Broadcom DX Application Performance Management Reviews

It gives us insight into the functional health of the application, if we have any hot spots. For distributed applications we need those insights. We like the dashboards where we can consolidate different metrics into one view. Also, it tracks back-end service calls and it gives us insight into any issues with the services we are calling, as we use distributed application technology. Also, alerts and notifications.

The organization becomes quick in assessing hot spots and attacking any issues that are bringing down and application. It means meeting SLAs and reacting to issues quickly before they become problems when we see patterns, before the whole system becomes unusable.

It is a technology with a lot of things going on. We'd like some use cases to help us configure APM for dashboards and reporting.

Migrations from one version to the next are always a battle and we have to involve architects and other consultants to help us with upgrades, which is expensive.

It’s enabling technology, so we shouldn’t be spending so much time and resources managing the application.

We had some hiccups, and still are. When we implemented agents for one of our applications, the agents had a memory leak and halted the application, so it was unstable. We were told to upgrade to a new version of APM which mostly addressed the issue.

The issues are ongoing to an extent, and we’ve been working with CA for a while on a trial and error basis, which has been painful.

It is scalable, but we have to go through a lot of pain in configuring agents. Agent configuration has been something of a mystery because of poor documentation. We talk to CA and we get some guidance, which often doesn’t work. When you’re rolling out agents 4000 JVMs, it is a painful process, and that’s only one application.

We don’t have dedicated resources, but we open tickets and they come back. For example we’ve seen a lot of errors in our logs, and they’ve provided patches and configuration changes, but we’re still seeing those errors. It’s not bringing down the system but we don’t know what lurks, and we want to make sure that it’s stable. Sometimes we go to our account manager to escalate, which does get us an answer.

Still this has been a nagging pain overall, although the solution was more solid after upgrading to newer versions. We do seven to 10 billion dollars in revenue in those applications so we need to ensure those systems are as available as possible, and that hasn’t happened.

It was already in production when I joined.

It’s been a battle with upgrades, stability, and, to an extent, support. We also gain some from it – I will say it it’s been very helpful for us to identify issues but it could be better. The industry is evolving and there are pretty good cloud-based tools out there that offer me more than the current version of CA APM offers. Based on prior experience, we are dreading the upgrade to the next release. In a cloud environment, we don’t have to upgrade or manage servers.

In our organization, it was very common to create crisis rooms where we gathered experts from all areas to investigate an application problem by allegations of users about problems of slowness and errors. After we started using APM in our environment, we managed to reduce the creation of these rooms by 90%.

• Detection of errors that occur to users
• Measurement of response time
• Transaction traces

Currently, we have in our park 600 servers monitored with the APM, and we have on average 2000 applications still to be included in the monitoring. As our environment is very large and we support all of them with a team of about 20 people, we cannot verify all the logs looking for these errors. So, we set up rules in APM to warn us when the application starts to present errors, and we already interact directly with the development team to handle these errors. This is also true for the average response time. The tracers use the same ones when a more in-depth investigation of the problem is necessary to discover the exact point of the problems that we are investigating.

The creation of a report is an area with room for improvement.

The reports are a key part of APM in my vision because it is through them that we manage to generate the evidence to direct the development team and operational support to address. However, we can not extract the information of the tool through reports. We have needed several times to use screen print screen, CTRL + C and CTRL + V. I cannot change the font, color, size, bold or any text I put in the report, I cannot change the page size among other things.

We have vital information in the tool that we cannot extract as topology changes, application topology design, type-separated error relationship, and so on.

We did have stability problems in versions 10.1 and 9.7.

We had many problems of instability, but when we upgraded to version 10.5, these problems reduced drastically.

At this moment, we have not encountered any scalability issues.

Technical support is excellent. Whenever I needed support, I had an excellent service.

We did not previously use a different solution. We just did a PoC.

All settings have always been pretty simple.

Negotiate a lot, but do not forget to buy the product because it is worth it.

We evaluated AppDynamics and HPE Diagnostics.

APM only worked here in the company because CA's after sales is very present here and acted as a true partner for us. I strongly recommend having someone from CA “together forever”, because at the beginning it was very difficult to understand what the tool was reporting.

Our project is a logistic domain. DX passes all the infrastructure components which are managed by the Broadcom team. We are just deploying the different kinds of application versions, e.g. related to .NET, WebLogic, and other application agents.

We are also monitoring the infrastructure agents in Windows, Linux, and Unix which are combined into one infrastructure agent. We also do monitoring whenever the agent doesn't have the package that is supported through the infrastructure agent, e.g. Kubernetes from the Broadcom DX Application Performance Management perspective.

