Broadcom DX Application Performance Management Reviews

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. 

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.