Broadcom DX Application Performance Management Reviews

The system monitoring is one area that we like. Transaction tracer is another area that has worked well. The platform monitoring features is great, as APM integrates very well with some of the application server performance monitoring interfaces.

The alerting part – if the system goes down we get an immediate notification that a resource has gone down, so it reduces the impact on the business.

The end-to-end monitoring is not good. For example, a user reports a slowness issue, but we don’t have an option in the pool to find out which layer is causing the problem. The system doesn’t break down the application performance to show you what’s happening and where.

I've been using it for over three years.

It is a long process. Use-case monitoring - you have to know the application in and out to make it work. Other tools allow you to create the profile and configure it later. With APM, we don’t have anything like that. Configuring the use-cases monitoring is a long, time-consuming activity, and not a user-friendly one. It requires expertise and knowledge of the applications, and CA APM.

Outages with the solution are very frequent nowadays actually. We see the APM solution going down two to three times a day. And it’s a long troubleshooting cycle, as the CA APM system seems to add a lot of performance overhead.

We haven't scaled it yet.

It’s OK. They respond and acknowledge customer requests.

We are not happy about it, because we have had more than five or six tickets open for some months.

Previously, we worked with Dynatrace and AppDynamics. We changed because our organization decided to go with the enterprise licensing options that CA offers.

It was neither straightforward nor complex, but with some effort we were able to get it right. The application configuration for system monitoring is a good feature. It integrates well with application servers, but the application use-cases and monitoring was time-consuming.

We implemented internally, partnered with a vendor team. The vendor team were good but they had to depend on CA service tickets to complete the installation. This is because they don’t have clear guidelines to configure some of the solution’s features; for example the installation guide for URI monitoring feature doesn’t cover all the use-cases, and the partner had to raise tickets with CA for assistance so there was an impact on time.

I think pricing is good, actually. That’s what made our organization choose this solution. We didn’t face many challenges with the licensing because of our enterprise agreement.

• AppDynamics
• DynaTrace

For traditional technologies it’s the right tool, but for the latest technologies it might not be the right solution. I would tell them to consider all their options before deciding on CA APM, because the configuration, installation, and maintenance are time-consuming tasks. There seem to be a number of technology & support challenges with this tool.

• Real-time information
• Historical info
• Smart instrumentation
• Customizable

• Centralized point to start studying a problem
• Fast analyses
• Getting quick solutions on most cases, but sadly, not for the hardest ones

• User interface customizable components
• Being able to establish relations with source code
• Being able to add some custom add-ons, such as graphical add-ons and/or computes
• 1.- To solve the lacks of nice graphical components i think that this area could be opened to parterns and community. If you develop some mechanism to add graphical
  components, with angular,etc, giving a template in some way that we can add your own html,css and javascript, community will generate his own widgets and share via marketplace, so they will improve your software and make it more visually appealing (same for java to workstation application). I attack some examples i have done to clarify objective.
• 2.- javascripts can be done now and added to introscope but it will better if you can add it and appear as an option same as sum, max, etc. I mean now you can create a javascript and select the metrics affected by one regex, but it will be nice to have the option to make a calculator that simply adds itself to the options and be applied on metric grupings just like sum, etc. And also share with all ppl.
• I will like to comment to you one more point. I think that introscope has to be more application focused, first question always is what applications are afectted/working,not servlets o jsp, so it will be nice that introscope has a mechanims to asociate a JSP, servlets, backend (DB schema), etc to 1 or more application or context, althoug it be manualy .

We have been using this solution for about four years.

Sometimes the workstation hangs or becomes unresponsive. However, the web application works worse, is ugly, and we prefer to use the workstation.

There were scalability issues. With a high amount of data, we found that there is some loss of information when asking for the CLW. We have an issue open on this and CA its working to solve it.

I would give technical support a rating of 7/10. They gave us fast answers when we asked for information, but there were delays to get a solution, even when the issue was clearly a bug.

The setup was easy. It was self-learning in my case.

I don't deal with pricing or licensing, but I think it is a bit expensive. However, the product is really good.

It is a very good product, but it has to fit their needs because it is mainly focused on JAVA/.NET applications, although it has agents for PHP and Node.js.

The investigator section where we can observe the agent metrics.

We were able to use CA APM to help diagnose a vendor provided product where we were experiencing slower than normal performance. While using the product, we were able to see that the issue resided in the database and were able to make adjustments to correct it.

The cost of licensing of the product could be better. The overall cost has sometimes prohibited us from installing an agent to monitor an application.

I've used it for four years.

We did, although minor. We ran into issue with some of the rights with some of the back-end files used by the enterprise manager, although newer versions seem to have less issues.

