Alluvio Aternity Room for Improvement

RD
Head of Cyber Security Engineering & Oversight at a media company with 10,001+ employees

Potentially, the one thing that could probably help with better levels of enterprise adoption is around creating the application monitoring signatures. That process can be a little bit difficult. If one thing could be simplified a little bit, it would be the application monitoring signature creation process.

But that's probably quite unfair because it's a super-technical thing, so it's difficult. There is no other tool that can do it in a simpler way. If there were something I would want to simplify or improve, it would be that, but even that would be quite unfair to demand of any product.

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BL
Endpoint Administration Manager at a financial services firm with 1,001-5,000 employees

The reporting is okay, but the alerting and reporting could use some more polish. We can't alert on certain things that we'd like to. For example, if an application is using a certain percentage of processor resources for a specific period of time, then alert. It's not as extensible or flexible, on the alerting side of things, as we would like. 

You have to build out dashboards for everything and the Tableau back-end, while it's okay, is unique. They could probably improve that a little bit.

If it did some additional correlation of problems, that would be helpful. For instance, capturing certain events and event IDs: If I have an application crash, it might report that the application crashed but that's about as far as it goes. It doesn't always give you event IDs or faulting module names. It doesn't go as deep as I would like it to go in correlating problems. It's not necessarily pointing you in the direction of what's causing the problem, for example, if it's a driver or, "Hey, I noticed this particular firmware was updated and followed by an increase in crashes. That could be your problem." It's left for you to be "Sherlock," but it's giving you the clues.

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AW
Regional Network Manager at a recruiting/HR firm with 10,001+ employees

The process of doing the application recording is a bit cumbersome. It would be nice if there were a friendlier way to do that, or more predefined applications. 

Being able to add custom monitoring to dashboards would be nice. Right now, if you want to monitor the value of a registry key on your systems, to get that added into the dashboard you have to reach out to Aternity so they can start looking for that value. It would be interesting if that were more of a self-serve function.

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Buyer's Guide
DEM - Digital Experience Monitoring
March 2024
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EH
IT Program Manager at a government with 10,001+ employees

The solution's downloadable reports could be improved.

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IC
Infrastructure Architect Specialist at Scotiabank

When it comes to a lot of the features that I would want, they will tell you they are in their SaaS version, which we don't use. We are planning to move to the SaaS solution to get those features. 

But the issue is how Aternity, as a company, works their roadmap. They put all the new features on the SaaS solution and that's where you get the latest and greatest stuff. But some of those features are not available for the on-premise users, which is what we are. Why not have those features available for on-prem users?

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DG
IT Specialist at BMW

Integrating the tool with other products is a challenge. We didn't have the time to work with the integration. The integration must be improved. There are so many different monitoring tools out there. It becomes challenging to have too many different dashboards.

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Caillin Peacock - PeerSpot reviewer
Solutions Specialist at a financial services firm with 51-200 employees

I would like to see more granular performance counters collected and viewable from the endpoints. That would be great. That is something we used to get with SysTrack.

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Mike Sullivan. - PeerSpot reviewer
Lead Domain Architect at a tech vendor with 10,001+ employees

The licensing model doesn't suit the market we are in and has room for improvement.

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MS
Digital Experience - Team Leader Canterbury at a tech services company with 501-1,000 employees

For me, the biggest problem is the price. It is not so much about how much it costs. It is about Aternity only giving you 12 months upfront. So, you got to purchase it for 12 months. A lot of our customers are on a per-user-per-month type billing. They are all OPEX rather than CAPEX. It would be a lot better for our customers if there was an option available for OPEX so that it is billed on a monthly basis than a yearly basis.

They've got only Windows agents. They don't actually have mobile agents. It would be a lot better if they could also integrate Android and iOS because then we can start pulling steps and performance management out of users' mobile devices. That's the biggest addition I would suggest at the moment. A lot of our customers have desktops as well as tablets or mobile devices. We should be able to monitor that stuff as well.

