Broadcom DX Application Performance Management Reviews

Primarily the product is used for monitoring the Business critical banking applications of my Organisation like Internet Banking etc.

In our organization, the critical applications are being monitored with thresholds set for any malfunctioning through APM. Also, we have configured Dashboards which display any deviation of the application from normal. Further, the Tool is integrated with CA SOI, which displays the alerts at the Service level. Overall the Tools helps to detect any issue emerging with indepth analysis available for the resolution through APM components.

Presently we are making maximum use of this product for IBM Websphere monitoring with agents monitoring the MQ's. We are also using the java and .net agents for monitoring the respective applications. Introscope Reports and Dashboards provide business users a customized option to view data that is most important from their perspective. Along with Introscope, the CEM is being used for the monitoring of the Business transactions for defects and incidents.

Based on my experience with the product, I found two areas which can be improved on in future. Firstly, the APM upgrade procedure is a bit complicated with compatibility issues which can emerge like between agents and EM/Collectors. Secondly, the CA documentation/Knowledge Articles on the product can be improved.

The product is quite stable once the deployment is finished. Overall, the product properly deployed is quite stable.

Scalibility is quite well defined for the product with proper Sizing sheet available for the pre deployment scenario and finalizing accurately based on the same.

On a scale of 1-5, I would rate the level of technical support a 3.5. The reason being as per my experience, CA is lacking in resources having in-depth knowledge of the product, but it is being improved over time.

The initial setup is not that complex. But eventually the complexity can grow, but not to unmanageable levels since the variety of monitoring it can perform is vast. The organization can go for as much in-depth monitoring as they require.

It was a vendor team implementation. The level of their expertise was good.

My domain experience is with CA Service Assurance Tools. I have worked with other CA products like CA Spectrum, eHealth, NetQoS, CA UIM (Ca Nimsoft). Hence this was my 1st preference and it stood by CA standards.

It's a detailed product which suits maximum client requirements.

The usability and dashboarding. That's how our clients see the information. Also, deep trace analysis is valuable because that's how we figure out where our problems are.

It's helped us improve in terms of solutions by displaying key system data easily.

Data organization and creation of those dashboards. These seem to be getting better in the newer versions. Also, distribution and version control.

I’ve been using CA APM for between nine or 10 years.

The performance issues we have are on our end and we don't hold CA accountable for that.

The only problems we have are limited by our hardware.

We don't usually end up calling support because the other guy that works on it does a lot of high level development and he's out in Colorado. If there is an issue here I can't figure out, we usually end up having to go to engineers to get it solved. In the past when we've called them it's been really hit or miss. Like on a scale of one to 10, I'd give it a six.
Usually to get our questions answered because we consider ourselves pretty advanced users and we're kinda on the edge of what's going on. We usually have to get a couple of tiers in before we can get the questions that we have answered.

I personally haven't used other solutions. I was hired here specifically because I have experience with Intrascope at my previous job and we had actually deployed it there as our first APM solution.

I've set it up on new systems several times. It's pretty straightforward.

I don't remember back then because I actually wasn't involved in the decision making process. Since we've used it, we are constantly looking at other tools. We looked just to evaluate. We've evaluated a new solution at Dynamic and Dynatrace and a BMC solution or whatever they call it. We were impressed.

I would suggest that they don't underestimate the overwhelming amount of data that will come through and have their clients prepared for that. Because we end up spending a lot of time interpreting data for other people and really getting the users of the application involved is probably the most important thing in order to be successful. Then from a technical standpoint, just don't think for a second that you can skimp on some specifications because you will need all the resources you can get.

It's awesome. But I think CAPM is a little behind, at least up to this point with the versions we're on. On displaying data and making it easier to use for people that aren't in the tool eight hours a day.

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.

The most valuable feature is the ability to find performance issue. It's a end-to-end software monitoring solution that uses an wide variety of technologies, which is also very valuable to us.

With this product, we were able to increase our applications' performance, their response times, and to improve the satisfaction of our customers.

The automatic identification of business transactions need to be improved. Also, the end-user experience and the web console should be improved.

We have been using it since 2008.

We've had no issues with deployment.

We detected some issues on the web console in regards to its stability.

We didn’t have any issues scaling it for our needs.

7/10

We used a different solution and we switched because this one was more stable and did not impact application response times.

The initial setup was straightforward. We just deploy the agents and started to have visibly.

Any company has its own needs we are not able to give any advice other than to make sure it fits your needs.

We checked all the major competitors in this area. We chose this because it was the only one that was compatible with all our technologies.

First, deploy the agents and get to know the user interface concepts. Afterwards, try to find the root cause of your biggest performance issue and you will see that it is very simple.

Introscope, CEM and EP Agents

We have deployed this product at many businesses and the reviews of the customers was that it increased the value and revenue for their business.

Integration with other tools and out of the box reporting. Customization should be there for reports as this is the main feature asked for several times by customers.

Approx. 4 years

No issues. Easy deployments.

It's pretty much stable tool.

No issues

8 out of 10

6 out of 10

No, I haven't used any other APM Solution.

We work with CA.

Yes, I evaluated others as well - dynatrace. I also read Gartner's APM report.

