Broadcom DX Application Performance Management Reviews

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. 

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 most valuable feature is the flexibility and how you can get any data pretty much anywhere. They have a lot of out-of-the-box solutions for applications, servers and web servers, but you can also use their APIs and their EPA to get additional data, building and correlating it altogether.

We have some applications from which we can't get data with out-of-the-box tools from CA or even AppDynamics, so we need the EPA agent to get that data and then compare them to those that are captured with out-of-the-box tools. We really appreciate that that's a strength and a flexibility of APM.

It's critical that we're able to find actual problems or issues with applications on our network. We use APM to do that, as well as to troubleshoot the causes or triage them so that we know where to look for the problem.

It's got a steep learning curve, although some parts of it are easy to use.

I also know that CA is doing a big push to play catch-up to get the UI to be a little more streamlined, easier, and intuitive to use. Hopefully when they do that, they'll have an advantage over other solutions out there, like AppDynamics.

I haven't had issues with deployment.

In the previous releases, that was an issue for both my current and former companies. There was a conflict between the Java agent and our app servers. It was conflicting with some of the web services and so it crashed our servers. In the current release, however, I'm not aware of any such stability issues.

So far, scalability has not been an issue. There's a limit on the number of enterprise managers where the data goes to be reviewed. The solution, however, is that if you reach the single-cluster limits, then you can federate other clusters, so that way you can view up.

The main issue with scalability is, however, that there's a lot of overhead required to keep it expanding. With AppDynamics, on the other hand, you at least only need one server in order to accommodate a lot more agents. With CA APM, you need a lot of central servers and enterprise managers to have that same load. It is scalable, but the maintenance or the overhead to maintain it is a lot higher than other products.

They've been slow at times to get us answers and solutions, such as a few years back when we had the issue of the agent pressuring our servers. I haven't had to submit many support tickets, though, as I have co-workers who do that primarily. The feedback I've heard from them is that AppDynamics has done a better job than CA with support.

We also use AppDynamics.

It was all set up before I joined.

Both CA APM and AppDynamics have their place, but just do your research. CA, I think, has demonstrated their commitment to the product and improving it and playing catch-up in areas where they need to.

It show us a clearer view of our business and we can take proactive decisions using data collected by CA CEM.

With the CA Customer Experience we take Marketing actions, for example, we know how many transactions ocurred in our internet banking.

With the CA CEM value settings we can measure the size of ours earnings and even more of our losses caused by defects.

CA CEM show us a business vision from the transaction hierarchy. It provides easily understandable information to users with little or any knowledge. Assigning a monetary value to transactions is very useful for understanding the amount of money being lost by an organization because of a problem or even the total gain for a specific transaction.

The icing on the cake is the troubleshooting tab that helps us see possibilities for the continuous improvement of the business.

With the new feature CA Team Center is much easier to view the information of my user experience, with this unified vision, it was even practical for lay users to use the tool

The CA APM workstation (console) connection is too slow with some metrics.

The integration with CA Spectrum is quite difficult to create, and it is also only one way, only being used to view alarms coming from CA APM. It would be interesting to visualize APM metrics in CA Spectrum OneClick. I see a need to improve this integration.

The CA APM Comand Center is very good, on paper, but in pract does not work in the best way, this promises to be a and indispensable feature of the product, but has much to evolve.

I have not encountered any stability issues, in the newest version Workstation Works fine

I have not encountered any scalability issues.

Customer Service:

Customer service is excellent.

Technical Support:

Technical support is high quality, but little quantity... I'd like to have more APM support.

No.

If you have a Postgres DB, is annoying to Update CA APM, i have some difficults to update this, but if you can simply forget the previous base withou need to save previous data, it is much easier to install directly.

I implemented the solution in my enviroment, but following the advice of a Support team of the manufacturer.

I neve calculated my ROI, but i have date on how my transaction improved, in a more Technical way, I hada a 25% rection in defects and 37% redection in transactions response time, as well as a nearly 100% increase in the number of transactins ocurring on a daily basis.

