Broadcom DX Application Performance Management Reviews

We are using it for application performance monitoring. We have about 2000 applications and mobile applications. We are even using it for applications in the cloud now. So, we are pretty happy with the product.

It is the easiest way to obtain metrics in order to understand the behavior of the application, and also, if the application and the users are working well. 

1. We are receiving feedback from the DevOps teams in order to improve the way they are building new applications. 
2. We are discovering how the user uses the applications and what their performance is with them.

It does not help prioritize application performance issues at the moment, but the application and the product are working well. 

I would like to see a mobile application for the dashboard or the performance.

It is very stable.

The scalability is very good, because we used to have only the latest applications and we are now moving to containers and the newest technologies. 

The technical support is responsive.

At the beginning, it was very easy. However, the fine tuning was complex. At the very start, we used a basic metrics. Once we used more complex metrics, it was hard to fine tune. In the end, it is easy to use. 

It is very useful for us. We are using a lot of their metrics and their features.

• Experience View: Provides a business-focused view. It answers the key question as to what is the customer experience, with a minimal amount of work required.
• Assisted Triage and Analysis Notebook: Answers the question as to why the experience is poor, without having to do all the manual digging around.

With Experience View, our operation team has all the required information in regards to the health and quality of transactions and applications. Thus, in turn, it improves collaboration and reduces the MTTR. It doesn’t require an expert to identify the RCA.

It needs to work on the mobility and the digital aspects, as they are currently getting merged in today’s scenario.

I have been using this solution for the past five years.

There were no stability issues, i.e., not with its current features.

We did experience some scalability issues, i.e., only at the mobility experience monitoring end.

I would give technical support a rating of 9/10.

AppDynamics and Dynatrace are equally good solutions.

The initial setup is straightforward. With the default dashboard and differential analysis, there is no need to configure static threshold. It starts to deliver the greater value to the customer from day one.

We are MSP partners, so we have been delivering the best licensing options for our own customers.

We looked at other solutions, namely AppDynamics and Dynatrace.

• Delivers an easy, proactive, intelligent, and collaborative (EPIC) solution
• Helps to deliver a flawless user experience
• Has end-to-end application monitoring coverage, i.e., from mobile to mainframe
• Available in the SaaS version

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.

The most valuable feature for us with APM is the depth to which you can go into the actual instances that are occurring. So, whether it's SQL or the Java agent, you're able to get really deep information.

We're just now adopting APM, but we anticipate that it'll be very helpful with level-3 and level-4 triage.

I'd like to see more source code at the exceptions level. I'd like to be able to get down to the actual code-class file and know what the issues are there. With APM, we stop at just a hair above that, but to be able to get down to that specific level would be nice. I'd like to be able to get that granular.

We've had no issues with deployment.

We've had some challenges in the integration with the agent. It's had some conflicts from a Java-server perspective, but outside of that it's been very stable.

No scalability issues so far. That's been fine.

I don't use tech support for anything. We have our own internal team.

I wasn't involved in the setup.

Take a look at what you're using it for because it's not for every application.

The thing that is most valuable to us is the desktop console application CA Introscope Workstation. It is very easy to use. We tried other tools before (IBM Tivoli, for example), but the console was very difficult to use. CA Introscope Workstation is the first tool that was quickly embraced by our developers and became one of the tools they use on a daily basis. This is very important because, in reality, only developers can really interpret the metrics collected by the tool.

CA APM is mostly used during production post-rollout week. This is when our developers can quickly pinpoint any performance issues we might be having in production. Since the tool gives us near-real-time information, we lag only 15 seconds, we can quickly see bad trends and respond to them. Before APM, we were more reactive then proactive.

We are constantly adding new technologies to our stack and monitoring those is sometimes a pain because CA APM does not support some of these out of the box. For example, we have recently added things like MongoDB, Elasticsearch, memcached, etc. All of these tools come with excellent monitoring APIs accessed using REST, but CA APM doesn't come with support for collecting metrics via a REST endpoint. This really should be addressed – too many services come with a simple REST API utilizing JSON which should be very simple to collect.

