mPulse, from Akamai, is a real-time end-user digital experience monitoring solution (or RUM, for real user monitoring) that enables the user to capture user experience data, optimize website performance, and measure ROI.
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TeamViewer DEX
Score 8.4 out of 10
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Formerly from 1E, acquired by TeamViewer, The TeamViewer Digital Employee Experience (DEX) platform finds and resolves IT issues before they affect users. This eliminates digital friction, avoids costly downtime and helps keep IT operations running smoothly.
In general, if you manage a website, you must have a real user monitoring tool. mPulse is one of the leaders in the market, so if you use this product, you can count on the reliability of the product itself. Personally, I think that if you need to collect technical KPIs, mPulse is a good choice. If on top of technical metrics, you want to collect also business KPIs, potentially there are other products doing this better.
When we are needing to patch workstations for zero-day vulnerabilities or security risks, Explorer is our go-to tool to push out those settings quickly. We have a TeamViewer DEX server stood up in our DMZ to communicate with the workstations outside of our VPN, so we can push those settings or patches to devices without needing them to attach to our network. It's really nice to be able to communicate with the computers that rarely connect to our corporate network and ensure that they are still protected. We do have the TeamViewer Client installed on all of our internal servers in order to get inventory and licensing information, but we don't typically utilize the TeamViewer software on the servers for much else. A different team handles those computers and often requires change management, so expedited changes don't happen often there. Standard deployment and patching tools do the job.
They currently don't have all of their products incorporated into the web interface, meaning that we need a separate administration console for using their Shopping product.
The TeamViewer DEX Exchange is an online repository for common or useful instructions, but it is still a bit lacking. New instructions aren't published very often.
Writing your own custom instructions for Explorer has a bit of a learning curve if you aren't already familiar with SQL queries or their SCALE language. There is published documentation for SCALE, but I'd like to see them add a basic functionality course to their online training portal.
TeamViewer DEX has plenty of features and functionality right out of the box. They offer an Exchange web portal where you can go to download new product packs as they become available through consulting engagements and customer requests. Sometimes you might need to do something more specific or customized than what is available to everyone, and that's when your own knowledge is put to the test. Being able to write your own SCALE code would be invaluable, but takes a while to learn if you aren't already familiar with SQL, PowerShell, or a few other popular languages. Making it your own can definitely take some work, but it's worth it in the end.
Generally speaking, both products allow you to not be blind on your website. Easily, you can see how your website is performing. At the moment, Blue Triangle is better than Akamai for the business part (there are more business metrics collected and many more available dashboards for consuming this kind of data). Moreover, the look and feel and the usability of the Blue Triangle portal is better than Akamai one.
Microsoft has good intentions, but they are often late to the table. On more than one occasion, we have seen Microsoft incorporate a new feature into their own products, but it's something that TeamViewer had already been offering for a year or more. By the time Microsoft adds a new feature, it has already been in our toolbox and even then doesn't seem to have all of the additional functionality that we get from the TeamViewer software. Currently, we're starting to see Microsoft's push for endpoint performance analytics, which TeamViewer DEX has already done impressively for some time now.
Being able to deploy configuration changes while devices are off-network was a real-life-saver for us during the sudden work-from-home scenarios we faced during the pandemic.
Reclaiming unused software licenses has provided some additional budget to use towards other products, and helps us to justify the cost of what we already have.
Using Experience to proactively troubleshoot performance issues not only reduces the number of help desk tickets but also provides a better work environment for our employees.
