Tenium vs Pingdom

Pingdom today, and the reason people still buy it

Pingdom is one of the oldest names in uptime monitoring and it has stayed relevant by pairing synthetic checks with real user monitoring and scripted transaction tests. A company that wants to know both whether the site is up and how real visitors experience it can get that in one place. It is also part of a large software group, which helps if your purchasing rules favour established vendors.

For an agency or a freelancer the position is different. Larger Pingdom tiers are priced by quote, the status page is a single public page, and the product is built around one company monitoring its own web properties rather than many clients.

Prices you can and cannot compare

This is the one page where we do not print a saving. Pingdom publishes an entry tier with a small number of checks, and we do not have a verified public price for a tier of around 100 checks, so we will not guess one. Anyone showing you a precise saving against an unpublished quote is guessing.

What you can do is ask Pingdom for a quote that names the check count, the interval and the number of users, and set it against the Tenium figures. For reference, Starter is $7 for 100 monitors, Pro is $29 for 300, and Agency is $59 for 1000. Dollar prices are compared as published. Euro prices are shown as published and converted at about EUR 1 = USD 1.08 for the percentages.

• 20 monitors, 3 people: Tenium Pro at $29. For Pingdom: quote-based at this size; ask for 20 checks at one-minute or faster intervals.
• 100 monitors, 3 people: Tenium Pro at $29. For Pingdom: quote-based at this size; ask for 100 checks at one-minute or faster intervals.
• 400 monitors, 3 people: Tenium Agency at $59. For Pingdom: quote-based at this size; ask for 400 checks at one-minute or faster intervals.

Mapping a Pingdom setup onto Tenium

Most of what an uptime plan contains has a direct counterpart:

• Uptime checks become HTTP, keyword, ping or port monitors, all available on the Free plan.
• Transaction checks that click through a flow have no equivalent. The closest substitute is a JSON or keyword check on the endpoint behind the flow, which catches a broken backend but not a broken button.
• Real user monitoring has no equivalent. Tenium measures from its own check locations, never from visitors browsers.
• Email alert groups become contacts in Tenium, and escalation steps become delays on those contacts from Pro upwards.
• The single public status page becomes as many pages as your plan allows, each with its own custom domain.

Moving the data

Pull your checks from the Pingdom API as JSON, or save them as CSV, and upload the file in Tenium via Import in the sidebar. Name, URL, type and interval are read where your file has them, and you see the result before anything is created; tags and alert contacts are not imported, so add contacts again by hand. Confirm that every monitor lands with the interval you intend, because intervals shorter than your plan minimum are raised to it.

Because Tenium verifies an outage from 2 regions before alerting, you may see fewer but better-documented incidents than before. That is expected; do not read a quiet first week as a broken import.

Cron jobs, which Pingdom does not cover well

If you want to know that a nightly backup or a queue worker ran, you need heartbeat monitoring, where the job calls a URL and the monitor alerts when the call is missing. Tenium includes this from the Starter plan (20 heartbeats; Pro has room for 100). The URL looks like a short path with an ID, and you append /start, /finish or /fail to track duration and failures. Treat this as a bonus of moving, not a reason on its own.

Do not switch if

You depend on real user monitoring, on scripted browser transactions, or on corporate single sign-on. Tenium has none of these. Also stay if your contract with a client names Pingdom reports explicitly. You can still add Tenium next to it for the agency features, which costs little and gives you a second set of probes.