Althougth it is a bit expensive, it is really worth it

Yes, Dynatracer and AppDynamics, but i prefer CA APM because of the Customer Experience feature, we are a financial institution, we use the CA CEM to Marketing actions, financial and etc. I think the Customer Experience of the CA CEM is the best in the Market.

During the implemetation, you must understand "where you are today". From that, you should think about "where you want to be" in a certain period of time, and what you have to do to get there. CA APM will help you get there, but you must first draw up your goal. This tool requires a certain maturity to deliver the expected results, so start with a less-complex enviroment, mature the use of the solution use and from there, add the more complex structures.

The most valuable feature of this product is the CA Customer Experience Manager, as it shows the real impact on the customers.

We are constantly looking at the customer experience. Thus, in this aspect, it has helped us to improve the execution time and get real access to the problems.

I would appreciate an easier way to record transactions, i.e., in the CA Customer Experience Manager (CA CEM). One difficulty I have is to identify the fields that make the transactions unique, so that APM can identify them in the probe. If they look at other transaction recording software, they can take some ideas from there as to how to simplify the process. I have a lot of arguments from the HTTP packets and also matching the fields requires a deep knowledge of the app that is being monitored.

The other thing that can be improved is that the dashboard edition in the CA APM is very limited and basic. It is almost impossible to create a dashboard with some graphic complexity and the diversity of the tools is also limited.

I have used this solution for two years.

We did encounter stability issues in regards to the DB access and the time it takes to navigate through the application.

Despite the complexity, we did not encounter any scalability issues.

The technical support is very good.

Previously, I have used another solution but in a different institution.

I did not do the initial setup. It was hard to catch up with the setup process when we were presented with the solution.

You should create a user manual according to your system.

The solution gives us the flexibility to create new metrics and measure whatever we need. It makes it possible to monitor the full range of applications from the most complex to the most simple ones.

When the SAP requests start to become slow, I can proactively warn our internal customers to stay alert for any impact.

The customer experience management can be improved by making it possible to track down the user actions on a single page. I would like the tool to give me the exact path taken by my customer on my website, making it easy to understand his needs and the context of any problem that occurred during his visit. Then I wouldn’t need to ask him to run the same scenario again.

We have had this solution for three years.

We have not had any issues with stability.

We have not had any issues with scalability.

Technical support has been great.

I was involved in the installation and it was complex. Every APM environment takes time to make it trustworthy enough to create useful alarms and metrics.

Decide what you want to monitor. Improve the DevOps culture in your company. You need to know your applications before monitoring them.

• Business transaction defects from CEM.
• ADA helps find response time issues in the network.
• Team Center gives an overview of whole system.

• It helps in proactive monitoring.
• We can assess a risk in a test environment if application is going live.
• We can do OS, application and EUM with some part of network monitoring on single dashboard.

• Documentation is not straight forward and it could be easier to understand and implement.
• Integration with other tools.
• Dashboard look needs to be more attractive and dynamic.

I have used it for seven years.

I have not encountered any deployment issues.

Stability will be an issue if you install and configure it wrong. Otherwise, it's good and stable.

We encountered a stability issue. A customer wants to see more metrics but performance will degrade if you disable Data limited to 100 matching metrics.

Customer service is 6/10.

Technical support is 6/10.

I did not previously use a different solution.

Initial setup was complex because we implemented it for the first time in 2010 and everyone was learning about it. :-)

A vendor team implemented it and I rate their level of expertise 8/10.

EPA provides more flexibility for meeting customer requirements. CEM and Investigator provide realistic data by which user feels more dependent on them.

The pricing and licensing costs are too high.

Before choosing this product, I did not evaluate other options.

It helps us to monitor our infrastructure by providing us insight into issues and giving us metrics for various data points.

It helps us to troubleshoot issues or to isolate issues faster, and we can then take the appropriate actions to resolve those issues.

Mainly, what we are seeing are problems with our ability to manage all the agents across the board. That's just one of the problems we are seeing with this solution.

I wasn't involved with deployment.

We've had no issues with APM and it has, in fact, been quite stable for us.

We had no problems scaling it.

I haven't yet had to use technical support for APM.

I wasn't involved in the setup.

APM is quite nice, especially with the new features in version 10. It's quite an impressive solution, and you should give it a shot.