Broadcom DX Application Performance Management Reviews

The ability to quickly create alarms, actions, and dashboards is very valuable to us.

We have a key APM dashboard that is the primary dashboard utilized by IS Operations Center. We use it to evaluate the health of our primary customer and associated impacts on the application suite.

The documentation on customizing instrumentation of methods and classes (derivative files) could be improved, as well as some of the documentation interfacing into other APM products (ADA, CEM, ABA).

We've used it for three-and-a-half years.

Excessive errors in the application being monitored caused us to back off the level of monitoring due to the amount of traces being gathered.

The application has been very stable for us.

We've not had any issues with the scalability.

Customer service is excellent. Every time we have opened an issue, it is resolved quickly.

Technical support have a very high level of knowledge.

There was no previous solution in use.

The initial setup was straightforward. The biggest issues were getting internal people knowledgeable about the application to assist with defining methods and classes for instrumentation.

We used a CA team for implementation who were outstanding.

You should be aware when dealing with VM guests that you are required to license the entire VM host.

We also looked at Oracle Enterprise Manager.

Have your team who will operate be actively involved in the implementation. Get your application and infrastructure teams actively engaged in utilizing it for troubleshooting and analysis.

The most valuable features are:

• It's simple to use,

• The interface is a light engine,
• It uses almost no Java, which for us is excellent.

It's provided us with consolidated reports and a monitoring dashboard. With the monitoring dashboard, it’s easy to monitor things all in one place.

Also, it's helped us greatly that the dashboard allows us to create very customizable views that give us the information we need to determine the overall status of network health.

I'd like more what-you-see-is-what-you-get functionalities. That is, I want more customizable features that require less back-end configuration.

Once we moved past the basic setup and customized it for our needs, there have been no issues with deployment.

It’s very stable. It at least works to the specs. But we plan to push the solution more and, eventually, find out more about it.

It’s scalable, but not right out of the box, even though we were told it was designed to be out-of-the-box scalable.

The support is superb. They have the technical knowledge, but you just have to get to the right person. They are very quick to respond and follow up as promised.

It was a management decision five years ago as they wanted to work with CA. It was because we wanted to keep our IT management software under one umbrella. This was a high-level decision.

The basic steps are straightforward, but there is probably more documentation for customized set-ups that they should provide. We needed support, so, yes, the basic setup was straightforward, but not in customizing it.

It was a management decision 5 years ago as they wanted to work with CA.

Research the logistics of the implementation specific to your needs. See how other customers are using it, so go to them and find out about implementation and see how it works in real life.

The most valuable features are performance monitoring and alerting. You can set baselines and anything above them will trigger an alert.

The monitoring tool is able to monitor many teams at a time. We also use it to monitor our web agent. It’s also Java-based and versatile.

The documentation could better. It doesn't provide good descriptions of what some data are doing, and there's no good place to see what all the data might mean. You just kind of have to understand how everything works and make your own interpretations and draw your own conclusions.

It’s great, there are no issues with stability. We've just installed it, turned it on, and it just runs.

There are no issues there. It’ll run on as many platforms as you can run it on.

Technical support is quick to respond and very knowledgeable.

I was not involved in the initial setup, but I've not heard that it wasn't anything but straightforward.

CA is great to work with, but to use it, just learn the product suites and how they interact. Make sure you have a good layout and make sure you have everything you need.

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.

It reduces the downtime of applications, and has, in fact, minimized it to approximately 5 percent, and possibly even less than that.

1. Root Cause Analysis. For example, I have an application in my environment and it suddenly it goes down. I then need to find out which team to consult and whose fault it is: coding, database, network, or something else. No one is ready to accept that it is their fault, leading to the blame game. As a result, it takes me a lot of time to identify the right person, assuming I can find the right team. Then, identifying the root cause of the issue and resolving it will take more time, leading to loss of business. CA APM, however, easily updates the exact location of the error, which not only saves time but effort as well.
2. CA APM not only does root cause analysis, but it is smart enough to proactively identify an issue that could happen and advise me to do something to prevent it.
3. Over time there have been positive changes. For example, it now has automatic investigation, through the use of AI. CA APM has the advantage that we can create plug-ins. We can do whatever we want to do. It's like a Linux machine. Whatever you want to do you can, by scripting. That kind of customization is not available in Dynatrace or AppDynamics.

Automatic report generation needs work.

No issues encountered.

No issues encountered.

Customer Service:

9/10

Technical Support:

9/10

I used logs to study applications' behaviour, but that requires a separate team to properly handle it. There was dependency on their workflow. Now, we don't require a separate team. Additionally, the CIO can see the reports on his mobile.

