If you think Tealeaf costs too much for what they offer, there is a new session replay alternative available now called Pion. It lacks some of the bells and whistles but doesn't cost an arm and leg (maybe just a few fingers).

#1 Time to use – Similar to Coradiant, Pion is available as a network appliance. I agree that this approach makes it MUCH easier to get up and running quickly, compared to Tealeaf which requires provisioning and has lots of independent software bits that need to be integrated.

#2 Time to usefulness – Pion captures performance metrics, but it doesn't provide great reports out of the box like Coradiant. For session replay, however, Pion does start "working for you" right away without most of the messy configuration that Tealeaf requires.

#3 Cost – Benefit "Equality" – Pion can handle up to a gigabit of traffic with a single 1U box, while we've heard from Tealeaf customers that a similar configuration can require 20 or more servers! If replay is what you need, there are now much less expensive alternatives available than Tealeaf.

Disclaimer: I'm the obviously biased founder and CEO =)

I've found that "performance" discussions with people who are on the performance and operations care to see incident management — identification of slowness by performance and breakdowns into what causes the slowness.

Marketing is interested in doing "replay" to understand the true customer experience. There are some compliance issues needing the ability to see a specific user replayed as well.

It also has depended upon whether the company saw performance as a "feature" or penalties for violating SLA's. That tended to drive operational real-user monitoring versus UI exploration which comes from a replay solution.

My two cents.

I can get the argument that it is cool to look at user sessions but I come back to the points made by Avinash on this matter (see http://tinyurl.com/398×2f).

My question here is – what am I missing that I don’t get with a properly configured web analytics package?

Some of the things people have mentioned as being useful are:

• Error messages
• Broken stuff
• Form errors or validation issues
• Bugs / Rendering issues / Browser incompatibilities
• Process bugs (e.g. not accepting certain forms of payments)
• Correlating customer contact with particular web events (e.g. broken stuff causes contact)

But I can get all these from a web analytics solution, in aggregate format but without the video viewing!

The things I can’t get are:

• Watching a replay of the session to see exactly what someone did
• Debugging a complaint from a customer by getting developers to watch the session
• Providing proof of the customer ‘doing something’ from a legal or service perspective
• An idea of where the mouse moves

Are these things I can’t get worth the costs? Hmmm – the jury is still out on that one.

If, however, I have a badly implemented WA solution that hasn’t been set up to capture this kind of stuff, then replay tools with data aggregation facilities (like Tealeaf) can plug that gap. If my WA solution does all this, I don’t need another product.

The one cool thing mentioned about Tealeaf was the ability to collect WA data for ingest into a package (e.g. Webtrends) without having to do any page tagging. Lol – now that would make developers less chippy to start with .

Maybe tealeaf needs to work on me some more? Is there anyone out there that can refute the central plank of my argument here?

Craig.

LOL – I take your point about it being cute. I guess there is limited value for us based on the price of these types of products.

If we had a system which aggregated form handling issues and correlation with abandonment much better, this would be much better.

Keep us posted on the Israeli company you mention – sounds interesting.

That partly is my concern. Does this scale? And then there is the issue of ROI. Paid tools in this area can have a price of entry of three to four hundred thousand dollars, and then it goes up. That is just the software and hardware, layer in the other costs of people, process layers etc. Then it truly becomes a stretch.

There are a few comments on the post that show that there is ROI for some. So clearly my experience is lacking because I have yet to see any from the 15 clients I have spoken to. Almost always the actual implementation failed to deliver even half of what the sales pitch promised.

Perhaps ROI is a non issue now that there are so many free options. I just spent some time with a Israeli company that is doing some very interesting things with video replay.

My challenge to them was the same: "I don't care how cute it is to watch the sessions, it is cute. I care about how you can proactively help me find insights and I care about doing that at scale – being able to do two press releases / case studies from thousands who have installed the product is not enough and neither are one off blog posts. :)".

To their credit they are working on a few innovative things and I dearly look forward to those (and their video replay tool is free!).

Rob : I am sorry but I was unable to internalize your comment.

I spent quite a few years in IT so I very much understand load testing.

I am unsure of what you mean by "replicating real world style traffic" means as it applies to video replay.

If you wanted to know what a typical session is you can simply grab one of the hundreds of thousands of session on your website and use it.

Were you referring to hammering your site / servers to do "load testing" and then watching the replay of your load test?

Perhaps I am missing something. Would you be so kind as to share some more context?

Thanks so much to both of you for adding to the conversation.

-Avinash.

Helpful Link: My disclaimers and disclosures page (& also see the Update, in red, at the end of the above post).