Broadcom DX Application Performance Management Reviews

• System incident analysis 
• Performance monitoring

We run a very large OLTP system: Six IBM AIX 780 high-end applications and DB servers. Daily transaction amount 100,000,000 per day.

WAS GC monitoring enhanced our application performance and DB SQL performance.

It is very useful and helpful with the analysis of historical performance data.

• E2E monitoring
• DB web WAS monitoring
• App crash report
• User customizing report
• DB connection usage from WAS

• System incident analysis
• Performance monitoring

My organization can find the correct solution to an alert the first time around. This shortens the resolution time.

I found the solution's end-to-end analysis and flexibility most valuable.

Java Console uses too much memory.

I have not encountered any issues with stability.

I have not encountered any issues with scalability.

I would rate the level of technical support as "Good."

We used a different solution in the past. We switched because of this solution's end-to-end analysis feature.

We did not evaluate other options, since there were no other solutions that we knew about with the capacity for end-to-end analysis.

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.

• Provided greater visibility to IT regarding necessary actions on its governance and relationship with suppliers and business areas. In the previous scenario, IT was surrounded by tools, but did not possess a vision focused on quality of service delivery and end-to-end. With the adoption of CA APM, we have accurate mapping, we're updated on what supports each business service and what, when, where an incident occurs and how it affects the business.
• Regained credibility of IT's role as a driving force for improvements result in greater business performance. In the previous scenario, IT was surrounded by tools, without any integration which forced us to dispense resources with a late result and sometimes without solving the issue. With the adoption of CA APM, there was a change in the relationship of the areas of IT, its own role and value to the success of the business.

The features which were instrumental in our choice of CA APM include:

• The options that we have to create use cases providing synthetic vision when applicable to the needs of the business
• The ability to accomplish the identification of the root cause of problems with applications in drill-down level by integrating the suite with tools for managing and monitoring.
• The existence of components for collecting information from other platforms and applications.

From my perspective, as I had the opportunity to evaluate CA APM compared to other vendors, one of the improvements we highlighted which would be necessary to improve the targeting interface is to make it more user-friendly and current.

No.

No.

We selected CA APM as opposed to other solutions in the market because it has a solid install base and is notorious for integration with other products including monitoring platforms, service desk and ERPs. We had the challenge of promoting a radical change of posture of the IT organization from reactive to proactive. One of the biggest factors was that the impact was a heterogeneous IT environment!

It was a simple initial configuration. In order to minimize impacts on the operations of the business, a strategy was adopted taking into account the application of low-impact stretching forward to the greatest impact. During this process there were continuous disclosure processes and changes to management which enriched the lessons learned that contributed significantly to the achievement of success.

The implementation was carried out by the CA team. We had difficulty finding professionals to deploy and maintain the solution in Brazil.

I also evaluated AppDynamics, BMC Software, Compuware - Dynatrace and Microsoft – SCOM Avicode

To have a proper result, consider:

• Spend time to do a proper mapping of your business processes, interfaces, dependencies carried out and the support (IT). In certain situations we are faced with a fragile and inadequate monitoring which doesn't amount to any APM!
• Any APM tool will not perform a miracle, it will only be an instrument with other existing tools, which should have processes and people behind them to reach the desired results. In our case, success occurred only when there was a fusion of interests and efforts of the areas of IT infrastructure and systems development.

This is a very particular vision of the existing IT environment in Brazil, however one can not generalize based on this.

One of the great features of CA APM is the analysis of application performance problems. This allows us to find problems quickly so that we can resolve them before larger issues arise.

It helps speed up the identification of the cause of performance problems, making us more efficient in terms of cost and time spent resolving issues.

I think that the agent installation process needs to be streamlined. It could be a lot easier. In fact, it would be even better if it could be automated and allowed for remote installation.

I've used it for five years.

We had no issues with the deployment.

We have had no stability issues.

There have been no issues scaling it for our needs.

The technical support is good. We have always had good interactions when we've needed them.

We did not use any other solution.

The initial setup is very simple. We had no problems whatsoever with it.

We implemented it on our own with our in-house team.

Once you try it, you'll see that this product is easy to use.

It gives us the overall capacity measurement for our current environment.

We're able to determine where there are bottlenecks in our system. To some extent, we're also able to see what might be causing some of these issues.

We are also using the tool for determining performance bottlenecks in our Java-based applications. It provides us with performance metrics.

It provides access to problems, but not to the problem analysis. You cannot track the problem to the root cause. For example, you can see that the applications have a performance bottleneck, but you can't perform a drill-down analysis into the actual code of the problem.

Also, it doesn't provide dynamic analysis. This may be OK for mainframe customers, but for those with distributed systems, DynaTrace may be the better solution. 

I have to test it from version to version first before we implement to make sure it can perform for us.

Setup for a limited scope is easy, but it's difficult for a wider scope, in which case you need a longer deployment time. We have a mainframe-oriented system, so we can scope the old activity to the mainframe. but if we were fully distributed, it's a little bit complicated because we'd have more than 100 servers.

It gives us a 360 degree view of application performance. We can see the frontend, backend, middleware transactions, and URLs all in a single dashboard.

I have personally audited the number of incidents opened for the Application Support Team before I implemented CA APM for one of my clients. The incidences raised by end users for application performance-related issues decreased from 1700 per quarter to 250 per quarter. CA APM/Wily was proactive in its monitoring.

It needs better documentation to help make the implementation easier.

We've been using it for five years.

The issues during deployment were with the documentation. Documentation needs to be improved.

It is the most stable tool I have ever used. We've had no issues with instability.

We didn't have any issues scaling it to our needs.

I rate technical support a 9 out of 10.

There was no solution in place previously.

The initial setup was a little tricky, and not too easy.

We're implementation partners.

We also looked into Aternity.

You should just go for it.