What's most valuable about this solution is that it completely monitors code-level visibility. We benefit from this as we're able to capture any performance issues from an application, then raise and forward those issues to the applicable team more quickly.

The occurrence of CPU spikes and memory issues is an area for improvement in Broadcom DX Application Performance Management. To avoid these, we turn on the conservation settings, but it would be best if Broadcom can rectify those issues.

The period of time that passes before they fix issues should be shortened. They should not wait for the next release to fix issues raised by their users.

I'm been working with APM tools for four and a half years. I'm working with AppDynamics and Broadcom DX Application Performance Management.

I've worked with Broadcom DX Application Performance Management within the last 12 months.

It is a stable solution.

This solution is scalable.

The technical support for this solution is good. I'm rating it a four out of five, with one being the worst and five being the best.

The initial setup for Broadcom DX Application Performance Management was straightforward. We used a straightforward technical documentation for building and adding the agent.

This solution was implemented in-house. I did it myself just by following the documentation.

I evaluated AppDynamics, Dynatrace, and the IBM Tivoli Monitoring Tool.

Currently, I'm using AppDynamics and CA APM. It's Broadcom DX Application Performance Management which is similar to AppDynamics and Dynatrace, but I'm currently using AppDynamics. It's for application performance management.

I was involved in the integration of this solution and moving from the lower version: CA APM which was version 10.7, to the new version 20.2 which is now Broadcom DX Application Performance Management.

Out of all the APM tools I've worked with, I prefer Broadcom DX Application Performance Management the most, followed by AppDynamics.

We're using the Enterprise license for this solution.

What I'd like to tell people who are looking into using this solution is that sometimes when we raise issues and open tickets with them, they'll say that the issue will be resolved in the next release. We have to wait for the next release before they are able to solve the issues, instead of solving them more quickly. It is their tool so they should be able to give the right solutions faster. They should not keep saying that the issue will be resolved in the next release. We've experienced this a few times.

I can't think of additional features I'd like to see in the next release of this solution as it is similar to other APM tools. AppDynamics and Dynatrace are the best solutions in the market, because they have better tools than what Broadcom DX Application Performance Management offers. Their market growth is also very good.

I'm scoring Broadcom DX Application Performance Management a seven out of ten.

If the application team requires me to deploy something which I have not deployed myself in the past, e.g. one I have no experience deploying, I can look at tool documentations and learn how to build it. I'll then build it and improve myself at the same time, the way I worked on multiple application agents. I'll build and give them to application teams. This is why I'm rating myself a seven out of ten.

Currently, we are building a visibility dashboard which allows our level-1 and level-2 engineering teams to actually look at the events, and be able to designate which ones are critical, which are important. It alerts them. They are able to simply look at a dashboard to be able to predict and resolve issues.

The CA tools allow to me to get into detailed transactions for custom ranking, and be able to make predictions. It also gathers data. Some other tools may be good at one area, but not good overall, including the mainframe.

CA has been very famous for the mainframe. I think that's actually the edge, by the way, for CA products, as there are many, many dotcom products that don't touch mainframes. I think that CA should still keep that. 

The area where CA is changing is, I'll give you an example. The fresh technology should have been out a long time ago. But it appears to be we're catching up on the UIM, because Microsoft basically says they are not going to support the fresh, starting next year. That means they are a little bit behind on the waves in the architecture, etc. I think that can be improved.

Another thinking is, if the developer can get to the level-1 engineer level, they will develop a better product. I suggest the developers at CA really work as a level-1 engineer, because then you have a different sort.

Very good. The CA UIM is a very solid product. We love the simplicity of the robots and the agent installation and upgrading, because you can just do it right at your central station without rebooting the remote workstations or servers. The APM allows us to have inside-application  analytics, and very seldom do we need to reboot, etc.

The scalability side for the UIM is pretty solid. As long as you set up your database right, you should be able to handle, for example, $150,000 transactions.

APM, currently, our organization is moving to the cloud, so we have lots more APM analytics, etc., so we're going to see how that's going to scale up.

I like the old dashboard - I'm just going to be very open. The old dashboard allow me to create a case and be able to get my products, without going through some of the current things that are going on. 

I still like the old, for example, CA UIM support, where you can download directly through the UIM portal without going through extra steps. So I think that can be simplified.

When selecting a vendor, the reputation is important. One of the things that we have been thinking is, how many of these dotcom vendors will exist three years from today? You see AppDynamics are acquired by Cisco, you've got other vendors. Almost every week, some of these companies disappear. CA has been here for a long time, and we think that's the reputation. We definitely want CA to exist, definitely three years from today, and think that's helped.

