Broadcom DX Application Performance Management Reviews

We use Broadcom DX Application Performance Management for application performance. We try to have some measures about the application and provide dashboards with different key points of the application. The goal is to be proactive, active, and responsive to critical events in the system.

The solution is easy to deploy, and we have been working with customers for many years. We have very good dashboards that are very useful for getting all the parameters of the application. The real-time consolidation is a point where the solution is a bit far from competitors like Dynatrace, however, it is sufficient for our customers.

The DAW, especially, is very nice. Even DXP has an agent migration feature, which is technically very nice. 

Initially, Broadcom said that migration was not feasible and that it would be a fresh implementation. But now we have found that instead of deploying a new agent, removing the 10.7 agent, and deploying the new agent, we can actually point the agent to the new server, the new DXP server. 

So, we don't need to remove the old agent and deploy a new one. We can just redirect it. This saves a lot of time and effort on the application server side and on the Wow agent where we serve. So, it's good in terms of migration.

And as an application of DXP itself, it's pretty good, comparatively. It's kind of on par with AppDynamics and Dynatrace, apart from the AI and ML capabilities, which are kind of missing. 

Broadcom is promising and going in the right direction, but still not up to the max of the industry standards whereas Dynatrace is, with a single click and a few hours of observed availability, showing end-to-end visibility.

This solution still relies on inbuilt configuration. For example, I'm pretty much impressed with Dynatrace POC, where we deploy the agent with a simple click, click, click, and then that's it. And we did not build any alerts or anything. We just started getting the alerts, warnings, and everything on its own system, understood what the benchmark is and what is the threshold, and it started giving you the warnings and the caution alerts, the danger alerts. 

So we expect something like that should be there in Broadcom at the level. But, instead, it expects us to configure. So that is what is missing there.

Even if the server CPU usage is 95%t, it doesn't harm you. It doesn't send you any alerts. We think the system is normal. So it's not normal. So this is what they should think and send you AI/ML-related alarms on their own.

In future releases, I would like to see more AI and ML capabilities, which are kind of missing. 

Another area of improvement is its infrastructure monitoring perspective. For example, they are still using UIM, which is a good tool. But for APM, they have come to DXP. However, in terms of UIM, the unified infrastructure management, there is no DXP version or AIML version of it. So they should try to find an updated version of it so that it is not competing with the rest of the solution.

There are multiple users related to Broadcom DX Application Performance Management. During any severity or incident, our company's customers have dealt with their applications with the help of the tool, and they also use it for daily alerts, team management, and reporting.

On a daily basis, our company's customers use the tool for dashboard creation and reporting. The tool is also useful for managing any incidents, or when any high utilization happens, as it triggers the alert, and after the users get the alert, they take care of the necessary steps on the applications. Basically, there are three types of use cases when it comes to Broadcom DX Application Performance Management. The tool is used to manage in case any drill down on severity is required, to take care of reporting, and to monitor the dashboards.

In the future release of the product, I would like to see the tool have better capabilities in terms of dashboard creation and reporting. Dashboards and the reporting part are related to Broadcom DX Application Performance Management. The dashboards need to be auto-populated as they happen in any generic kind of APM tool. There is a need to build an easy way to generate the report related to application utilization.

The tool's most valuable feature stems from the product's main use cases, which are related to application drill down, so if any issue happens with any code or any other problem occurs, the tool serves as a pinpoint. Users can find help for any issues with the help of the tool. The aforementioned features of the product are valuable, in my opinion, since before any incident happens in an environment, the proactive use of the application helps reduce the severity and downtime.

A new concept (APM) to be introduced in our workplace which was never there before. Never had visibility into application (layer) performance. Prior to this our main focus was on server and network hardware monitoring. Having visibility into app performance and backend layer has been quite an eye opener in putting together the entire picture for management. We've put together a complete portrait from an ESM (Enterprise Systems Management) perspective with Broadcom/CA Tools.

We are introducing 10.1 in our dev environment and then prod down the road. APM is a new culture here so we are working with customers in getting them introduced to the product. Want to show them how deep dive provided by APM can help them with DevOps lifecycle as well as proactive monitoring. The previous version v9.5.3. we've had for about a year since we introduced a the product in our environment has been a good hands on experience for our users. Now looking forward to getting hands dirty with 10.1 and utilizing the additional capabilities. Will continue to show customers the usefulness of this tool and how they can use it to generate reports on performance of their app as well as the service it provides. There has also been reactionary situations where we have used APM and pin point the issue or able to narrow down the focus.

Updated - 08/29/2018

We now have v10.5.2 SP2 running in our Dev & Prod environment since June 2018. So, far we've had a really good reception for APM by our internal app owners. The key is now for ESM Tools to be adapted by app owners (physical, network and app layer).

Updated - 2/3/2020

We now have upgraded to v10.7.0_SP3 which has provided yet another set up stability and more capabilities for our app environment. APM Command Center (ACC) has a more features and stability from a admin and maintenance perspective.

The next upgrade (v11) changes a lot of things as Broadcom has decided to go to Kubernetes platform as for as APM upgrade and/or rollout of v11 is concerned. It will be interesting to see how customers react to this and whether it pushes them to take a look at SaaS model.

We primarily use Broadcom DX Application Performance Management with Java and JBoss, and for approximately 90 percent of our usage, we utilize the Introscope model with OpenShift. One issue we've encountered is that we're unable to use agents in OpenShift 4, which only affects agents installed in the image. This is one of the reasons we are considering updating to a more recent solution.

The bank here in Brazil, and the world, need to ensure that transactions are processed in the shortest amount of time possible. We closely monitor this to avoid penalties. Additionally, having the ability to closely monitor the resources of our machines with Broadcom DX Application Performance Management has been helpful for us.

It is a first line of defense for application performance monitoring and management to understand the customer usage patterns. When we get any major incident or a production issue, we can isolate the area where there is a probable problem. 

Adding a layer with built-in some service level guarantees between the operations, development, and support, give us one of the key disciplines that this product has pushed us to evolve into. Previously, it was bunch of loosely built operations metric infrastructure applications. I would get a call (someone I know), you know me and let's start working together, because there is a problem. Now, having this alerting in place and metrics showing themselves for what is in store and what we should work on, there is a service level that is being built across these teams so they exactly know how to work. That is a very good thing to bring as a discipline.

It is very hard, especially for banks working from the Canadian space, because we are traditional in nature. So, it is very hard to bring about change. A product like this has broken the ice in two years in good amount of time in Canadian market and Canadian technical space. It has been able to establish itself. There has been a little push for certain disciplinary changes and behavioral changes within the teams that work in the bank.

Currently, we are building a visibility dashboard which allows our level-1 and level-2 engineering teams to actually look at the events, and be able to designate which ones are critical, which are important. It alerts them. They are able to simply look at a dashboard to be able to predict and resolve issues.

The CA tools allow to me to get into detailed transactions for custom ranking, and be able to make predictions. It also gathers data. Some other tools may be good at one area, but not good overall, including the mainframe.

In our organization, it was very common to create crisis rooms where we gathered experts from all areas to investigate an application problem by allegations of users about problems of slowness and errors. After we started using APM in our environment, we managed to reduce the creation of these rooms by 90%.

• Detection of errors that occur to users
• Measurement of response time
• Transaction traces