Germain UX

I've been using germain APM for quite some time now. It is giving me very clear insights on the performance of my applications. It is very easy to use and navigate, even for non-experienced users. It has great collections of wizards that can help you with the monitoring and automation of your system.
I also love that there is a Chrome extension now, for monitoring and debugging my JS code.

The only drawback is the large list of KPIs and SLAs that I have to scroll through to find the one I need, but I can live with that.

1.Vast language support, so many people from different countries across the globe will feel comfortable using this tool and very soon and easily get used to all the features it has to offer.

2.Cost effective, value for money accounting to be pocket-friendly not just for enterprise level, but for start ups and mid level companies and with no limit to the industries it can be used for.

3.SLA configuration and customisation capabilities the tool offers

Well, I have nothing to complain about what it already has, but I would like to point what more it can offer from a ‘Performance Test Engineer’ perspective. I would expect any APM tool to be able to identify and filter the real users and virtual users, and it should be able to provide response times of the business processes by filtering the time taken by the tool itself in this process.

For instance, I do load testing using MicroFocus LoadRunner tool for a banking site - a web application and use Dynatrace as an APM. The response times of the business transactions are roughly x+0.3 sec (approximately, this can vary from app to app) when I execute load test with Dynatrace and when I execute a load test without Dynatrace, the response time would be x sec. Because of this reason and for the sake of getting accurate response numbers for the application before go-live, I’ll end up doing a load test with Dynatrace enabled and disabled.This causes more testing efforts and increases cost in the SDLC.

Having a feature to filter real and virtual users, measure accurately the response times of transactions between requests/response without APM time would be great to have!

- It has very simple UI to get start and it also save your preferences to customise the feature set as per your need. Secondly, colourful charts really save your time and one can quickly get an idea of the application performance
- Germain APM ability to support all types of applications whether it's a web, desktop or mobile application and on whatever technology stack it's built, you can simply manage all the application layers front end, back end, Servers, network etc. with single tool is amazing.
- Getting automated Emails with set of Actions/Suggestion one need to take when any SLA fails is an awesome feature which helps you to keep an eye on application performance even when you are not accessing it
- Detailed and simple documentation for the app features. Great support team which doesn't charge anything extra.
- Last but not the least, Germain APM feature which I like the most is its Customisation Review Tool (CRT) which identify potential functional and performance issues with their severity and suggest tuning recommendations as per best practices. You don't need to wait for the application to be in production to identify your issues. Though this feature comes with an additional cost but it's worth spending.

Due to the robust feature sets, initially it took some time to understand and properly use the application. But fortunate enough to have a very responsive support team available for help whenever needed.

Hassle free signup and user experience is commendable. The application is very responsive and navigation to various features is seamless. It felt very easy to navigate and find various options. Integrated well with advanced features. Performance monitoring is one of the key features of this tool, which works smoothly with the help of more than 60 popular plugins that do complete monitoring and analysis. This is completely automated. Awesome dashboard with various performance based metrics and analytics. Also provides easy exportable & user-understandable graphs in the form of a report. complete and easy configuration of the various automation jobs.

For a first-time users, there can be a bit of a learning curve to understand and configure the cloud.