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Don Dandrea - PeerSpot reviewer
IT Administrator at a insurance company with 5,001-10,000 employees

I want more reporting around asset management, with greater flexibility and customization ability.

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JA
IT Manager | Digital Employee Engineering | End User Product Engineering at a consultancy with 10,001+ employees

I would like to get more granular detail. In regards to defining the applications and activities upfront, that can be challenging. Simplifying that would be a big win. One of the things that I know they are already working on is a verbose mode. 

Aternity does a great job of not impacting the device. It only sends up small bits of information at the time so it doesn't have a negative impact on the device itself. That also means that sometimes you want to get more data, but it's not giving it to you. However, being able to turn on a verbose mode so it could give us even more granular detail, at certain times, would be helpful. 

I think helping get to root cause would be really huge. One thing that Aternity is working on is its Insights and being able to inform us whether this type of model in this location, for example, performs worse. Getting those Insights automatically to the surface, which they are working on now, is a big improvement.

One misconception that some people at our company have when they first hear about Aternity, or start using Aternity, they expect it to find a root cause. If an application crashes, they want to jump right into why that application crashed. Aternity doesn't come right out and tell you. It gives you the diagnostic that gives you the information about what happened. You still have to sometimes have to put together those pieces, going farther to get to the why. I don't know that there is a tool out there that does give you the root cause of any of these issues. 

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EK
Director GWMS Development at a financial services firm with 10,001+ employees

In version 7, there was a separate tab for certain applications where I could open five IE Explorer instances or pathways in Chrome, which I found really useful. It had memory consumption and CPU per process. We already indicated to Aternity that it would be helpful to have this again. 

Right now, the user information being displayed by Aternity is received from AD. Ideally, we would like to see integration with other sources for user information, like other databases, so we are not limited to AD. 

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ZA
Service Designer at a financial services firm with 10,001+ employees

We are waiting for the GA release of their agent. I hope they can do better when they release their endpoint agents. Right now, we are not able to measure some applications, core applications, because it's relying on a specific version of the agent and that agent has not come out yet and there's no ETA. I would like to see them speed up time to market when they release agents.

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TD
IT Technical Specialist at a financial services firm with 10,001+ employees

We don't feel that we get the back-end transaction details from Aternity. We have other tools that do that.

Also, there is room for improvement in the granularity of the alerting and reporting. We would like to be able to alert on a defined set of users for a given application, for example, that all users in this group who are using this application are seeing low performance. And we would like it to provide comparisons of that to other users in a similar group that are not experiencing the issue. We would like the ability to alert and report on those types of specifics. I don't necessarily know what all the parameters are that I might want to use to slice that data, but our experience has been that within Aternity it's not always as granular as it needs to be. 

Version 11, with the Tableau reporting, offers some promise there. We're only a couple of weeks into Version 11, so we haven't fully implemented it. But that's something we're looking to improve with our new version, moving forward. 

The other place for improvement, as an on-prem, non-SaaS customer, is that the system administration and management in Aternity are very difficult. They've even told me that most of their support calls come in due to configuration and system administration on their on-prem. Their on-prem solution is not easy to use. I know it's not their focus, but for now they still have us and a lot of other customers using it, and they could improve that, rather than forcing wholesale, brand-new builds.

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BS
Team Lead - IT Collaboration at a retailer with 10,001+ employees

Maybe they could extend coverage. Right now it is only for mobile, desktop, and web. If they could extend it to point-of-sale devices, that would be helpful. For example, your local floral shop has a scanner. I want to know what the performance of that device is like. It may be slow. Or when you go to pump gas and the screens are slow, these are the kinds of point-of-sale that we could start troubleshooting. That would be a nice feature.

Also, when it comes to what is called creating signatures, it's not easy for a non-coding person for desktop applications. You need to run the recording and you need to have some exposure and knowledge. That is an area where they can improve. For web applications, they have the Web Activity Creator and that's an awesome and easy tool. Anybody can use it and capture the signatures. With the desktop applications it's a little more cumbersome and difficult.