No, the application is very stable in our environment.

We are experiencing an on-going issue with our CA APM to Spectrum integration where we are unable to send alerts to the Spectrum console.

Customer service has always been very helpful thus I would rate them 9/10.

Technical support, as with any company, is hit and miss depending on who is assigned to your ticket. Overall we have had a positive experience as we have had very technically proficient folks and have had a few people who seem to struggle with supporting the product. With that said I would rate them 7/10.

We used an in-house developed application before CA APM. Our monitoring needs had grown and the solution we previously used no longer could meet our needs.

It was complex for we had to have some custom modules developed for us. We required the monitoring solution be able to monitor IBM's DataPower appliances, which CA APM could not do right out of the box. We were able to work with CA to have a custom module developed that provided us all of our DataPower monitoring needs.

Our implementation was accomplished by a mix of CA and PHI employees.

Our ROI has been high. It has allowed us to adjust applications to perform better, thus reducing our need to install high-end servers.

We did evaluate several other products. Solutions from BMC and Microsoft were evaluated but fell short of our total monitoring needs.

Keep on top of the amount of metrics that you are accumulating and make sure you have enough disk space to accommodate.

• View the smallest component and how it's performing
• See how all the components are connected
• Have a predictive alert
• To customize alerts and reports
• To use attributes to 'mark' and group components

We're CA partners and we work with their product and we deploy the solution to our customers. Working with CA APM is effective, simple, and the customers are satisfied with the solution.

The new experience center needs some improvement to works with all the attributes, but it offers great potential.

We have been using this solution for about six years.

There have been no issues with stability. Sometimes there is something to fine-tune, but you have the help of the CA communities and eventually, the help of support.

There were no scalability issues. We performed large installations without any problems.

Technical support is good and they are quick to respond. It would be better if they can create a different, more technical approach. Maybe they could go directly to second level support for partners.

We did not use another solution, although I know of other one. I think Introscope is a more complete solution.

The initial installation was easy. The fine-tuning of the environment can be tricky, especially for big environments.

I'm not the right person to ask about pricing, as I am in pre-sales.

I know the competitor's solutions, but CA APM is more complete and they have an interesting and challenging roadmap.

CA APM is based on a solid solution that could be helpful for everybody. It has a technical view where you can check every single bit of information and a map view with all the components. On top of that, Experience View can help you to look at the health of your environment and quickly identify problems or performance issues.

Before APM, all the support/information diagnostic retrieval was post-mortem. Logs retrieval with tons and tons of useless info would generate a report after several days of an issue, with no clue as to a root cause, but with several hypotheses on what was it. Now, different teams can get info even before the system crashes and can take proactive steps and find the exact point to focus their efforts to fix it.

Also, not only are the main services now monitored, but the main website with no transactions at all are included. This helps us to monitor customer experience and verify the correct functions.

There are several types of products implemented and on each one there are different features used to remark the value of it:

• In an initial pilot it helps with Error Collection, Transaction Traces, and providing general info such as Average Response Time and Responses per Interval.
• Once it's implemented with application and backend services. After the initial feedback, almost all the other app owners start to review all the info compiled from the Application Performance Monitoring (APM) platform and they also check if their architecture maps are as stated and found by APM.
• Service maturity when you can retrieve the normal metrics for every major aspect of each module and delivering this info to the correct eyes.

They need to add support for new frameworks, or at least provide a broader guide/perspectives to add them to monitoring specific agents to retrieve metrics with thresholds as a reference to guide the customer as to where they must go to achieve this.

The only issue is when the customer platform is really old. For example, where people are using client server apps developed on Delphi 1.0.

There are more issues with the app monitoring itself, since the architecture can be a little bit confusing, and in some ways even incomplete on paper. Several times after an implementation, there are a lot of other services involved and supporting the main app with the service owner not knowing, or to the contrary, the documentation doesn’t include this info.

Excellent, they are always calling and resolving issues. If there is a need to escalate it internally to get a fix or a workaround, they will do it quickly.

Several customers were using others like IBM Tivoli or an HP solution, but they don't offer an easy way to quickly check the state of the monitored app. Also, they didn’t offer a good customer experience.

Everything is swift and smooth, even when a PoC is developed, it only takes five days to complete.

I just implement it and make it work to fit the customer requirements

We didn't look at anything else.

You need to check the requirements, such as the network ports, traffic forwarding, and the supported apps. Do not be afraid of the initial response from the stakeholders, and they will quickly become supporters.

We've found Team Center a very innovative and intuitive interface. It gives us the ability to link applications to other applications and services all the way down to the database.

