Broadcom DX Application Performance Management Reviews

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.

My use case is that we have system called "Systemwalker", so we are trying to collaborate that product with APM. We are trying to use the triage of the APM, and we are still evaluating that system. 

It is performing okay. We are waiting for the new release. They have not released that yet. 

We want to sell the project in Japan. We have users in Japan. By combining the APM and our product, CA can sell it. 

We are a partner. We bring our customers to CA, and they can sell the product. Recently, CA is focusing on customers in Japan, the Fujitsu customers. 

The triage can find the root cause for pent up issues.

I created my own program to test the triage, and it works.

It should be easier to install or set everything up. 

I think that they are trying to add the artificial intelligence to the triage, so we are waiting for that. 

We are doing the PoC phase, so we have not done any of that kind of stability test. 

Not sure.

We have used the Japan CA team. They are helping us. They have been helpful and responsive.

We are also in contact with the people in Santa Clara, and they are also helpful.

We tried, but we could not do it ourselves. Japan CA did the initial setup themselves. They were helpful.

We have just so many settings. We could not figure out what were the right settings. We could not get the data fast in store. 

No. The president, my boss, told me to test APM, and find a solution with our product. 

If people are looking for the solutions from a big company, maybe I would recommend the CA. 

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.

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.

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.

Environment Profile Agents. I consider this as a trump card of CA APM. We have written almost 20-30 customized scripts to monitor non-Java/.Net calls. We have incorporated DB queries, shell scripts, curl scripts into EP agents involving business specific metrics.

Agent customization. Writing custom tracers, although tedious, gives a lot of flexibility when it's required to capture business specific information from the method calls. Interesting use case that we have also involved a work around to monitor asynchronous calls using custom tracers which would otherwise be very difficult to trace.

Customer experience management plugins. CEM plugins are another important supplement to the business appetite when it comes to business transaction data. Basically we have entire HTTP dumps coming onto the system. If one knows how to extract useful information from it, we pretty much get the entire picture of what's happening on the customer side. CEM is also quite handy when JavaScripts are disabled, although these days JavaScript is not blocked anywhere.

Using a combination of CEM plugin and EP agents, we were able to derive business specific metrics like day/hour-wise revenue opportunity, day/hour-wise conversion, and failure along with the reason for failure. So basically, a customer is able to identify that since opening of business hours, how much revenue opportunities came to the application, how many got converted, and how many failed, along with the exact amount each opportunity carried. This is also possible using customized agents, but it becomes difficult when these values are part of an object and not direct arguments or return-type method.

CA APM has a steep learning curve as compared to other tools like Dynatrace and especially AppDynamics and New Relic, but in return it is very customization friendly. You can capture what is important and leave the rest, but it takes time to identify exactly what is important and what's not.

4 years

Agents with certain customized applications can increase overhead. This then requires careful analysis and tuning. The probability for this case, though, is 1 in 100.

Stability becomes a issue if it's wrongly configured. Defining incorrect business transactions and irregular use of SQL normalization are common causes of instability.

Scalability is, I think, one of the strongest points of CA APM. You can control individual agents and control the infrastructure requirement at micro level. This reduces the chances of over expenditure of resources for the tool.

We deployed at a customer site where they were using ITCAM. It was incorrectly implemented, was cumbersome to deploy, and was not that efficient in providing deep-dive diagnostics.

Vanilla setup is easy and quick. It's easy to understand, too. Because it has so many customization options available, services generally end up writing customization. This can be simple to complex, but nothing is too complex here.