Broadcom DX Application Performance Management Reviews

The compatibility of the solution is its most valuable aspect.

The initial setup is very straightforward. The deployment was easy.

Support could be much better. Right now, we are not happy with the amount of service we can get.

I've been using the solution for two years. 

Technical support is not good. We are not satisfied and would prefer if they offered much more support for their product.

The initial setup is not overly complex or difficult. It's pretty simple, pretty straightforward. 

For us, the deployment took about two months. 

We had IBM and an integration company assist us with the initial setup.

We pay a monthly licensing fee. The solution does have a few different options, according to your needs. 

We're a customer and an end-user. We don't have any specific business relationship with Broadcom.

Overall, I would rate the solution at an eight out of ten. We're mostly happy with its capabilities.

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.

There are a number of valuable features for us:

• Dashboard
• Implementation of tool
• CEM
• TIM
• Alerts
• Actions
• Reports
• Triage maps
• Transaction tracers
• Team center
• EP Agent
• Management modules
• PostgreSQL backup

It has helped us to showcase business use cases better to our clients during demos or PoCs.

Application performance in terms of transactions is a bit slow and could be quicker.

I have been using it for a year.

There have been no issues with our deployments.

We have had no issues with the stability.

We have been able to scale it to our needs.

Technical support has been a 10 out of 10.

Every component has its own value. Investigator is the most valuable feature for me because we have deep visibility for application performance via all agents. We can capture the in-depth transaction trace and error trace which helps us to provide RCA to the customer.

We have deployed APM agents on multiple applications for our customers who had the worst performance. The application team was unable to pinpoint the problem and that was the main pain area of the business. We have collected and shared RCA for some problems with the business and application folks. Now, the application team has more visibility in regards to their application performance and they can easily pinpoint to the problematic area by transaction traces.

There are various areas which have room for improvement:

• First of all, the product team has to design something with which we can showcase the complete call graph of any transaction and overall health of the application.
• There is a need to improve the Team Center functionalities and performance, as it doesn’t work properly in a vital environment.

• There is a need to develop any utility to auto-schedule the Investigator report.

• There is a need to design a function with which we can export the transaction trace in PDF or in any other format.
• There is a need to increase the traffic-handling capacity of TIM and discover another way to monitor business transaction via CEM instead of port mirroring (SPAN). Hence, some clients don’t allow mirroring traffic that has confidential data from the business perspective.

• The product team needs to work on the product’s architecture because the number of server requirements is very high compared to the other competitors. For example, if we need to monitor a large number of agents, then we require 4-5 machines for the APM solution installation. On the other hand, the competitor can handle the same number of agents by using only 1-2 servers. (I am aware that the APM capacity planning and hardware sizing depends on the number of metrics that will be monitored.)

It has been almost three years that I am using this solution. I am working as a services consultant with an organization since December 2013.

I have faced scalability and stability issues. When we needed to monitor a large number of data metrics, then these kind of issues occur.

The customer support is very good and active. I would like to rate it a 9 out of 10.

Professionally, I have worked only with CA solutions but I have tried different solutions in test environments.

The CA APM installation is very straightforward. It is as simple as stated in the CA documents.

I don’t deal in pricing and licensing so I don’t have any idea about this aspect much. However, the best thing about APM licensing is that it is a trust-based licensing, so monitoring will never have any impact due to licenses.

I would like to advise everyone to try this solution. It is best APM solution in the market, as per my knowledge.

CEM (Customer Experience Manager) and Introscope.

With CA APM, we can see the performance regarding the transactions of our applications and analyse the availability and quality of our environment to provide the best experience for our clients. With this product, it is possible to resolve the problems faster because all of the features are connected.

For diagnosing problems, and considering that all products are connected to CA APM, it could indicate in the initial view or dashboard which layer - front end, middleware, back end - is most likely the source of the problem. Today, we can find the problem, but it requires three or more clicks.

Regarding creating dashboards, CA APM needs an enhancement to support building models in HTML5.