The second area is the support. I think CA, has great people. 

On pricing, CA is very competitive. I think that's going to help in the long run. 

It covers from mainframe, all the way to dotcom, for example. CA currently covers Amazon, Microsoft Azure, Office 365 monitoring. They're getting to that. We notice it, we immediately install these probes as they become available from CA.

We think the stability of this product needs to be a little stronger on these newer products. We do suggest that CA keep it up in their area, because CA has mainframe to handle already. Now they want to expand into these other horizons. The addition of these products is going to help CA to sustain. The overall coverage of the product, not just in one area. Open source is very important, and we're looking to open source on all these too.

CA tools are great. The technical people I work with are great, on each product. On a one to 10 scale I will give it about eight. Now, there's a reason why I say eight, because I really like to work with the technical folks. So when CA approaches me, I hope they approach me from the helping us perspective, not trying to sell me another product. I think this is so important. 

That natural evolution comes when you, yourself, are technical. When you are technical, you are able to talk the sales language, and then it will come to the sale. Sales come very naturally as part of technical. I think that should be your overall coverage, not just one person knowing one area. It should be, you should have a master architect, master chief, who knows about every single product, and deal with it.

We have an e-commerce application. It's more of a business-to-business model, and employees of most companies come to our websites to order product. The APM tool allows us to monitor performance of that application, where are the pain points, where are the slowdowns, to focus on where we can fix those.

Product performance is awesome. It's covering all aspects of the application; good database metrics and internal application metrics. Just tons and tons of data.

The improvement for us is in the customer experience. The quicker the websites are, the more satisfied, the better experience the customer's going to have, hopefully the more product they're going to buy. The sales sites are more reliable, more up time.

That it's customizable. If there's something that you really need to get at that doesn't come out of the box, you can pretty easily put together some custom metrics and get those in place.

One of the challenges is agent releases. So as we employ agents, they are done relatively manually. A little bit of automating of agent release would be helpful.

We've not had any problems with it.

It scales. We have a bunch of different applications using it.

We get really good support.

We did not have a previous solution. This was brought in because we had a new app. The app was not stable, it wouldn't stay up.

Initial setup is probably somewhere in between straightforward and complex.

It's the configuration, you have to know your application, you've got to know what parts to monitor. It's not a product that you install and it does everything for you. You have to put a little bit of effort into configuration.

There wasn't anything else on the market at that time. There have been some other players that have come in since then. CA was the first.

The most important criteria when selecting a vendor are 

• good support
• a company that's been around for awhile.

I give it a nine out of 10. It does pretty much everything we need it to do. It's just little things, fringe things, that need a slight upgrade, like configuration. It's getting better.

I would say get your employees some training, get some help from CA to make sure you know what best practices are.

It has been very, very productive for us. It helped us with number of challenges we faced in the past. It prevented a lot of downtime and a lot of outages with the Java side of the house. We are predominantly a WebSphere shop.

We’ve been very successful using version 9.7. We're still not up to the latest version, 10. I've seen a lot of interesting things with version 10 happening, which hopefully will address our problems. Some of which are the inability to manage multiple hosts at the same time, configure agents in an easy fashion. There's a lot of manual labor that still exists that hopefully will be simplified with the new Command Center. We’re looking forward to upgrading our 9.7 to 10 to start using the Team Center, which is a phenomenal product we've seen today at CA World.

It's been very, very successful using our NOC. We are using the console and dashboards.

Looking forward to the growth and maturity. We're looking to standardize, reduce the number of tools and collapse them into one. I think that CA's been listening to the customers and have been moving to that direction.

Looking forward to another journey.

It's been a great five-year tenure with the APM suite. We're looking to expand that now that version 10 is out, 10.5 GA by the end of the month; looking to start using the new Team Center, which hopefully will greatly reduce mean time to repair. Makes our NOC as well as the SMEs more productive; repair issues much faster; and it's been a great run so far. CA has been listening to our concerns. They have been addressing some of them. There are unfortunately sometimes shifts in paradigms as CA is known to be a dynamic company. Sometimes the direction is not always clear.

Some challenges are maintaining the growth of the environment; a lot of manual labor is involved, which again is being solved with the new version that came out. One of the products we use, the real-user monitoring, has been very successful, but at times challenging to implement. There's some shift in paradigm using it today, moving to a more mature model within the APM umbrella, and again, start using a lot of the stuff with their new solution, AXA; some of the mobile platforms, which will help us to move into that direction, to unify the APM solution which we heavily rely on today.