The initial setup requires some understanding of your applications. For example, you need to know how much response time is fair for a function in that program or the response time of a given page or the application overall.

Implementation should be done by an expert as an average implementer would only be able to provide 60 to 80 percent usage of the tool.

It varies depending on the environment.

You should only use a preferred partner of CA.

Over the couple of years, since I first reviewed the product here, my rating of it hasn't changed. I still rate it at eight out of ten. I rated it eight because it is a good CEM experience but there is room for improvement with CA APM. It is it's quite tricky to implement because you need to have traffic monitoring, etc. in place.

I have been using Dynatrace for the last nine months or so and I would rate it at nine out of ten.

We are using it for application performance management (APM).

For example, before each upgrade of critical mission application, we have the APM set for prep, and all administrators can do a stretch test, and they see how applications are working under the load. It is great, because they see which part of the code, network, or any programs on the database are slow. We are using it, not for productions, for the testing in pre-production.

We are using the web view for the displaying the data and interpreting the dashboarding for the customer.

The product fits its functions. The presentation layer is nice for me. However, what I would like to improve is its integrations with the dashboarding of other CA products.

It is very stable. We have not experienced any crashes. If we have any performance issues, we just edit some manager and we can continue.

The scalability is really fast. Though maybe it should be faster. Maybe it is still some point for improvement for the APM if CA would provide some docker installation, this would make it even faster. 

Because the docker container is a coached service, and if it will have a some performance issue, we will automatically deploy the new docker installation and a new docker agent to the endpoint and do everything possible without installation. 

When I catch the right Level 2 engineer on the APM site, everything is fine, and I would give them an eight out of 10. They are great. 

If you will ask me about the general Level 1 support of the CA, and I would give them a two or three out of 10 because it takes a long time to get to them to focus on the program. Also, it takes a long time to redirect to the right Level 2 engineer. 

The setup is complex. It is a little bit difficult to explain to our customers what APM is because we have problems to find the right people on the customer site. CA could provide a simple explanation for the technical customers.

AppDynamics.

Anybody can work with the APM, because this solution is so flexible.

Right now, it is the standard product for the application performance management RAR. There a lot concurrent solutions from different vendors. It is a really good, stable, flexible product, but there are no special features when I compare it with with the other solutions from the other vendors. 

Application triage is the most valuable feature. It gives precise insights about problems and leads to the root cause very quickly. We use CA APM internally to monitor and diagnose Java-based systems.

CA APM helps to identify problems and make faster decisions so as to re-establish the service in a precise way.

It would be very helpful to have transaction insights with a more transparent configuration. If we could have user experience information without using a network tap, then the use of this feature would bring more value in more cases.

I have used this solution for four years.

I have not encountered any stability issues.

I have not encountered any scalability issues.

I would give the technical support 10/10 rating; they are very good. They have highly skilled staff and are available 24 hours a day.

We did not use any other solution.

The setup was straightforward; with the latest versions of CA APM, it is even more straightforward.

You need to think cost versus benefit. It is an investment and can address almost any application issues within many IT environments.

We did not evaluate other products before choosing this product.

You should consider using CA APM even in the cloud. CA is focusing to deliver full APM stack in the cloud and not just on-premise. It is a complete solution.

APM is a master in monitoring application performance. When we emphasize performance, it focuses on business transactions and helps provide a good amount of successful transactions. In order to enhance application availability, rigorous monitoring of its components’ performance is very important.

APM helps in monitoring performance of application with end-to-end application component visibility.

• Reduced troubleshooting time by identifying the exact point of failure
• Capacity planning of infra based on application performance

Out-of-the-box report templates need to be incorporated. Agent performance reports and transaction statistics report need to be incorporated. Agent performance reports will help us to monitor agent communication and availability. Transaction statistics will help us to monitor what are the transactions flowing into the system.

LDAP and EEM integration should be simplified like in other CA Solutions.

I have used it for one year.

Until now, I have not faced any stability issues.

Until now, I have not faced any scalability issues.

Technical support is mind-blowing. They are really a big helping hand with administrating the application.

This is the first time I am working with an APM solution.

Initial setup was very simple. We did our implementation in a day and were able to provide output to our management in a short amount of time.

Pricing and licensing are straightforward. It is very easy to plan the license requirement, as the license terms are clearly documented.

Before choosing this product, we did a proof of concept for Zenoss. We felt CA APM is agile and aptly engineered to meet our requirements.

It is the very best solution. It will surely enhance anyone’s application performance and resource utilization.