I didn't use anything similar to this in the past.

We used and continue to use several traditional monitoring tools (SCOM), but we selected Riverbed for application performance monitoring, which grew to include network management and security use cases in the Riverbed ecosystem.

We used Foglight before this solution. The reason we switched is because Quest Foglight was a bit of a complex platform and not really delivering the visibility that was required.

We used HP Diagnostics, Wily and Introscope Agent. All these couldn't help diagnose problems on our network or with applications. Also, they use sample data.

We used to have another tool prior to Riverbed, which was CA Wiley but it was just not as robust. At one point we had found out that that tool had a memory leak in it which was causing our applications to go a little sideways. It took us three times of climbing the ladder to purchase Riverbed, and that was just convincing the executives that this was the way to go. Everybody likes it.

We previously used something else and switched because Riverbed has faster problem resolution and the ability to see trends developing across the infrastructure. Many times what might have taken hours or days can be resolved in a few minutes.

We use different APM tools for addressing problems on the application side of the application servers. Every APM solution has a similar logic base, and through agents monitors traffic and renders the result. Our problem before using AppInternals was that the agent that worked on the application servers had a big overhead. This resulted in the owners of the applications not wanting to monitor with those agents. Therefore, we started to search for an APM solution for our applications. The starting point of our search was for a stable solution, and at the end of the POC process, we decided that the Riverbed AppInternals agent solved the overhead and stability problems best.

I have worked, in the past, with Mercury Diagnostics for performance troubleshooting and later (currently) with AppDynamics. From the experience I had with these three tools, I realized that Riverbed was superior in all aspects (performance, user experience, and features).