We performed a comparison between Apica and Avada Software Infrared360 based on real PeerSpot user reviews.
Find out what your peers are saying about Datadog, Dynatrace, New Relic and others in Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability."It helps with releases because we monitor them in staging. We can tell if something is critically wrong before it gets into production, e.g., if it was load related or function related and also what was different in the dev stage. It then alerts us straightaway inside of our production monitors once it has been released. Therefore, it has improved how we run our systems since we monitor multiple environments."
"I like the transcript download feature. And with UI scripting, it's helpful that Apica handles a lot of the backend work automatically. I don't have to tag everything manually, though I can tag elements later if needed. It's really good at recording the steps."
"We see the benefit almost every day. It allows us to be alerted whenever there is a store that is not responding properly around the world. We do have a network operation center (NOC) who receives these alerts, immediately checking if everything is okay."
"As always, within the IT industry, everybody's always looking to upgrade and update everything else like that. Apica has been one of those things but it's really hard to replace because it offers us the unique capability to see what the customer is seeing. A lot of other ones can do Selenium script and things like that, but there's a lot in Apica that we use right now. We utilize a lot of the scenario options in Apica right now, and there's a lot of other ones that do parts of it, but it doesn't do everything that Apica does."
"There are several features that are really good. The first one is the flexibility and the advanced configuration that Apica offers when it comes to configuring synthetic checks. It provides the ability to customize how the check should be performed and it is very flexible in the number of synthetic locations that it can use. It allows us to run scripts from different locations all over the world, and they have a really good number of these locations."
"One of the biggest advantages of moving to Apica is the ability get to a hybrid model with the architecture in the cloud and our agents on-prem. We also have access to Apica's cloud agent across the globe. That has changed the way that we have our load testing setup at this point. Previously, it was always internal. Now, with this change in the way it is implemented for load testing, we can test anywhere across the globe and from the list of agents available within Apica's cloud. If I don't have an agent available in a second location, it just takes an email to their customer support, then it is spun up within 24 hours. That flexibility has changed the way that we perceive our load tests, not just in the US, but globally."
"With the ZebraTester, the ability to have and store dynamic variables, when setting up the monitors, means you can extract that value and use it in a subsequent service call. This is something that has made our lives easier... This is one of the features that I like the most because it helps us in configuring these services, in a certain flow, without the need to re-record the whole thing."
"You can tell from the operational space of people who are using and consuming this data that they are more integrated. It is not dependent on one team anymore. It saves a lot of time by capturing and pinpointing the exact problem that is happening quickly. We have moved from getting escalations manually to getting escalations synthetically."
"It's what we use for monitoring our MQ system, so the features that they provide are just really, really good."
"The administration piece makes it very easy to do MQ administration. It gives us a lot more flexibility and capabilities."
"Monitoring that ties into our incident management system"
"We have easily created use case testing harnesses for specific flows that incorporate various message types."
"It allows non-technical users to inspect their individual components within the total infrastructure without disturbing other components and without bothering the technical teams."
"It has role-based access to queues, giving us more insights into problems."
"We have been focused on reducing polling times for synthetic checks. We have gone from 10 minutes down to five minutes for a pretty broad swath, but there is some appetite to reduce that further, which could be an improvement."
"Learning the tool has always been a little difficult from a scripting perspective because the framework is proprietary and unique. Once we became used to what it does and how to perform it, then it became easier for my team and me. I would like to see some of the testing steps be part of a more well-known language, like Java or Python. That would be a big improvement."
"The initial screen on their dashboard could have a bit more data, but this is a small thing. It could have more data, so we do not need to drill down to a screen behind that initial information. I would like them to get a little better on the user interfaces that we need to go into."
"Apica should add more features and integrations with different tools and certain ticketing systems, like ServiceNow."
"Alerting needs improvement. It's a little noisy. It needs some better options. Currently, they have an issue, when you set up a synthetic monitor, you can set up where it's monitoring from, a data center that Apica owns."
"When it comes to the way the internal agent is installed, because you can install an application on a server, I would love to see the application Docker-ized. If you could install internal agents using Docker or using containers, it would be easier for us to manage them and spin up internal agents."
"There are some components of the user interface that are not up to date. Just to give you an idea, today we have web applications that are called single-page applications that are much faster than the old style of web application. If we can move faster into the flow of the graphic user interface, and in a more effective way, it will save us a lot of time."
"The accuracy of alerts can be improved a little bit. Right now, it's pretty good in terms of alerting pretty quickly about failures or changes in response times. However, what we have seen happen is the number of alerts that we are getting is very frequent, and we would like to tone down the number of alerts. That's the only trouble we have. Apica could tone down those settings because there is no option for us to tone it down to a level that would reduce the alerts to a minimum. As a platform, it does send us good alerts, but it could be improved a bit."
"Some of the graphics in the interface could be improved. It's pretty basic. Some interfaces are not up to what you're used to seeing on other, more Windows-like tools."
"The UI can be cumbersome - but we are still using the Viper interface and we have not had the time to check out the Alloy interface which is supposed to be much improved."
"The user interface could be sexier and more ergonomic. The competing products have similar problems."
"We desire a dashboard that could accumulate BOQ lengths per tenant on one screen for all tenants."
"We are still working with the FTE/MFT subscription monitoring and reporting functionality. That is an area in which we would like to see further development taking place."
"One area where they could improve is with their documentation. Some sections are not up to date with new release information and providing additional samples in some areas would be very helpful."
Apica is ranked 55th in Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability with 2 reviews while Avada Software Infrared360 is ranked 68th in Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability. Apica is rated 8.4, while Avada Software Infrared360 is rated 8.8. The top reviewer of Apica writes "Their support makes the product so much easier to use. They sped up our migration process". On the other hand, the top reviewer of Avada Software Infrared360 writes "An offsite team performs a daily infrastructure health check and sends reports to the technical/management teams. ". Apica is most compared with Dynatrace, Datadog, AppDynamics, Apache JMeter and OpenText LoadRunner Cloud, whereas Avada Software Infrared360 is most compared with IBM MQ and Dynatrace.
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