What was really quite good about it was that, with some of the out-of-the-box, standard applications that everyone expects to be able to monitor it was good, but we could monitor home-brewed applications, which big enterprises have a lot of — applications that are not off-the-shelf but are developed in-house — we could monitor those very carefully, and that was incredibly important. It gave us very bespoke levels of detailed monitoring, and that was for on-prem, mainframe, cloud — any type of application. That was great.

The most valuable thing that you get from Aternity is very broad visibility. You get visibility of your network, of your endpoints, of your software usage, your application performance, capacity, in one pane of glass. We had 20 to 30 IT tools, including application performance monitoring, network monitoring, security, endpoint detection, network protection, capacity management, service management — every kind of monitoring you can imagine. But Aternity was always the first place that I turned for anything, because you can see everything in it. 

The beauty of it is that it has that really simple Tableau backend so you can manipulate the data within it incredibly easily. If you can think of something, you can usually find a way to force Aternity to show you that permutation of data, in the way that you want to see it. It's flexibility is great.

The user interface is good. It's elegant, it's quick, it's simple, it's all built on Tableau, so it feels familiar. It's not difficult to learn how to use it.

We've looked at the Digital Experience Management Quadrant (DEM-Q) to see how our digital experience compares to others who use the solution. We have used that to see how we are trending and it gives us some insight into areas that we might need to focus more on. That's helpful. It's a new feature. 

It gives you the ability to filter the comparison by geography, industry, or company size. Obviously, I'm not going to compare myself to another area that may not be relevant and that doesn't run similar applications to those we do as a financial sector company. I wouldn't say it's not valuable, but I wouldn't say it's super-valuable to us as a company. Others might feel differently.

Aternity provides metrics about actual employee experience of all business-critical apps, rather than just a few. It does some out-of-the-box monitoring for the Office suite, but you can create custom monitoring for any of your applications, whether a web client or a desktop application. There's a process where you record the transactions and then you feed that into Aternity in an XML file. It then looks at what you're clicking on and what the URL is and, if it sees that on other clients, it can start recording the transactions for those applications.

We've used that feature to measure employee experience before and after changes to applications, devices, or operating systems. That's something that is really interesting. One of the dashboards can tell you, when an application is having issues, when the issues started or when we had a change window. It will baseline the performance before and after that change window.

The most valuable feature of Alluvio Aternity is the compiling and displaying of end-user data so that we can utilize it to troubleshoot proactively. Alluvio Aternity is a very good product to utilize. It is a pretty stable, reliable, and user-friendly solution.

The main feature, what we really like about Aternity, is that it can monitor the actual user experience, meaning their actual response times, volume, and when they did what.

Another key feature is with regard to the current situation with COVID. A lot of people are now working from home and Aternity has been a very good tool to monitor and measure the performance of the VPN.

Other features we use heavily are the WiFi analyzer, the Skype for Business analyzer, and the troubleshooting functionalities. We also use the Device Health quite religiously here for troubleshooting devices that are unhealthy, when we're talking about things like high CPU or memory consumption, or file system problems within the users' workstations.

The response time in the application is valuable. The product can quickly analyze and see where the bottleneck is. It can identify whether it was on the network, the back end, or the client side. It is pretty good.

The solution’s user monitoring features help us to have a quicker time to resolve. It also prevents us from having 20 different teams on a call. We know which team to contact. We do not waste resource time. The dashboard is very effective. We can easily identify issues that come up.

There are many valuable features. If I had to single out one, it would be the UXI score. That's a proprietary Aternity score that tells you how good or bad the experience is for a user on that particular machine, for a particular app. It neatly encapsulates the pain of the user in a single score. It's very easy to find issues and then drill down further into those issues, based on that score. A lot of tools will do a similar thing, but they will do it indirectly and it's not always relevant. The Aternity score is on the money pretty much every time.

The Digital Experience Index (DXI) feature is also very valuable. We've incorporated it into the KPIs for our endpoint team. We can use that as a benchmark to improve our goals and our environment, and for ongoing life cycle improvement.

Alluvio Aternity has multiple use cases.

It is useful for working out whether there are any issues in the network or between the endpoints. It is also useful for working out any performance issues. It has been useful for a lot of stuff around Teams. Our customers like to know what's happening with Teams when they call in.

It is helpful for easily profiling users. It records all the applications that are being used for each user, and you can see what users are doing.

It is very good in terms of performance. You don't have to wait forever to try and get reports or results. It is quite quick to get everything that you need out of the software.

The data the solution provides is valuable to us; we can see the health of the machines, how they are performing, and what might be causing issues on a particular machine.  

We can monitor the usage patterns for desktop applications, showing us which are performing and which aren't.

We use the Digital Experience Index (DXI) feature. It offers customization options, so we can decide what we want to improve and what can stay the same and prioritize specific improvements. 

For the applications installed on the laptop, it's very customizable. So, we can get certain features out-of-the-box and add to them. Even with custom applications, we can create our own monitors and application signatures to track user activities which are specific to our company. We are measuring:

• How long certain actions take for a user to typically complete. 
• Before and after any particular change and do the comparison. 
• In smaller chunks, we can compare a change group to a control group and be more confident about the impact of the change based on the user experience for the change group versus the users who didn't get the change.