Aternity provides visibility into the employee device and into application transactions all the way through the back-end, but it does not support that at a high level. It's not really detailed, but for support people it is helpful so that they can tell if the problem is with the end-user PC, the network, or maybe the back-end. But when you talk about the Waterfall details, it's not providing any. If they could include that, it would be great.

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it_user382059 - PeerSpot reviewer
Senior Advisor, IT Operations at a healthcare company with 10,001+ employees

The only thing I can say which has been frustrating are the Tableau workspace/dashboard options out-of-the-box, at least prior to version 8. A simple example: the US map can be ¼ of the dashboard, but there's no out-of-the-box full-screen US map which can show minor/major data points for business locations. And the ¼ screen widget of the US map is, of course, not by default expandable to the full screen. A trifle for sure, but annoying. I think

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Akhilesh Mishra - PeerSpot reviewer
Technical Lead at M.Tech

The solution provides enough options. They should include database monitoring activity as well.

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it_user621015 - PeerSpot reviewer
Director Infrastructure Applications at a wholesaler/distributor with 1,001-5,000 employees
  • Dashboards and reporting features: They are not user-friendly
  • Reports were a lot easier in the older versions
  • They need to revamp their whole sales, management, and technical support. Their technology is fine. It's the associates around it that make it not worth my while.
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it_user487617 - PeerSpot reviewer
Infrastructure Design/Capacity Planning at a media company with 1,001-5,000 employees

Signature development process requires deep technical expertise in the application and in the use of their studio tools that help you create it. I know they're aware of that and I know they're focused on making stuff simpler. I think in version nine we'll probably see improvements. That's the biggest thing for us, and unless you're creating those signatures on a daily basis, that needs to be your full-time job to maintain the expertise to do it properly. We're still depending on their professional services to help us with that.

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RogerLang - PeerSpot reviewer
Presales Technical Specialist at Datacom

I would like Alluvio Aternity to be certified by the IRAP for petrol companies in Australia. This will improve their security posture for the collection of data from the networks.

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it_user359463 - PeerSpot reviewer
Engineer at a healthcare company with 10,001+ employees

I think the next release has what we are looking for. I guess they are working on this now, but to monitor these transactions, you need to look at it, analyze it and capture it. It requires a little bit of work, but in an environment like ours, you need it to be easier. They are making great strides to make this easier. I’d like it to still be easier yet, though it might not be possible because unless you have a background, it really makes it hard to do it on your own.

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it_user201618 - PeerSpot reviewer
Director at a financial services firm with 1,001-5,000 employees

The thing that I think most companies like ourselves would want would be an easier way to customize custom scripts. It does a lot of out of the box standard monitoring, but there are special applications that every organization have, and right now, creating the custom scripts requires technical resource support from Aternity.

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JY
Sr. IT Manager at a manufacturing company with 10,001+ employees

Aternity does provide performance numbers, the data. However, it doesn't tell you what you can do about it. It just presents the facts. How to interpret the data, and how to draw conclusions from a lot of the data, requires knowledge and experience. That's the part that I would hope Aternity can continue to explore and give us that kind of capability.

I understand it's challenging. A lot of things may not be due to a single factor or make it easy to draw out an action plan. If, for example, we look at the stability index and it's low, there could be many factors involved. Right now, Aternity doesn't tell you that maybe by doing this or that sequence you can improve your stability next. Not yet. That's the area I'm hoping for. For the time being, I'm developing the team who will have the experience and knowledge and provide that part of the capability.

It is an area that I would love to see Aternity make more progress in, but I also understand it's challenging. There's definitely the room to continuously explore it. It requires very good experience with the hardware and also requires a lot of intelligence. It's going to be very exciting if Aternity can make more of a breakthrough in that area.

We are also trying to integrate it with ServiceNow. We are still learning that process. It would be easier if they had more configurations or the capability to inject the logic into the interface. For example, right now Aternity creates alerts that can turn into ServiceNow tickets, but there are a few areas that can be improved.

