Broadcom DX Application Performance Management Reviews

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. 

Before CEM, we didn't know when the users were having issues. We always learned about issues when the users called management and the managers informed us about the problems. That was an embarrassment.

With CEM, we call the users, help desk, and application support before a situation becomes problematic. Therefore, problems are deflected and embarrassments of not knowing what is happening are avoided.

The CEM (Customer Experience Manager) allows us to see user errors and proactively react to issues before they become problems.

Presentation and reporting should be improved. Very often, we use tools such as Kibana or Jaspersoft for dashboards and reporting on CA APM data because CA APM’s old interfaces do not reflect well in modern displays, compared to those new tools.

However, we are seeing an improvement with the introduction of Team Center. We would like to see the same type of graphics in the old reporting facility.

We have not had stability issues. The product is very stable and corrective maintenance is provided regularly.

We have not had scalability issues.

Support is average, but there is a great community that provides solutions almost instantly to any query.

We previously used IBM ITCAM.

It was a straightforward initial implementation. We started small and grew bigger.

Negotiate, negotiate, and negotiate.

We also evaluated IBM ITCAM.

Have a dedicated monitoring team.

Having implemented into production, we found that initially the application had quite a few incidents, alerts, and problems as we used monitoring to unearth some technical debt.

However, after implementing “smoke detectors” and resolving the technical debt, the applications have become much more stable, with fewer production incidents, fewer defects, higher reliability and quality of service.

Cross-platform business transaction tracing, custom triggers, thresholds and alerting, and deep dive root cause analysis are the most valuable features.

Cross-platform business transaction tracing supports the ability to monitor end-to-end performance across the stack, providing granular insight into customer experience KPIs, which are a critical success factor for organizations. Business transaction tracing also allows identification and drill down into problems within the stack, reducing the mean time to detect and resolve problems.

Developing custom triggers and thresholds for problem management allow the introduction of “smoke alarms”, which can prevent severity 1 system failures, improve productivity (fewer war rooms), and increase application stability, reliability, and performance.

I would like them provide more guidance on specific tuning of monitoring options to avoid unacceptable overhead. This has proven to be a little bit of a challenge, particularly in the cross enterprise CICS monitoring overhead, which we are currently working through with CA. They have been very helpful in advising us with this.

We have had stability issues. Not all applications are equal, and what works well for one app may not be applicable to another.

“Chatty” apps, excessive monitoring, or sampling can cause memory issues and server crashes resulting in a little bit of trial and error to determine monitoring levels that have minimal impact on performance and stability of environments.

We have not had any scalability issues.

Technical support is excellent.

Other parts of the organization are using Dynatrace, but both products are very capable.

The initial setup was relatively straightforward, with good documentation and technical support, both via email and on-site.

There is some research needed to determine licensing costs, based on the number of DataPower instances for the Nastel agent, for example.

We didn’t evaluate other options as this was pre-determined via our group administration.

• Make sure you sign up for the appropriate training
• Ensure you have dedicated on-site resources to implement, build, and maintain the tooling
• Make sure you extend training to the production support, developers, and business stakeholders
• Develop a monitoring and alerting strategy, with a supporting roadmap and pipeline for deployment across business-critical systems.

While out-of-the-box monitoring is relatively straightforward, the value comes from custom implementation of alerts and dashboards that focus on specific application functionality.

I think the most valuable feature is the deep dive feature. It has the ability to provide in-depth knowledge on the application code. It's invaluable.

For us, it's given us completely brand new visibility that we never had before. Application owners are able to completely understand the application better now on the back end, as well as on the front end. It’s pretty much an eye opener for them.
A lot of it, we try to do it through alerts and dashboarding. You want customers to spend a lot less time poking around and we want the dashboards to be a tell-tale sign of what is going on in their environment.

I think my biggest feedback from a negative perspective would be the presentation layer, which I think they're already working towards. The user interface, that presentation layer, I think that's already coming in the next few iterations, so I'm looking forward to that. That has been a big challenge for them.

Then also there's a lot of integration right now from within, which will be very helpful also. Mainly, on the customer experience manager side, it would be great if they could integrate that into the existing user interface.

It's pretty robust and scalable, so I haven't had any issues. I've been using these products for the last seven years, so stability-wise, it's one of the better, scalable products I have worked with.

The tech support is great. Yeah, actually, I know most of them by name since I've been there. They're very helpful, very intelligent, very professional; great customer service.

My experience has been mainly that an existing solution did not work as well, or doesn't scale as well, and so this one, CA APM, was looked at, evaluated, and decided. Some of them were above my pay grade. Once the decision was made, that's when I was involved.

I was involved with the CA professional services from the start of the deployment. We did the whole architecture and deployment. Once we were in ops mode, I also did an upgrade earlier this year. It's been pretty smooth.

There are competitors out there. When selecting CA APM, a lot of it is also the fact that, I think, it's scalability, usability, and the amount of data that it provides for the application from end to end. I don't think there are a lot of products out there that can do that.

I would definitely encourage others to evaluate it first, see what works for them. It's not for everyone. It all depends on the size and what you're trying to accomplish. I would definitely encourage them to evaluate the product as much as they can and decide from there.

It does a lot of good things. There are a few challenges. Mainly, I think it's the amount of knowledge that it provides to the application team; it's vast. I worked with two or three other products and I don't see them providing that much metric tools and information about that application the way APM does.

