as Geneos.

If you look at some competitors, such AppDynamics, they probably have a better way of discovering dependencies as well as connectivity to them. That aspect is probably another area for Geneos to improve on.

We haven't evaluated anything else so far, although that would be a higher-management discussion. But I think everyone is happy, as we have been using the same thing for many years.

Our previous solutions and this one take roughly the same amount of time to alert. Both do so within a couple of minutes.

We had a few choices to evaluate, including using an OpenStack or open source solutions, but when we evaluated those we felt that, given the time and effort to stitch them together, it was more beneficial for us to use Geneos. The time and effort needed to get those open source systems up and running and combined—you have to use multiple open source products to get the same functionality—and the fact that there's no support and nobody to help, led us to conclude that it's much easier to use the ITRS solution.

I believe they went back probably another decade. It went back to the very early market-data days. There wasn't much choice at the time, if any. There was open-source software, such as Nagios that we had looked at. There was some open-source software, but nothing really in the sensible commercial space.

I have looked at other products but they fail right at the start – these other products use Java or Pearl and this is not what I want running on my machines. As this product was written in C/C++ it does need many files to run or a complex environment to setup.

We looked at three other monitoring tools, but that was four or five years ago. BMC was one of them and there was an HPE solution as well. We looked at them based on top industry reviews.

We considered HPE open-source, but the GUI features and how fast it displays alerts on the GUI, as well as polling and integration with other third-party tools - they were lagging. We found ITRS more useful.

We found the best alternatives to be open source systems, however the development costs to get these to the standard of ITRS meant that open source was more expensive. Many clients have also done internal investigations and have come to the same conclusion. I would prefer not to name these systems simply due to the confidence that they do a fine job, however, I believe they are not best placed in our fast moving industry.

Icinga (Nagios-Clone), AppDynamics, BlueStripe, Leutek. Icinga was too slow for our requirements and would have required - according to the company mainly supporting this open-source solution - major development efforts to accelerate it enough. The other solutions did definitely make a good impression but we went finally for Geneos due to its specific focus on the financial area (we are a bank) and also due to positive experiences with Geneos we had in the past in another time-critical business area (ETF Market making).

The product is renowned for its versatility for monitoring market data environments. The built-in plug-ins for TREP and Wombat is the main reason for using this product. The licensing cost is the biggest detraction, but cheaper solutions are not as robust.

We did evaluate other options. One was Integrien Alive (bought by VMWare and non-existent anymore), Leutek ZIS, Quest Software Big Brother and IBM Tivoli (TEP).

Many other application monitoring tools are either too infrastructure centric or client experience centric. Not many cater well towards the capital market.

We did evaluate other solutions, and as mentioned earlier this product has many good features which are really easy to use. The UI is clean and since you have color defined with each level of severity its more easy to take up an action. The reason i'm focusing on this is because, Monitoring teams have to monitor for long hours and when the UI is dark and clumsy it really effects the monitoring.

We’ve used some popular and well known open source tools for some research purposes. There are the same pros and cons comparing to other open source and proprietary tools. We had to get ITRS usage skills and experience as we use it internally as well as our customers.

It was more fit for purpose in terms of real-time monitoring with dashboard metrics than other monitoring applications.

CA APM

Yes we did, however I do not know what the other options were.