First, the alert is pretty much defined by Aternity. An alert has to be created to be converted to a ticket. But if I don't need to create an alert, can I make a dashboard and create certain parameters and convert from those parameters into a ticket? That would be very powerful. Right now, only alerts can convert to tickets.

Second, when they convert to tickets, it would be helpful if they put in a lot more logic which we can easily configure. For example, when a user is from a certain region, it would be good if we could automatically assign the issue to the specific IT group in that region. We are still working on this. Right now, the scripts for the integration are still rather complex and we are still trying to understand this part.

On another topic, if they had an easier way to claim back a license, that would be beneficial to us, but it may not be very beneficial to Aternity, because we might not need to buy so many licenses. For some computers, once we finish troubleshooting, we probably don't need Aternity on them all the time.

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it_user621018 - PeerSpot reviewer
Senior Systems/Applications Delivery Manager at a legal firm

When they moved from Version 8 to Version 9, the customers lost so much control of what they could do with the product. They need to give back what they took from us. In the previous version:

  • We could create our own monitors easily
  • We could set incidents easily
  • We could look at the thresholds for our configuration and change them accordingly

We can't do any of that now.

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it_user268209 - PeerSpot reviewer
IT Project Manager at a legal firm with 1,001-5,000 employees

I think they need to focus more on ad-hoc and customized reporting. They also need to allow the users to be able to create their own dashboards, rather than only be able to use what's out of the box. I do know that this is on their development roadmap, but those were the two things, from our perspective, that jump out.

I'd like to be able to pull data out of Aternity a little easier. It all comes in pretty nice looking charts and things, but we have a hard time pulling out hard data, which is usually what you'll need if you're trying to be actionable.

To deserve a higher rating, we would need some additional data, access to additional data around crashes, and they would need to add more robust reporting or ad-hoc reporting module and customizable dashboards.

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it_user489111 - PeerSpot reviewer
Vice President, Infrastructure Management at a financial services firm with 10,001+ employees

I would improve the dashboard, the presentation player.

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it_user458040 - PeerSpot reviewer
Infrastructure Engineer Specialist at a healthcare company with 10,001+ employees

I would say the reporting capabilities of this product could use room for improvement.I would say the reporting capabilities of this product could use room for improvement. The standard reports that are given are not the greatest, and no custom ones can be created; however, I am told that the latest version of Aternity offers this!

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it_user508131 - PeerSpot reviewer
IT Admin at a financial services firm with 10,001+ employees

The biggest improvement would be the ease with which you monitor applications. It's a little clunky right now; it takes a little bit of time. It's very manual right now; maybe it can be automated more. I’m not even sure that they can make it better, but they have started to. There's a weakness, but it's kind of due to the type of tool it is; it's going to be there. It's probably always going to be there, no matter how easy they make it.

Also, when you call in to support, a couple of times they haven't had the best of luck as far as getting the answer right away. It has taken a little time. I don't think it's any worse than any of the other tools we have, but there's always room for improvement there.

Some of the dashboarding and reporting on the analytics side could be improved. I think they realize it. Obviously, some of the desktop monitoring metrics always can be improved.

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it_user314040 - PeerSpot reviewer
VP - Application Performance Monitoring at a financial services firm with 1,001-5,000 employees

Schema is difficult to work with when constructing custom dashboards.

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it_user380955 - PeerSpot reviewer
Enterprise Performance Analyst at Helmerich & Payne

The dashboards and navigatability of the platform could use improvement. It often takes five or six clicks to drill down to exactly what you want to see, but many of our stakeholder groups have refused to use the tool because they perceive it as “too cumbersome” to get the information they need. As a Tableau developer myself, I’ve been able to provide certain customizations that have helped, but overall this is the biggest area of opportunity for improvement that I see with Aternity.

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it_user490683 - PeerSpot reviewer
Manager Application Support at a legal firm with 1,001-5,000 employees

The product itself is actually extremely solid. The support of Aternity, specifically their client success management and after-sales support and training leave a lot to be desired. They've gotten better with my last engagement with them, which was beginning in May.

