Aternity

What do you like best?

First, Aternity provides our organization the ability to see how web applications that we purchase and consume but do control are functioning without having code on the web application servers. To the best of my research, this is the only application that does this. Most (98%+) of my employers' line-of-business applications are web applications for which we have master service agreements with the hosts. Prior to purchasing Aternity, the only way I knew if we were having issues with those applications was 1) if our users complained or 2) if our vendor admitted a problem. With Aternity, I can see in near real-time and get alerted if activities on any of the SasS services that we consume are below the baseline. Beyond that, I know how many users, which activities, where they are, and I can relatively easily provide this log data to the vendor to assist them in their analysis.

I would have bought Aternity just for that capability alone.

However, Aternity also provides me a wealth of individual system performance data, so now when a user complains about performance issues I can more easily validate their concerns and pinpoint the issue. It's not a silver bullet, but it is very helpful.

Additionally, in the work from home world, I was able to run a report showing the wireless signal strength of all my WFH employees and determine who needed to move their system, get an antenna, or wire up.

It was a long road for me to convince upper management to invest in Aternity. We initially looked at it in June 2017 and we didn't purchase until March 2020. During that interval, I kept looking at "competing" products, but almost all of them were designed for web application hosts and required code on the web application servers, which was impossible for us. Since implementation, it has only taken a few SaaS outages or degradation episodes during which I was able to provide hard data and color graphs on the nature of the outage for our leadership to see that it was money well spent. If your organization uses SaaS to any significant degree, you need to get Aternity.

What do you dislike?

I'm not sure that there's anything that I dislike about the product, except that it doesn't make coffee for me in the morning.

The data you're looking for can be elusive at times, and there are aspects of the interface that make this more difficult, for example, where most apps would have you right-click, you have to left-click, not a deal-breaker but a mental adjustment.

I wish it could provide more detailed network performance analysis from the endpoint, for example, connection speed from a user's home network to our corporate network, but that's a nice to have for us, not a requirement.

Recommendations to others considering the product:

This is a deep product that has a tremendous range of capabilities, but as with anything you get out what you put in. It requires a fair bit of fine-tuning at the outset to work well, so working with your sales and professional services teams during implementation is critical. Both my sales team and my PS team have been amazing.

There's simply a lot to the product and you have to invest the time to understand it to get the most from it.

What problems are you solving with the product? What benefits have you realized?

Service level monitoring: We know within minutes if any of our SaaS vendors is below SLA or performing poorly regardless of SLA.

End-user experience monitoring: We can see if our users are having issues with their individual system or a monitored application.