Use the product how it was designed to be used. It allows you to test your application in a QA setup before moving an app from test to production. And after moving the application to production it encounter the ongoing issues with application which are met when an application is used to it's highest use and you can modify your application until it becomes highly stable and you will be able to submit 100% availability reports for your application to your customers. It can give a good business aspect to your application with 24x7 monitoring of your application.

As a support engineer, the most valuable component was Customer Experience Manager (CEM). Being able to detect end user defects based HTTP response code and slow time, while differentiating between geographical locations or individual users was the biggest advantage to proactively managing root-cause analysis. And once integrated with the APM agents on those same applications, transaction tracing from end user to middleware/backend systems really did give that end-to-end view that organisations always get pitched when there is an open tender on any APM solution. From a Consulting aspect, this would have to be the new ABA (Application Behaviour Analytics) engine that is now available. It makes my job both easier and more efficient as well as clients. Being able to easily identify the end user transactions to low level internal java methods in the same screen automatically with bare minimal configuration is impressive.

Back in the support days, we were able to provide Business Service availability and performance statistics rather than just the number of P1 / P2 Incidents rose within the service desk each month. With the change of mentality to a Service Offering approach through CA APM, we first used the SLA numbers for each day to then determine which incidents where of most criticality to the business and technical support team. This meant that support resources where used more efficiently to resolve bottlenecks in load and performance during peak periods of the day.

The one thing that needs improving is the uplift of dashboards capabilities to HTML5 and flash based widgets. Some new vendors coming into the market have dashboarding capabilities that are flashier and shiny which can sometimes be a deterrent to CA APM’s proven track record to diagnostic triage.

I initially spent 2 years as a Web Application Support Analyst focused solely on using and administering the toolset for a large Victorian government department. Over the last 3 years, I have been working for a Professional Services Company implementing the CA APM solution for a number of different large companies.

Deployment of CA APM infrastructure and agents is quite easy and pain free. Issues do start to arise when you have a large enterprise environment comprising of multiple Pre-production environments and Production. The administration and configuration tasks involved to changing the configuration on agents and uplifting versions can be a long process without the use of a centralized management console for agent configuration purposes.

One of the biggest strengths with CA APM is that it is incredibly stable. In the 5 years I have used the toolset, I raised 2 support tickets about stability of which were resolved by configuration changes to suit the environment it was hosted in. The main deterrent of stability is whether it is designed to scale.

Scalability will only become a problem if your initial scope of deployment doesn't allow for the adopting of the solution in the wider business. Most solutions like CA APM are implemented in large commercial organisations that stem from siloed projects, which have an initial role of configuring, installing and providing a business benefits realization. Once this occurs and when done well, the solution needs to be able to grow and grow fast. The standalone or clustered architecture that CA APM adopts allows you to upscale and downscale your solution with minimal impact to the business, allowing for a solution that will fit all organisations deployment plans.

My experience with CA Customer Service, from Sales and Pre-Sales teams, has been of the highest standard. The team always frequently drops by to just say high and follow up any enquirers.

While working at different organisations I have overheard people talking about the lack of urgency and turnaround time when it comes to support. The CA Support team are very good at ensuring you know the progress of any given issues with constant updates.

At the end of the day, you should be selecting an APM tool that best suits your organisations requirements when it comes to Performance and Availability Management. I would recommend CA APM because I have used it both for Support and as a Consultant and seen that when done well, you can get instant quick wins straight out of the box.

Transaction Trace Session, Query Historical Errors and Investigator's Dashboards

• SLAs and User Experience improved (most of all- User Experience / Application performance)
• You can fix complex incidents with a quick look at the dashboards (CA dashboards or your custom dashboards)
• You can easily be proactive and can help to save departments a lot of time. If you have a great platform, (something that is actually very common in enterprise environments) you have a lot of log files.

Probe-based network appliance: Add more protocols (currently only supports TCP, HTTP and HTTPS) Software / Consoles / Dashboards

Over 5 years

Only in old versions (where MOM does not exists)

I would give CA customer service a 8 out of 10.

I would give CA Technical Support a 7 out of 10. They have a great knowledge database and great documentation.

The initial setup was very easy. If anything, the more complex task was the configuration of the probe-based network appliance SW. To be honest, the only issue was because of an error we had with the ISO for version 9.1.4. Our storage guys "undeploy" a NFS file system from the virtual machine and the ISO (RHEL 5.2 + TIM Sw) fails in the boot. Now you can install a supported OS on your own and then install TIM SW (you can get the TIM SW installer on your own.)

Our initial implementation was done by a CA spanish consultant and the posterior tuning with a CA partner. Working with them went well.

The initial setup was a couple of days of work. Our setup cost also included a license and initial contract. There is no day-to-day cost for my company.

I also evaluated Compuware, Lucierna and Oracle.

If you are not an APM expert and have no hands of experience with any APM solution, I recommend having CA do the initial setup (or via an experience partner).

Our primary use cases are for IT monitoring, alarms, and tracking the behavior of the IT system. We are customers of Broadcom.

The configuration and the manager tool are good features. It's very easy to deploy the parameters of the tool.

I'd like to see more integration between all the tools. You have APM, you have different management and other tools. Each tool works well by itself, but if we are talking about a suite, maybe those tools need to work well together.

I've been using this solution for a long time. 

I rate the solution eight out of 10.