Before we make a change that would impact the entire company, we do it on a pilot group and measure it then. So, we avoid rolling something out that fixes one thing and breaks something else, which can happen. Therefore, we have more confidence in our changes.

It gives us visibility into what the user is doing, i.e., the user activities on their endpoint, and the response time for any of those activities. It gives us a breakdown of client activity. e.g., what an end user's computer takes time to complete versus what's happening on the network, and if there are any network delays. 

The troubleshooting is the most valuable feature because we are experiencing some issues with end user computing. It is very helpful finding out what is the root cause.

Aternity provides visibility into the employee device and application transactions all the way through to the back-end. There are applications or nonstandard applications where you have an ability to extend them to add extra information, which we are doing right now. You can clarify the information that you receive on Aternity, like your custom application. If it is web-based, then you can customize it with minimal development and get extra information about personal transactions as well as the user experience of browsing between application tabs on the browser.

The application monitoring is the most important feature. For example, how long does it take to open Outlook, or how long does it take to send an email or preview mail? How long does it take to open Word? When it comes to launch time, how quick is the application?  We use that for a lot of our Microsoft applications. The ability to measure response time is the best feature.

There are also built-in activities that let you measure things like preview mail, open address book, and send mail. Those are the activities that we are able to get measurements on, and those are things we have not seen in other software monitoring tools.

Aternity enables us to see exactly what employees see as they engage with apps. That means we use Aternity in a reactive mode. When we get a call to our help desk saying a machine is slow or acting up or not behaving as expected, we monitor the device for a couple of days, and then we make our diagnosis based on the reports. We use Aternity to troubleshoot user complaints.

The most valuable features are the ability to 

• separate machine issues from software issues 
• build custom monitoring of our own homegrown or non-standard applications.

As a financial institution, we have a lot of applications that are either written internally or bought from a vendor and customized for us. Having a tool that lets us monitor specific transactions in those applications allows us to focus on the transactions that are important to the business. We find it valuable to be able to see what's going on with the hardware and look at standard applications like Outlook or Teams or Office applications. Those provide a comparison point and let us separate out hardware versus software issues. 

The custom monitoring is where we really do see a lot of value.

The most valuable feature is the alerting. As soon as we click on an incident, it takes us directly to the problematic PC. It's a direct solution. We click on an alert and it takes us to the incident details. The details show in different colors, in a graphical representation, and I like that the most. 

To give an example, we have a SharePoint portal and we configured about 15 banners. If any one of them is breaching the threshold of the number of users, any support person can easily click the incident and nail what the root cause is by looking at the graphical representation. It may be the network or another issue.

There are a lot more features for troubleshooting and monitoring and a few other tabs are available, nicely presented. 

The beauty of this product is that it does support desktop. I've seen a lot of products and they have synthetic monitoring, but they're not real-time. Aternity is real-time and it covers desktop applications. An APM may not help, but a real end-user solution like this is helping us with any issues on the desktop. The thin client is running on the local machine, so we need to know what's happening at the end-user machine. This is another one of the features I like. 

Another nice feature is that we can customize a lot of dashboards using Tableau.

The most valuable features for us are the Incident Management dashboard, Application Status dashboard, and Activity Analysis UI.

The application response time. That's what our business has been having a problem with.

All of it, but it depends on who the end user is. The folks that support the applications, like the signatures that we've developed, it gives them feedback on their application performance. The folks that deal with the IT with their desktop in the call centers like it because it gives them visibility into the desktops that they wouldn't otherwise have. Then the guys that are responsible for our mobile devices like the mobile aspect. The reason they like the features is they didn't have them beforehand - it's visibility they didn't have prior to this tool.

For instance, the folks in the call centers if they wanted to look at a workstation that wasn't performing or was having an issue, they had to go to the workstation or remote into the workstation. They had an agent that kept having issues with her machine and they couldn't tell what was going on, every time they looked at it it'd reboot. With the Aternity tool they were able to see she was actually powering the thing off and then saying, "Hey, I can't do my job," so there were some shenanigans. It gives good visibility into what the behaviour is of the agent interacting with the workstation as well as interacting with the applications.

From the application owners perspective, we have real user monitors out there in the call center and we've got sniffers that capture the transactions as they come across a network, and synthetic transactions and that sort of stuff going on, but it really didn't give them that view from the call center agents workstation. It gives them a more realistic picture of what's going on than from a networks perspective. You're actually now getting it from the workstations perspective. Then the wireless guys, (the people that are dealing with the handhelds), that's just visibility we didn't have and there are a number of tools. Since we already had Aternity deployed in the call center, it was a natural extension.

There are a lot of great features. The detailed level of information you are able to get on the complete environment all of the way down to a specific machine.

The ability to quickly utilize the dashboard to gather information is valuable from a DXI perspective.

Alluvio Aternity is comprehensive.

Desktop monitoring, and being able to understand the performance of applications that runs on the desktop.