We have been using CA APM for over five years to provide real-time monitoring of our IBM WebSphere-based production systems. We're currently in the process of upgrading to v10.

No issues.

CA APM performs really well and I cannot remember the last time it crashed. Granted, we are not an enormous deployment!

No issues encountered with scalability.

Over all these years we really only contacted customer support once. The issue was resolved quickly and professionally.

This tool quickly becomes very important to your organization. It is ok to use a local partner or vendor to help you out, but use that for some knowledge transfer. In the end you will need an in-house expert or two. As your applications change, so will the tool's configuration and it is best if you can do that yourself.

The good thing about licensing is that you only pay for the application serving machines you monitor. That means that all other backend servers come for free – stuff like your RDBMS, NoSQL databases, search servers (lucene, solr, elasticsearch), cache servers (memcached), etc.

We tested IBM Tivoli based solutions – it was a logical choice since we use IBM WebSphere. However, the tools were difficult to use and the whole user experience was just awful. We then piloted CA APM (CA Wily back then) and everybody fell in love with the console and the information it provided.

Plan for the involvement of your developers. This tool monitors your production applications, but only the developers know exactly what to monitor. Sure, the tool can give you metrics for method call, but somebody needs to give you a list of methods to monitor – you cannot monitor every single method! You will need input from the people who created the applications you want to monitor.

The transition to APM Team Center as the primary console in APM 10 will definitely be the most valuable feature.

The ATC shows a lot of potential on how we view performance metrics on the front-end and back-end connections in a single view.

An APM tool should have the capability to provide a high-level view of the monitored application and APM 10 is heading in the right direction by just doing that. A single-window view of performance metrics, timeline, applications, alerts and heat maps (DA) throw a lot of data to an engineer in a quick glance.

Another new feature may just have to be Entry Point Discovery. The capability of the agent to detect the application entry point and create custom pbd for this. Interesting concept of automatic discovery and prescriptive change.

CA APM strength is the Custom Instrumentation - just having the capability to capture performance metrics for classes and methods in the application makes this tool a elite candidate.

CA APM is the go-to tool for any performance-related issues. It is always there monitoring the non-production and production environment. It is becoming part of the DevOps stack and becoming a key support tool for Performance testing.

The tool has supported many times in identifying slow transactions and the bottlenecks in applications.

APM 10 has jumped leaps in feature improvement over the last few releases which in itself is an achievement.

The UI still feels a little outdated (though there is change) especially for Dashboards. New widgets and dynamic actions needs to be in place for this part of CA APM.

Integration with other DevOps toolsets. CA APM needs to provide easy integration capability with CI/CD and ALM tools which will provide strong value to all stages in an SDLC.

The CA APM Introscope part is a must. We use is it as well in pre-production for deep dive diagnostics and in production to get a good follow up of application performances.

We had for several applications performance issues. With Introscope we were in many cases able to pin-point the bottleneck(s) and debrief it to the dev organization to improve their applications.

Faster deployments, in the form of a SAAS solution to support better POC’s.

1.5 years

Yes. Our first project was to get more visibility of our ‘Intranet solution’ based on WebSphere Portal. We tried to use CA APM CEM to get an understanding of the application performance around the globe. We needed extra code enrichments as CEM was not able to cope with dynamic URL’s.

No issues encountered.

CEM needs good follow up as it collects big amounts of data. Close follow up is needed for critical parameters. But you can easy scale up.

Very high. We were able to work with a very high skilled service force.

Medium level. Issue were so complex that first line couldn’t help.

Yes. Part of the organization uses HP BAC Insight. We switched to CA APM as HP support was not TOP and a new direction was chosen at the corporate level.

Setup of the solution was straight forward, but our first application was to complex and therefor the first initiative failed.

We did the implementation together with the vendor team. It was very useful to work together.

I was not involved in the selection process, but I know they also looked into the Compuware solution.

If you are new to the domain then I propose to start with a simple application in a SAAS approach.