Request Metrics vs. SolarWinds Pingdom

Request Metrics is great for small web development teams that want to make fast web applications. It was quick for us to get started and we could use the reports right away without having to read through documentation. If you just need to get some performance metrics, Request Metrics is perfect. It would not be so good for a larger team or a complex backend application as it is pretty limited in what it can measure.

Pingdom is well suited to monitor any of your public facing IPs, so you receive an alert by text message or email when the IP you are monitoring does not respond for a given length of time, from an impressive 10ms to 30s. This allows you to be pretty granular with the alerting. It's less appropriate for monitoring IPs on your LAN, unless you NAT these through your firewall.

Incentivized

• Performance charts are really simple and easy for us to understand what is happening
• It was easy to get started and doesn't need administration or training
• It's affordable for our team
• It's fast

• Alerting, particularly the integration with PagerDuty.
• Reporting: the ability to go back and view the history of each status check (including details about every failure) as well as graphs and reports over a longer time period.
• Weekly uptime report emails are very convenient.
• Programmatic configuration is possible with a third-party Terraform plugin.

Incentivized

• I wish that it could also do uptime checking of the site
• There is not enough detail to drill into individual users

• sometimes sends false alerts
• there should be some threshold value for when an application is not reachable, it should alert after 30 seconds and keep sending hello packets for those 30 seconds and if still there is no response, then it should send the alert.
• too many unwanted metrics.

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.

Customer service from Solarwinds has always been stellar. We've never gone unnoticed, even though we're currently within their tail segment. They're a great partner to us and indeed an important one. When we've had to submit a ticket, we've always received a response within 24 hours. I'd highly recommend SolarWinds to any organization with a server network

Incentivized

We also consider Speedcurve and Calibre for monitoring. Speedcurve was really nice, but the reports were slow. We had to wait a lot to get information. It was also out of our budget and would require extra justification to use it. Calibre was also nice, but the numbers were based on synthetic rather than real user performance. We felt that this wasn't as helpful for us.

We have only used Pingdom for these needs, so I can't speak directly to competitors. That being said, for the reasons we used Pingdom it was fantastic value and the fact we never bothered to look for a competitor speaks volumes about our satisfaction with the product.

Incentivized

• The launch of our project dashboard was much smoother and more successful because we could fix problems earlier
• It fit without our existing operations budget

• Our client has continued to use our services
• It has helped our organisation keep up to date about any site traffic fluctuations and help us make educated decisions on appropriate server resources for the site
• The service is relatively inexpensive making it easy to cost into our maintenance charges

Incentivized