Broadcom DX Application Performance Management Reviews

• View the smallest component and how it's performing
• See how all the components are connected
• Have a predictive alert
• To customize alerts and reports
• To use attributes to 'mark' and group components

We're CA partners and we work with their product and we deploy the solution to our customers. Working with CA APM is effective, simple, and the customers are satisfied with the solution.

The new experience center needs some improvement to works with all the attributes, but it offers great potential.

We have been using this solution for about six years.

There have been no issues with stability. Sometimes there is something to fine-tune, but you have the help of the CA communities and eventually, the help of support.

There were no scalability issues. We performed large installations without any problems.

Technical support is good and they are quick to respond. It would be better if they can create a different, more technical approach. Maybe they could go directly to second level support for partners.

We did not use another solution, although I know of other one. I think Introscope is a more complete solution.

The initial installation was easy. The fine-tuning of the environment can be tricky, especially for big environments.

I'm not the right person to ask about pricing, as I am in pre-sales.

I know the competitor's solutions, but CA APM is more complete and they have an interesting and challenging roadmap.

CA APM is based on a solid solution that could be helpful for everybody. It has a technical view where you can check every single bit of information and a map view with all the components. On top of that, Experience View can help you to look at the health of your environment and quickly identify problems or performance issues.

CA APM is currently used in two areas of our business (SAP estate and SMART estate) but slowly we are delivering APM to a vast amount of people in the business. I think that is the biggest compliment I can give as more and more people are wanting to use APM.

I feel the ability to easily see a variety of metrics is great for us as a business, as we are able to view our systems in more depth. If there are any issues we are able to spot the exact problem very quickly. We are able to spot issues much quicker with the use of the out-of-the-box metrics given to us by CA. But we also develop that further with the use of the EPA Agent and expand what we can give and show the business by creating our own scripts. This has allowed us to develop our own self-monitoring and before anybody else sees the issue we are on hand to solve that as quickly as possible.

I don’t believe that there are many improvements from the product point of view, as the future upgrades which are coming will solve many of our issues.

No.

No.

The technical support is superb. They are always willing to help as well as give guidance as and when you need it. whether on a chat, face to face, or through the CA communities site where you can talk with other users.

Straightforward as we had a CA technician in with us to help us set up and tell us what was needed to be done and how we can do it.

Might seem quite expensive but definitely worth the money invested.

The CA APM product is great to show you how your business is doing and where improvements can be made. We are using this in our SAP estate and SMART estate and, as said above, we are exploring how we can deliver this product to more areas around the business helping our company grow!

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.

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.

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.

1. Transaction Tracing
2. Cross JVM Transaction tracing
3. Trace Views
4. Integration of Introscope and CEM making a full APM tool meant for diagnostics (using Introscope) and end-user experience (using CEM) tool.
5. Easy way of configuration and Instrumentation.
6. Less components required to install and capture the performance metrics (for e.g. a single EM installation for repository, processing server and portal server)

Identifying the performance bottlenecks in every environment (UAT, SIT and Prod) including features for Service Monitoring (through alerts).

Dashboards needs improvement for better look and feel. They are more for a technical guy rather than for Business managers. Inability to get integrated with IDE (like Eclipse, NetWeaver etc) makes it less popular in Dev environment. Introscope lacks the information of User metrics. Graph with datapoints limit to 100 matching metrics restraints the use of Wily for big infrastructure where there are too many data points.

1.5 years

I had and issues but it was resolved through CA support or CA Community.

Considering our large scale infrastructure and number of deployments, it is pretty much stable.

CA support responds well but solution delivery is not at par. The CA Community does a great job at helping resolve issues.

8 out of 10.

I had used several tools but for different projects.

As mentioned before, it's very easy to setup. No multiple product Suites for different things. For e.g: for a standalone application environment, agents+EM (wily server) are the major components to be installed to get the things working.

In-house (as a part of CoE) and working myself as a vendor for one of our large financial organization customers (helping them to make best use of Wily APM).

I suggest using CA APM if you have some techie's on your team. For BA's and Managers, this tool will not satisfy their expectations. But for a person with a little bit of technical knowledge it is the best tool on the market to enhance application performance.

Monitoring application performance.

As such, no improvement after using CA APM.

Regarding how we utilize CA APM for container monitoring, our implementation team is not able to this information. Our implementation team was not able to understand and share information regarding the impact CA APM has when attempting to triage complex application issues; and similarly regarding the visibility CA APM provides across complex application environments. We are not aware of how the solution allows you to monitor and gain performance insights into the various technologies across the application environment, like docker monitoring and the ability to see into the database. The same is true of how the solution helps monitor system changes, topological changes or code updates. We would like to receive documentation to understand the above features.

CEM - We have to produce reports of defective URLs by selecting the client site IP group, which helps us to identify status code of IIS. This gives an idea regarding obtaining the defect and finally understanding the issue.

Tool is so complex to understand.

No issues with stability.

No issues with scalability.

It's average.

This is our application monitoring solution.

Complex.

A few 24/7 Web monitoring solutions were evaluated for comparison.

Its complex to understand.