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WPM - alternatives, your suggestions and experiences

WPM is a great tool but, heavily limited by the fact that it only supports internet explorer and its difficult to record/simulate complex website experiences.  WPM is now seriously dated and I will be looking to get rid of our WPM component.

Several years ago, I created a feature request which had a lot of support for SolarWinds to invest in WPM, make it compatible with multiple browsers and generaly bring WPM upto date with competitor products.  It looks like this is never going to happen.

We have been using a 3rd party to cater for our Website/digital needs but, its very expensive.

So, what else have others moved onto or had experience with that allows you to record complex website user journeys, across any browser type, device type perhaps and provides the detailed stuff we are used to seeing with WPM

  • Hi,

    WPM 3.0 Beta is using Chromium as a recording and playback engine, you should check that before leaving WPM.

    https://thwack.solarwinds.com/thwack-beta.jspa?groupID=1492

    Petr

  • Its good that WPM will be using Chromium as thats a good step forwards but, that alone is not enough to match the competition as  competiors seem to have sprinted past SolarWinds WPM package.  Is there any feature list details for WPM 3.0?

    Its a shame as we have a large SolarWinds suite and it would be nice to keep everything consistent but, at the moment, WPM is just dated for our needs and I can no longer defend it.

    The 3rd party we have outsourced web monitoring to offers real user monitoring which provides further details such as what devices, operating systems, geograghic locations our partners and customers are logging in from.  In addition, it provide details on web session lenghts, what pages each visitor goes to, how long they spend on that page, where they exit (e.g just obtaining a quote or completing a purchase) and coversions etc.  In addition tests can be run from various locations (countries/regions etc.).

  • Hi,

    I am no longer part of WPM dev team, so I cannot say whether some feature list exists or not. Hopefully, someone will post it.
    Maybe you can try pingdom, it is also a product from SolarWinds family and it seems it can suit your needs.
    Website Performance and Availability Monitoring | Pingdom

    Petr

  • Old post but was doing some research on the subjetc.  We have tried a few tools but we ended up dropping Enterprise user experience monitoring altogether.  We used HP BAC for many years.  There was a lot more complexity developing the transaction monitors.  It can handle more browser types.  Cons are also the same as WPM - you have to deploy and manage players(which end up being pc's).  It's hard to explain to a site operation manager why we need to deploy a pc to sit in the office with a sign - **DO NOT USE**.  We also used Aternity.  Aternity had some decent features like dashboard and reporting but the alerting was not very good and not anywhere near as good as WPM. With Aternity you have to manage and deploy thousands of agents. 

  • The WPM module for Orion is not designed for many of your features you outline. It is there to perform macro recording user experience interactions with web pages to confirm they are working, delivering the right content and in a timely manner. With the addition of Pingdom integration, the ability to run the recordings from a number of locations provides the visibility of the website performance from locations representative of where users are.

    Your list is more aligned to a website analytics solution, for which SAM can provide a number of capabilities.