StackState competes in a crowded market, and getting "found" by potential customers is a major challenge. One of the tactics we initiated recently was to raise our profile on G2 , a popular website focused on end-user reviews of many different categories of technology offerings.
When we asked our customers to write reviews about their experiences in using our observability platform, we weren’t sure what kind of response we’d get. After reading the first wave of submissions, we’re humbled. Our customer reviews have totally exceeded our expectations, both in the speed of response, the thoughtfulness of the comments and the overall positive ratings our customers gave us. You can see all the details for yourself here . There are some great headlines and really interesting themes that emerge from the reviews.
The quick top-level stats:
Average rating of 4.6 out of 5 (higher than Dynatrace, AppDynamics, DataDog and New Relic!)
Eight five-star ratings and two four-star ratings
10 customer reviews submitted and published within two weeks
Even better than ratings were the review headlines that our customers came up with, including:
Hands on mentality with an innovative approach for topology-powered observability
The Missing Link for our Monitoring / Observability / Metrics
Here are five big themes that were repeated across our customers’ reviews:
#1: Topology is key
Understanding the performance of complex, dynamic IT environments through the lens of topology is StackState’s biggest differentiator, and that point was echoed in several of the reviews. One customer cited the thing that they like best as “the timeline to visualize topology and status in the past”, while another customer described it as “One Observability for 'Serverless', 'Serverful' and 'Enterprise' applications in one place, giving a wider topology-powered insight.”
#2: Speed of integrating existing monitoring data
Most of StackState’s customers already have some monitoring tools in place that collect some telemetry data. The reason they usually bring us in is to unify all those silos and to give the integrated data better context through our topology-centric approach. We invest a significant amount of our R&D effort in trying to make it easy to tap into all this existing data and it was good to hear that our customers see the value of that investment. One reviewer commented , “Stackstate has a clear innovative way of "aggregating them all" - i.e. bringing together many different tools (from AWS to Dynatrace to Zabbix) with different data (topology, metrics, tracing) and the time factor.” Even when we don’t have a pre-built StackPack sitting on the shelf, multiple reviews cited the value of our extensible integration framework, noting “[it’s] easy to write custom integrations for nearly every system you can think of.”
#3: Ease of use
We try hard to make it easy for our customers to manage complexity. Our product team enlists design partners for every major new capability we introduce, and they regularly interview existing customers to get their feedback, so it was gratifying to hear comments like:
“It's very easy to gain insight into your (hybrid) application landscape.” (Solution Architect )
“Simple, easy-to-use interface that can be customized for each role.” (Senior Product Manager )
“Easy to drill down to the root cause of issues.” (Administrator )
#4: Rapid time to value
To earn the right to expand our footprint with our customers, we need to show value quickly whether it’s in a proof-of-concept or during a production roll-out. This has been an area of focus and improvement for us over the past year and our customers are seeing results. “Just try it with one or more of the StackPacks available out of the box. This will get you results in a couple of hours,” said one of the reviewers . Another IT Platform Engineer from a large bank commented, “In one month we proved that StackState could visualize a multi-tier load balancer architecture as well as other components like virtual servers, core switches, esx hosts and much more.”
#5: Commitment to customer success
Perhaps the thing that I was most proud of from this initial wave of G2 reviews was just how frequently our customers commented on the high quality of StackState employees they interact with and the caliber of service we deliver. Almost every review had something positive to say on this front, with one reviewer going so far as to title his review, “Vendor / Friend with which I would like to grab a beer! ”, to which we say, “We’ll buy the first round.” But hearing one customer say that the thing they like best about StackState is our “commitment and tenacity to achieve proposed goals” is truly music to our ears.
To our customers who took the time to write reviews on G2, thank you on behalf of all of us at StackState. Your suggestions for improvement are always welcome, and your positive feedback is a key reason that we all do what we do.
And to the reviewer who said , “I think it’s the next generation in AIOps,” we agree!
If you want to give StackState a try for yourself, check out our ungated sandbox or try it for free in your own environment.
