Broadcom DX Application Performance Management Reviews

• Quick triage of problems without finger pointing
• Proactive preventing of problems due to alerting and historical trend analysis
• Acceptable performance overhead in production environment
• Very flexible and extendable monitoring in accordance to business needs, possibility to instrument self-written frameworks, dynamic BCI (byte code instrumentation)
• Tacing of transactions accelerates the triage time
• Easy to install and to configure

We have reduced the triage times and don’t need long lasting analysis any more. It is one of the reasons we could improve and accelerate our development and operations procedures.

We don’t have performance bottlenecks or leaks in production any more. We act proactively to prevent their occurrence.

The main analysis is performed in a QA environment. We can eliminate the majority of problems concerning wrong configuration or capacity planning and even code errors before they go into production. We’re continuously working on improvement of our development and operations and Introscope helps us on this way.

• Automation of monitoring configuration for all applications
• Differential analysis

We've been using it for eight years, since 2008.

We didn’t have any performance problems or downtime with the tool.

This isn't an issue as it's possible to configure Introscope Enterprise Manager as a distributed high available cluster environment.

It's good to very good.

We switched to Introscope because of bad usability of our previous solution and its very restricted features. The price vs. service proportion was better on this product.

It was straightforward.

I’m responsible for technical solution, but not for account management. In my opinion the right investments return the favour.

Involve not only operations, but also development teams in order to get the best possible visibility in your applications’ performance.

The use case is for crash analytics. We want to know what went wrong, and what is the area in my code that I can improve on.

In terms of performance, we are still evaluating it, but so far so good.

The time to deliver, time to market, is the greatest improvement.

The crash analytics, and that it goes down to the level of code where it shows, "Hey, this is an area you need to check."

Custom dashboards.

It's pretty stable. I'm not the one who configures it but I'm the one who drills down to the reports and checks what went wrong. It's good.

I'm not sure because I'm not the one who configures it.

No support tickets so far. That means the product is stable.

We had a presentation from CA and everybody from the product management side was impressed by it. We are still evaluating it.

When my company is investing in a vendor the criteria are

• brand
• reliability
• scalability.

I give it an eight out of 10 overall because I don't see custom dashboards. Plus, some of the stat analysis features that were explained are not that easy to use. 

Otherwise, it does what it's supposed to do.

I would say go ahead and at least give it a try.

APM integration is the most valuable feature because of the possibility of mapped links breaking for web services with internal components.

We can review recorded sessions of UXE.

Mobile and virtual banking: The app transaction layer is mapped with the UX.

I have used this for three months during a PoC.

We did have stability problems.

We did have scalability problems.

As of right now, I have not used technical support.

We previously used a different solution, and we switched because of APM integration.

Setup was easy and simple.

We did not evaluate other options.

Use the correct application instrumentation.

• Applications graphs
• Dashboards
• Error snapshots
• Ability to receive metrics from various ways

An example would be the error reports, which shows the services with the higher error percentage and which errors occurs most, to they can be easily spotted to improve the application performance.

The application's discovery/triage mapping.

I've used it for seven years in three different companies.

Had some performance problems with a few applications and had to disable some probes.

Yes, but due the product being installed on a VM environment without the proper I/O speed.

No, it's pretty easy to add more collectors/servers.

10/10, CA is pretty close with our company, and they are actually in the same building.

8/10.

Only open source solutions.

Only open source solutions.

Both with an in-house and with a vendor team. They had the necessary expertise for the installation.

Could be better if other teams were convinced to use the tool, but it's good.

Make sure to test to see if there's any performance issues and do use a physical server.

Memory Leak in CA Wily Introscope

Handling of Issues has become proactive rather that reactive, with Introscope flagging issues before they become a crisis.

Product could be made more lean. POC for customers is troublesome.

I've used CA Wily Introscope and CEM for 5 years.

Deployment for large scale systems is an issue with lot of add-ons/additional products required. For example add-ons for Oracle / Siebel / Peoplesoft, etc.

We haven't had any stability issues with CA APM.

We haven't had any scalability issues with CA APM.

Yes. Other Products were evaluated. This product was found to be a close match to our requirements.

• Ability to monitor any application (Java/ .NET/Other). 
• Ability to monitor the Applications using CEM (Customer Experience Manager), Application Servers/Web Servers/Databases, etc using Introscope. 
• Creation of Alerts and integration with Other tools to send out Notifications before any issue occurs. 
• Customised Dashboards that act as a unified view of all the Critical metrics that are being pulled every 15 seconds from the Servers. 
• Transaction Tracing that pin-points the component of code for an application that is failing or the Backend SQL that is taking a long time to respond.

We have implemented all the above features and some extra features like EPAgents, Web Server Power Packs, Unix Field Pack, MQ Power Pack, Perfmon Collector Agents, Error Detector, Change Detector, Leak Hunter (Occasionally), etc.

There is always room to improve any product to achieve new heights. Same applies to CA APM as well. The Transaction Tracing feature can definitely be improved. The Web Client can also be improved.

4 Years

We haven't experienced any issues in these areas.

On a scale from 1 - 5, I would give CA a 5 for both.

The setup was straightforward.

Initially we implemented using a vendor team. They had a good level of expertise.

It is great product with lots of features that help minimize the time taken to troubleshoot issues and root cause analysis to avoid loss of business.

We are a service and solution provider, and this is one of the monitoring products that we implement for our customers.

The primary use case is network monitoring.

The features that I find most valuable are related to network monitoring. One of my colleagues is more focused on the application performance management aspects and has a better appreciation for those features.

It is straightforward to use.

The feedback that I have received from some customers is that they want to see more information on one screen when it comes to IT management. For example, they would like to have IP management, where it detects and shows IP conflicts on the network.

Ideally, the vendor would be better helping vendors by pushing this solution. If they created webinars then it would be helpful in this regard because potential customers need to have an overview of the features and benefits that they can get from it.

Technical support needs to be more responsive and address support tickets more quickly.

We have been using this solution for more than eight years, before the acquisition of CA by Broadcom.

Stability-wise, I think that this is a superb solution and my customers have been rating it high.

Technical support has not been what it was since before the acquisition by Broadcom. However, it is improving. There are a lot of things that they need to fine-tune and get back on track. In particular, they need to respond to issues more quickly.

Sometimes the partners run into problems with implementation. It could be an issue with the environment, for example. When the support ticket is logged, I need them to respond immediately or come online to be able to help resolve it at the time.

Time can be used when they ask for more information, such as sending certain logs. However, I want a situation where when you raise a priority-one ticket, they should be able to log in, take over the system, and help resolve issues as quickly as possible.

The initial setup is straightforward.

We deploy this product for our customers and then we help them to manage it.

This is a product that I continue to recommend to my customers.

I would rate this solution a nine out of ten.