ManageEngine Site24x7 vs. SolarWinds Pingdom

[Site24x7 All-in-One Monitoring is] well suited in website monitoring where especially for uptime and availability of the website. Due to its cloud nature, the company has servers distributed globally that allow to check site availability from anywhere in the world.

Incentivized

I believe the scenarios we used it for were quite well covered, from the executive perspective. The downtime alarms worked very well and were easy to setup, uptime monitoring tools were clear and easy to use, even for non-technical people (C-level) and the SLA management tools allowed us to spend less time, and have less friction, with our clients

Incentivized

• Very clean website UI. Tests are well categorized and navigation is very simple.
• The accompanying mobile app is very useful when on the go as it can also notify you of any issues.
• The cost of the platform is very cheap and the cost also scales at a low amount.
• No on-premise footprint. All cloud-based.

Incentivized

• The alerts are very responsive offering quite detailed timing information
• The UI for reports is very clear and set up of reports is very intuitive
• Customer service was good when there were problems - e.g. lapsing billing causing reporting to go down

Incentivized

• Ability to edit an existing maintenance schedule, vs creating a new one each time
• Grouping of emails to SMS and non SMS alerts to save on false alerts
• Setup of Realtime user monitor was not as functional as expected with regard to adding 3rd party scripts.

Incentivized

• The PagerDuty integration could be a lot better. When you use the PagerDuty integration, it doesn't send any information about which check failed! It just sends a message like "Timeout (> 30s)" -- this isn't very helpful when we have hundreds of checks. We've worked around this by using both the PagerDuty and Slack integrations and having them both post to the same Slack channel. But this means that when an engineer is paged from PagerDuty, they have to go to Slack (or Pingdom) to find the details about the page; it's not available on the page itself.

Incentivized

Recently added features have made Pingdom less intuitive for our requirements. While Pingdom has a broad offering and remains a good value, it is becoming more than we need. Our customer base is becoming more and more global and Pingdom still lacks Asia-Pacific monitoring, which we will need within a year.

Pingdom is easy to use, very intuitive and has a very short learning curve. From the onset, we've been able to jump in and leverage the tool to accomplish our goals for page speed performance and discover the insights we need to make improvements. Its a well-designed tool and makes for a good user experience.

Incentivized

Interface is unnecessarily complicated and frequently responds slowly.

I have only had to use support once, so I can't go into much detail about their support team. The one time I did use it the response was fast but the resolution took some time.

Incentivized

Support responded the same day to my query, as I was setting the product up but couldn't find the setting I needed. This was successfully resolved in a short time frame, so I was pleased with how quickly we were able to get this resolved. I haven't needed to contact support since.

Incentivized

The biggest difference between Site24x7 and products like PRTG, Nagios, or Icinga, is that Site24x7 is hosted off the network, completely externally. The others do a great job on network alerts-- and some can even be configured to send SMS or phone calls with the right equipment and plugins-- but they usually reside in the network or at least on-site. Hosting them in the cloud might be a way around that, in which case they would be pretty similar to Site24x7 in capability, but without the additional software costs in the case of Nagios and Icinga (both open source).

Incentivized

1. PRTG Network Monitor was a far more complicated tool to use and set up albeit it does both Internal and External monitoring. The setup wasn't intuitive and there are too many configuration options to complete to form an alert
2. Amazon CloudWatch is specific to AWS resources and cannot be easily use outside of the AWS Ecosystem

Incentivized

• Cost savings have been substantial at approximately 70%.
• We do suffer delayed email notifications and regular locational failures from 24x7. However, this is easily overcome by extra locational checks.
• Much quicker responses from out of hours teams with the benefit of the mobile app, which is user-friendly.

Incentivized

• Honestly, we have 4 other products that overlap this functionality whose organizations provide far superior support. At this point it is an unnecessary expense.
• In my opinion, their lack of support responsiveness and commitment has impacted our IT agility.
• Its time to explore other alternatives.