It gives us a lot more in-depth information that we previously didn't have for monitoring capabilities. Some of the new tools will allow us to get issues into the hands of the right support staff immediately.

We're using this solution to turn our support into being more of proactive approach than reactive to issues that are reported to us from the customers. We're actually trying to bring those issues to their attention before they bring it to our attention. With new features in version 10.5, it looks like we're taking more of an inside out approach to actually bringing the root cause immediately to our attention. This is instead of us having to start and dig down to identify what the root cause was. It brings it right to the forefront immediately without requiring additional triage. It's really changing the way that we're doing our business. This improvement is not only from a monitoring perspective where we're getting advanced notice of system issues that are occurring, but I'm actually using it as a tool to even identify where there are tuning opportunities based on our current configuration. We are also using it in working towards global standardization for our entire client base, which is something that's been lacking. It was very difficult to find all of that information in one place, readily available, and historical information like transaction activities and things of that nature. They're all now available at our fingertips, whereas before that just wasn't a possibility.

One of things that I've noticed is that in the desktop product there are some features that are really nice that are not available in APM WebView. I know that there's a concerted effort to make sure that everything will be included in the WebView portion of that, but it’s not there yet. I actually spend most of my time using Introscope, because of those features that are really useful to me personally.

I don't think we've been faced with too many challenges with stability. I know that very early on in adoption that we were having some crashes, but it's being relatively stable for the last number of weeks, even months.

We've rolled this out for a single one of our products and we're already exploring the potential of expanding that across the company to incorporate multiple products. It's something that we're definitely considering.

I have not used technical support, but the feedback that I've gotten from our system engineers is that it's been tremendous actually.

Previous to using this solution, we had a really large gap in our monitoring tools, and so it was just something that needed to be addressed, and CA APM was the right solution for us.

I was involved in the installation on more of the functional side of things. I wasn’t involved in configuration. I haven't done any of the engineering work. I was involved in setting up business transactions and a lot of those features. Initially, this setup was little bit overwhelming. I think it does take some time to get up to speed to understand how to navigate through the product, but once you get comfortable and familiar with it, it's pretty intuitive.

When selecting an APM product, I would suggest looking at the cost benefit. Find out if they are competitive with pricing, and if you are going to get return on your investment. I think I would just share some of the success that we've had already today, including, like I said, that shift of being reactive to proactive, and sharing some of the new advancements that are being made in the most recent releases that are going to make that experience even better.

The monitoring features - transaction tractability and visibility.

Also, BRTM in v9.x and the differential analysis in v10 are valuable features that are very helpful in monitoring and maintaining the application performance.

In the market, the CA APM 10.x is already out and doing well. It is much improved and meeting customer’s expectations. Moreover, the implementation is bit complex for a distributed environment.

The tool has improved a lot and still updates are there on the way. It would be easier to understand if the components involved could be less about providing the same capabilities as it already does.

I have experience of approximately two-and-a-half years on CA APM.

The issue we faced was on sizing and implementing the APM architecture as it involves multiple components in a distributed environment.

The monitoring stats we get are only 70%-80% reliable. We cannot depend completely on the monitoring view provided.

I have experience in AppDynamics, BMC, and HP APM. It all depends upon the client’s requirements. I chose this product as it was fulfilling all the stated requirements.

We have implemented the clustered architecture of CA APM. Initially, there were less complexities but when it comes to distributed deployment, it was complex.

I have experience of implementation of in–house as well as through a vendor also. Both are equal, just experience and a clear understanding of all the tool components is a must.

Expected returns gained.

CA APM is a brand name. It is easy, proactive, intelligent and collaborative. All of these features leads every business transaction, it's a loyalty-building interaction.

• Very powerful and flexible suite of tools which provide great insight into application and network performance.
• The features we use most are the introscope agents and CEM real business transaction monitoring.

Introscope Agent management is very manual, although the next version is looking to improve on this situation.

Dashboards are powerful but clunky and time-consuming. Again, the next version is looking to improve on this.

CEM/ADA are extremely powerful, but they require a lot of networking knowledge.

The user management for these tools is poor and we've found the EEM product to help with this to be quite flaky. Again, this is due to be improved upon in the coming version.

Cloud Monitor system seems to be pretty good, although I haven't used it as much as the other components.

Architecture of the OPMS (on premises monitoring system), which integrates with Cloud Monitor, seems over-complicated and doesn't integrate well with the main system.

Approximately 1 year.

Customer Service is excellent. They're very fast and provide knowledgeable responses.

The support personnel I've dealt with have been very responsive and professional.

APM 10 Team Center provides a faster way to diagnose environmental issues and complements the existing APM WebView.

The enhancements related to Smart Instrumentation, Differential Analysis, and tracing will all contribute to enhanced troubleshooting during an issue and the ability to provide more intelligent alerting from the systems.

Implementation is underway currently, but there are various parts of APM 10 which will improve the use within the organization compared with APM 9.5.

Team Center requires a number of tweaks to allow per-user/group configuration to customize the interface for groups of users, though I believe these are already in the product roadmap.

In this version of CA APM team centre, everyone sees the same view of the server configuration. Ideally, groups of users would see a subset of the data which they are interested in by default. Currently, they can do this through filtering, but a user/group setup would allow pre-defined filters to be created for particular groups of users. Alternatively, users could be restricted to see a smaller section of the overall monitored services. In the current version, anyone who logs in sees everything, and can create their own filters.