We're just now upgrading to it, so we haven't gotten into Team Center a lot. For now, we've mostly been using Investigator in order to triage performance bottlenecks and other problems within our enterprise systems.

We've had some hits and some misses, but our successes have been well-noted. Overall, APM improves our total customer experience and reduces our operational costs.

That said, the downside for APM is, in our case, end-user acceptance and use. We're trying to expand to other departments, show them what the value points are, and show them that we can help them with their jobs, performance, and efficiencies. With version 10, CA shifted its marketing plan and its persona, and that's been rather disruptive. I'm hoping a good disruption, but a disruption to my end users, whom I'm still trying to get turned-on to performance monitoring improvements.

We'd like to see full integration of Unified Infrastructure Management to take over the infrastructure monitoring from APM. They should have APM sterilized away from the infrastructure using the custom scripts through the environment performance agents. CA should go over and use the technology from Nimsoft or Unified Infrastructure Management to gather that information and marry it up back to the application.

We're not really having issues. We're only half way through the total capacity that we've projected. We're currently at about 800,000 metrics. We originally wanted about two and a half million. We're getting there, slowly, but we're getting there.

We're hoping to scale it out to the entire IT staff with about 1200 total servers including a mainframe, which is massive, through four call centers. We've got it scaled to that, but it's our end users' uses of the technology in order to improve what they're doing in the varying departments that will ultimately determine how well it scales. And so far, so good.

We only had one main issue with our upgrade. It took longer than I would have liked. I pushed the issue up through our account manager, got a call, and within an hour, we got it fixed, though that took us a week-and-a-half to get to that point. We expected it to take an hour-and-a-half.

Other teams have their own products -- Splunk, NetFusion or NetQoS -- but we're slowly hoping to turn them over to CA.

When we first installed, it took us six months to install it and get it somewhat usable. Our upgrades, because we're having to step development or step environments, usually takes us about three months.

The step environment is where we do dev tests. This involves stress and QA cycles, and then production. Each one has to have a month to get everything installed, tested, and verified to make sure it doesn't impact our core applications.

We just now finished our Phase 2 upgrade to our second tier, which is our performance test environment and our QA two environments. It went really well. The reason why it took us a month to do our test was because we had to get everything lined up with CA support and to get the install and upgrade completed.

When we first installed, it took us six months to install it and to get it somewhat usable. Because we have to step development or step environments, it usually takes us about three months.

No other vendors were looked at. APM was part of an enterprise contract deal. We had several other CA products and CA offered APM as an add-on to our contract, which increased our costs, but the vice-president and CEO and CFO thought it would be worth it. It's been five years and we're doing pretty well.

This solution gives feedback exactly the way that we need it with data specific to tasks, timelines, and analyses. It ensures we are making the most of our production and QA stages.

They tried to streamline the organization, that was the initial point of using APM. It led to so many internal changes, but it didn’t affect the organization much at all in the end.

But the good thing about the solution is there is little overhead. It has a very small footprint on the system and it doesn’t affect the performance of the CPU.

We will move to version 10.1 when the time is right, but we're exploring our options for something that will in-fact streamline our organization.

We have no issues deploying it.

It’s very stable. We haven’t had a single problem with this product.

This solution is entirely scalable from our point of view.

I think it’s very good, you can talk to them and you get good support. We have never had an issue with the support from CA.

We used when it was still Wiley Interscope. Then they were then bought by CA, so it was a natural progression into the CA product.

The setup was quite complex initially. They came to us and worked with us in-house, which was great to learn from them.

We have had big discussions about changing, but we have recently decided not to. We are staying with them for now.

I recommend that they should look at their options deeply.

I use it to track performance on the production environment and QA environment.

The time it takes to track problems in applications is the most valuable return that we have from this solution. 

The transactions rate feature is the most valuable feature. It shows the deep histories of everything that's running on an even transaction. That's why it is so useful.

I would like for them to develop a feature that controls .net agents remotely. It would be very useful and we don't have this feature now.

They need to improve the crossing over of data from large files and they should use LUNIX heavily. There's room for improvement there. 

I have a good impression of the stability. 

I use technical support a lot. They've performed well. They always respond quickly and they are assertive. We have had a good experience with support.

The initial setup was straightforward.

The quality of software is one of the main criteria that we consider when evaluating a solution.

I would rate it an eight out of ten. The reason it's not a ten is because they don't focus enough on improving over time like other competitors do who have a more modern and complete tool. 

They should develop the user experience so that you don't need to put in other agents. Today you have to use another host to bring up your vision. If they would have a single agent with all this information, it would be perfect.