Support from CA has been really, really phenomenal. We've always applauded CA as being one of our top vendors, compared to many others, such as HPE and Microsoft. Many times when we had an issue, it really was really, really phenomenal support. From a CA standpoint, any bugs, any issues that we typically have, we would have pretty much a few engineers involved and at times solve an immediate need, which is something that we cannot experience with other vendors, such as, again, like HPE or Microsoft, or what have you.

From other competitors and other competition that we looked into, such as Dynatrace and other vendors similar to CA, CA was a clear winner for us. Again, it's been a great product.

There's some deficiencies to their product. But again, they are being addressed, as CA's been very responsive to the customers. One of the most important things is they do listen to customers. If you have a major problem or major concern, CA try to address that. If that cannot be easily addressed, they try to lay it on the roadmap, and we've seen some stuff delivered that we requested in the past.

• Isolating issues, the dashboards, and the customization are the most valuable for us because they enable this tool to be used by multiple tiers. Let's say we don't know what the problem is when one occurs, we just know that we have multiple tickets generated, and there are customer groups down or experiencing slowness. These tools help us identify the issue quickly. That saves us a tremendous amount of money. That's the number one value.
• It is easy to use. That's a big one.
• The fact that it is a suite solution, rather than using just one technology.
• There are multiple offerings. That's nice as well.
• The agents are low-profile, and there is not a whole lot of overhead with the agents.

It sounds kind of corny, but it helps bring us together because when a problem strikes and it’s happening, there's the tendency to start finger-pointing at different groups. With this tool in the hands of a tier-one or a tier-two technical individual, or small group, they can identify the issues without needing to go back and forth between different departments, who are all saying "Oh, that's not our problem." It then turns out to be their problem in the end. That's the main benefit.

There are a lot of improvements to be done. One particular area is in the area of automation. That's a big thing for me.

• In my personal opinion, it's a bit of a weak point. I believe that they know that, and that they're working towards it. I would love to see that. I think they are heading down the right road. It’s a sound product.
• In APM, in triage, it's all about time and less effort. If an outage bridge or a severity breaks out, I want less people on the phone. I want a small group of individuals. I don't want every head of department on that bridge for hours on end. There are a whole lot of ways. That's a soft cost; but it's a cost: absolutely.
• I want to see more automation out of these products, especially in identity management. As we virtualize, and as we become more mobile, I want identity management to seamlessly move with the user and applications and systems. That's a hard nut to crack.

I have very high expectations for these tools. If it takes me more than a matter of minutes to identify a problem, it's not good enough. There's still a lot of growing to do. A lot of it is internal growth, too. It’s not just CA. It's not their fault; but our own company needs to adopt certain practices and change our ways. We need to be more open too, I guess, with more internal collaboration to use the tool to its full potential.

It is stable; and, more so, I like CA's direction. I am very inspired by it. It gives us hope.

The product has absolutely been scalable.

My team doesn't deal with technical support directly. We work with internal groups who are the actual customers of the product.

I was not involved in the decision process to purchase APM or in the setup. They have actually been in-house for quite some time, before my time; but I've learned to know them. I've learned their products. I've met with vendors, as well as other vendors and competitors. CA seemed to beat out everyone for our company.

Never be satisfied. Always ask for more, and always look for the next step. As long as the company's vision is really the future, then I think we're in good hands.

I like the Transaction Trace Viewer and stalls feature on the front end/back end within the investigator.

It has helped to stabilize the environments and also quickly identify issues some while they are occurring and some proactively.

The extensive monitoring alert gave the ability to act quickly before an outage happens.

We haven't implemented the latest released version yet but I do believe there's a lot of improvement needed.

There's a lot of room for improvement in administration which I believe CA APM is slowly getting there, with their Agent Command Center. However, the interface and management of the entire APM infrastructure should exist via GUI.

I have used this solution for five years.

We have scaled CA APM a lot over the last few years. As time goes by, there is an increased demand for monitoring leads to underperforming enterprise managers and/or other memory issues. We are running on VM. However, CA recommends to run on a physical machine with lot of compute resources, which wouldn't be applicable to all companies with their standard environments and also in terms of the budget/funding that it requires.

The customer service is good but not excellent. I would rate it a 7 out of 10.

I personally didn't use any other solution, but my company did use the IBM APM tool.

The setup is complex. It takes some reading and understanding of the architecture along with some prior skills.

We have implemented it in-house. My advice is to install a PoC environment and familiarize yourself with all the components.

Compared to other competitors, this product is a little flexible with its pricing/licensing and is somewhat less than the other APMs in the market, with negotiations.

My advice is to implement the product and leverage all of the add-on free components. You should also compare it to other APMs in the market.