More than 2 years

Sometimes, the solution uses Java and this means you need a great environment to deliver high performance.

With CA APM, you can’t scale the ‘webview’ (Team Center), the feature that provides you with the views/dashboards. To do this, you need to build a new environment and start manually.

On a scale from 1-10 (1=worst, 10=best), I rate technical support a 6.

We switched because the product we used before CA APM didn't show application/transaction performance.

It was simple.

The price of the product is close to other similar products, but I think CA needs to change the licensing options because of the high price.

Oracle BPM, IBM Tivoli BSM, Compuware BSM, and BMC.

Get input from your different IT areas. Get help from your IT operations and, more importantly, get help from your business/production IT areas to map how critical it is to monitor applications and your transactions.

Most valuable features and characteristics for me are:

• Quick setup and good out-of-the-box value provided
• Usable interface and navigation
• Variety and value of the provided metrics
• Qualified and motivated Support services
• Customization options, you can monitor almost everything with EPAgents

Most of our customers use the tool mainly for incident diagnostic and incident early detection. In this sense, I know that is quite useful for customers. Sometimes it is used to validate results of stress tests before going to production.

In my opinion the are some areas for improvement:

• CEM setup is significantly more complex to set up than Introscope, more automation of transaction detection will be useful.
• Command Center should be integrated in the Web environment and the server part should be integrated in the MOM.
• Support for commercial solutions (Oracle Coherence, e-Business Suite and other market leading solutions) is sometimes limited. Official fieldpacks from CA can surely improve this point.
• TeamCenter needs a little more maturity, although I know it is a new feature. CA is working on it. CA should provide new use cases for this new feature in order to adopt the new Team Center.
• End-to-end visibility of transactions in complex environments is not always satisfactory (for instance, transactions crossing OSB).

I've been using it for the last seven years.

Overall, we've had no issues with deployment.

I think stability of the CA APM software is one of the strong points of the solution.

We have managed environments up to five Enterprise Manager instances which can be considered a middle-sized environment. We have not find any problem with scalability.

SLAs are great. Technical level of the technicians is quite good and the level of motivation in resolving cases is very valuable.

It is the first APM suite that I have used.

The setup is quite straightforward, but in middle-sized environments it could be long. It would be interesting to have some kind of “cheat sheet” to hasten the initial setup, especially for non-experienced consultants. Documentation is good, but it can be costly to read.

This is a management role, but as far as I know pricing is in line with other top market tools.

No other options were evaluated.

I would advise them to look for an experienced partner, have clear objectives and expectations of what they need, and take a time to obtain the most of the tool.

• APM status console
• Traces
• Triage Map
• Application overview tab
• Dashboards

CA APM always helps in finding problems quickly rather than requiring us to check logs to pin-point the issue. The turnaround time to resolve the issues has improved after we started using CA APM.

Also, by looking at the dashboards, application teams are able to find the problematic component by just having a quick look at traffic lights and dial meters.

SmartStor database requires lot of improvement where we need to have an admin console to maintain the SmartStor DB. The functions that we'd like are removing data based on time and removing selected metrics for specific agents in an easier manner.

Also in terms of capacity, I would expect CA APM to handle quite larger metric load than the current architecture. For instance, our applications teams expect a single collector to handle thousands of agents with heavy metric load as well.

We've used it for five years.

There were no issues and deployment was very smooth.

If proper CA recommendations are followed, there is no issues in stability. But CA should consider the capacity issues. There are times where capacity is reached and we face performance issues where the system becomes unstable.

We've had no issues on scalability because CA APM is able to scale up well and good on increasing load. But when capacity is reached, the system breaks completely.

The customer service was fantastic.

The technical support is good in guiding in the right directions to figure out the root cause of APM so quickly.

We used a vendor team to implement it.

CA APM is a nice performance monitoring software, especially if an organization wants to monitor the end-to-end architecture of an application.

It monitors the environment from mobile to mainframe. The user interface is prescriptive to understand the problems rapidly without any technical knowledge.

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.