Broadcom DX Application Performance Management Reviews

It has improved our transaction monitoring significantly.

The most valuable features are the end-user experience and transaction monitoring.

The installation could be improved. Also, they need to concentrate more on the cloud for cloud monitoring.

I have not experienced any stability issues with the product.

Customer Service: 4 stars out of 5.

Technical Support: 3.5 stars out of 5

We used HPE Diagnostics earlier. But since the client already had an existing license of CA APM, he wanted to leverage the existing toolset rather than going for new tools.

The initial setup was slightly complex.

The implementation was done through the vendor. The vendor, of course, had implementation experience.

The ROI is good when you have more applications for testing.

We evaluated Dynatrace and HPE Diagnostics.

Definitely a good product, worth going for. Since I first reviewed the product here, about two years ago, I would currently not change my rating of eight out of ten. CA APM hasn't changed much in that time.

It is a monitoring tool used for business intelligence.

It is highly-customizable.

It alerts to application performance dips.

It has been used extensively in KPN's environment since 2013.

It is very stable.

Scalability is very good, because you can choose different amounts of agents.

When we were trying to restore historical data, we have reached certain limitations, which have restricted our historical view from being resized. Also, it change the data from one year into 200 days, historically. 

Technical support is excellent. If you opened a support ticket, you would get a reply within a few business hours. They call back and make themselves available.

Yes, I used a different company before, Dynatrace, who is a major APM player. I also used a bit of AppDynamics.

We switched because of efficiency and cost. I think CA APM is a very effective solution. 

It was complicated to build up an agent version that housed all the data needed. There are many varieties of agents for different environments. That is the hardest part, selecting the correct one. However if you have selected the proper agent that collects the data that you are interested in, after that, it is fairly simple.

This product was referred to me.

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.

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.

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.

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 best features are the workstation and dashboards, and the newer WebView with CA APM Team Center, which shows dynamic status of the relevant environment.

CA APM gives us more transparency about our website environment and reduces time for root-cause analysis and minimizes service downtimes.

CA made a big step with version 10.1.0.15, so there are just very minor parts that can be improved with more web technology and more interfaces to other tools.

We have used CA APM since about 2010.

We did not have any stability problems.

We have not had any scalability problems.

Technical support is good, but I don't require them so often.

In 2011, setup was a bit complex, because of our own web infrastructure, but then it became more straightforward.

• 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.