Aternity easily provides visibility of all the endpoint machines to my clients. They can monitor the operating systems of their users, check the CPU and memory utilization, etc. They can also monitor the applications that users are trying to access so as to analyze the reasons for delays after accessing the application.

The most valuable feature is the application performance troubleshooting because Aternity is able to provide the performance from the end-user perspective. It doesn't just give the standard application logon time, etc., rather it's also able to measure the performance inside the application, the performance of specific transactions in the application, and break it down into three elements: the client time, the network time, and the server time. This gives us a lot of insights into what we need to focus on to improve the performance of an application.

Another area is the before and after comparison. Before and after any change, we can use Aternity to compare the performance. For example, when we implement a big application on our infrastructure, or even let's say when they moved the office, we had the user performance benchmark in the previous office location. Once they moved to a new location, we could look at Aternity and the overall performance and see if there was any change. We find that's a very helpful feature. 

The new office was supposed to have newer hardware, bigger than what we had, so the performance was supposed to be better. And it turned out, after the move, that user feedback was mixed. They couldn't really spell out what the real issue was and we didn't know if it was based on their feeling. But from the Aternity data we could tell that the network performance actually dropped. Then we started to look into what could be the problem and what we found out that the network equipment was misconfigured. That led to the correction of the error and we could see from Aternity that the performance was getting much better. That was one of the experiences we had using it for the before and after comparison.

A third valuable feature is the end-user device troubleshooting or the performance monitoring. For example, when we look at a computer that has slow WiFi connectivity, we are able to see what is the actual transmission speed, what the WiFi signal strength is, etc. We are able to find out what the possible causes are of the user performance issues. This gives us great insights.

Also, all the way to the back-end from the server, Aternity provides visibility into the employee device and into application transactions, in the SaaS version. We haven't fully tested that yet. But Aternity has the capability of analyzing the server side and to break it down further into different processes and different procedures that have longer lead times.

In addition, the Digital Experience Management Quadrant (DEM-Q) to see how our digital experience compares to others who use Aternity, has gained a lot of attention, not just from IT staff but also from management. We are looking at it and trying to understand what the numbers mean and, more importantly, what the costs are. It tells us we are in a certain quadrant. Why are we there? What can we do to improve? It's very interesting. I wouldn't say it's helpful yet, because we haven't fully understood it, but we are very interested in it.

Being able to proactively identify issues on user systems.

There are two most valuable features:

• The ability to monitor crash and health event issues at a user level
• The ability to get performance data, customized performance data from our enterprise production apps, third-party apps, specifically like Microsoft and HP and so on

Most of the other APM solutions don't really monitor third-party apps as much. They can't go in and do the normal monitoring of, for example, Microsoft Word, or something similar.

The most valuable feature for me is being able to monitor the productivity of every employee in the company as well as third-party, outsourced companies that work on our behalf.

And I also monitor cloud services. It can take that much workload.

The dashboards of this platform are the most valuable, especially the Desktop Health dashboard. This gives you the ability to see the trend in health of all desktops in a historical view.

The introspection into the desktops, there's nothing else that we have that will do that. While it also provides desktop metrics, the main thing we use it for is monitoring our applications. I would say we use the application side of it the most.

• Proactive application monitoring that is application-architecture independent.
• Advanced dashboards.

The data collected by the agents on each end point is the most valuable feature for us. There is so much valuable information that the agent can send back to the Aternity platform, and even though the dashboards that come out of the box with the installation aren’t always the most intuitive, we have been able to use the data itself for our own custom visualizations and reporting.

It's a monitoring tool. Specifically, it monitors very well the ability to sort large amounts of data into something that is actionable. Once you know how to use it, it's very good at identifying trends underlying in large amounts of data.

It's used to monitor our application performance. Desktop health, network health, things of that nature. We have used it to identify issues impacting large amounts of end users with applications, issues with our network, issues with our group policy setups or exchange, all sorts of stuff.

The most valuable feature for us is trend analysis, particularly with device-help type of events and computer help events, such as blue screens, application errors, and application crashes. It also gives us the ability to correlate that with different attributes, such as location or the Internet Explorer version or whatever comparisons we'd like to try to make to analyze our environment.

In our current version, the user experience it provides is the most valuable feature for us. Also, the performance navigator is very valuable.

This is a review of Aternity APM (formerly "AppInternals") on-premises version 10.21 only.

The infrastructure metrics, especially the CPU and memory data etc., are available in per second granularity, and this for quite a long time, which makes it outstanding as compared to other solutions. Its licensing cost is very low for us. For the use of the agent in infrastructure mode only (without code-level instrumentation), no licence is consumed. A license is only consumed when code-level instrumentation data is harvested, or downloaded from the agent to the Aternity APM server.

The code-level instrumentation has been quite helpfull in many cases, including the ability to record and analyse database SQL requests with bind values, and exceptions.

The item we use the most and what upper management wants is the SLA reports. It's a good summary of how the applications are performing over time from month to month.

The two most valuable features for us are its abilities to validate the customer experience and to measure performance before and after upgrades.

The dashboards and the analysis tools, especially the navigator, are great features and are very valuable.