We're still ongoing with a little bit of training. We recently switched from their on-premise Aternity 7 version to their cloud SaaS-based Aternity 9 product. Largely, once you get the product and you have it set up and get it installed, the relationship management after-sales leaves a lot to be desired. The product itself is actually really, really fantastic.

Between the Aternity 7 and the Aternity 9 version, they've made a whole repolish of the UI. They rethought the entire UI to make it usable for folks that haven't spent 40 to 60 hours training in the product, like I have.

We're getting a lot more value out of the product from every single level of IT, all the way from our service desk up to our executives and back down. They've done a very good job at innovating on the product. It's more so the support and professionalism of their client success managers and after-call support that leave a lot to be desired.

Their product is a 10. The support is a five. I'm going to average them out to about a seven and a half to an eight. I hope they're able to continue to improve. I want to make clear they have improved and I've been much more impressed with their support recently than I was over the last three years.

I hope that's not a function of an ongoing engagement and additional large sum of money that we've tossed at them in order to set up the new product. If they can improve on their support, then they would be in a really, really good position.

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it_user383703 - PeerSpot reviewer
IT Adminstrator at a financial services firm with 5,001-10,000 employees

They have a lot of features built into the product, but it would be nice if they had some additional features that I think a lot of organizations would benefit from. For instance, I can see the location and computer model and I can see a bunch of different attributes. But one thing I can't see is the Internet Explorer version.

I'd also like to see some more use interface upgrades to make it easier for people to utilize. I think it's easy for a person like me, who uses the product daily, but it's not so easy for somebody who only intermittently uses the product to interface with it.

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PT
User Experience Management Consultant at a tech services company with 10,001+ employees

I’ve seen the version 9 demo and they have really improved the product. It starts out as a high-level view. They've additionally added some great color coding, but they need to explain better and drive down further on the meanings of this workflow. For example, how quickly can I see why it’s not showing green?

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EZ
Expert at a tech services company with 201-500 employees

Its user interface and features should be improved. They don't support new versions of certain Linux editions. That is one of the reasons why we have to move to another solution.

In terms of a new feature, it would be good if we could restrict a user to a specific application or server. We have several customers, and we have to set up one or two servers for each customer. We have to set up one server for production and one for the test environment. Each user at the customer level can see all applications and the data of all applications, which is not really useful and good. We should be able to restrict user access at the application level or server level.

Their technical support should be improved in terms of response time. Its stability should also be better. We are currently using version 10, and its stability is not so high. The server crashes from time to time and needs to be restarted. Sometimes, you also have problems with applications.

Version 11 only allows for one AD/LDAP server to be connected to. Version 10 can connect to several LDAP servers, a feature we need; that's why we did not upgrade to version 11.

The on-premises version lacks some features compared to the SaaS cloud solution of Aternity APM.

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it_user487605 - PeerSpot reviewer
IT Engineer Associate at a insurance company with 501-1,000 employees

We're two versions behind so some items have probably been taken care in the newer versions. In our current one, I think the workflow needs improvement. I wouldn't say our desktop is an issue to be able to click into it deeper and then move to where the problem is on the desktop site. From what I've seen in the demos of the newest version, have already improved on that.

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it_user385023 - PeerSpot reviewer
Programmer Analyst and DCT Coordinator at a healthcare company with 1,001-5,000 employees
  • Intuitive use: The GUI isn’t intuitive and several elements of its design differ in appearance and function with other parts of the interface.
  • Reliability: Issues interfering with the deployment and use of the product has made its use reduced in scope.
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it_user359469 - PeerSpot reviewer
CST at a government with 1,001-5,000 employees

I’d like to be able to build monitors easier. That has to be an easier process, and they need to make the program less complicated. The documentation could be better. Also, I'd like to be able to download the latest version for testing.

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Buyer's Guide
DEM - Digital Experience Monitoring
March 2024
Find out what your peers are saying about Riverbed, Nexthink, Lakeside Software and others in DEM - Digital Experience Monitoring. Updated: March 2024.
765,234 professionals have used our research since 2012.