Broadcom DX Application Performance Management Reviews

• Thread & Method level tracing from within the app engine (JVM or .NET) from Introscope Agent
• Easy isolation of business transaction defects from CEM
• Fantastic delineation & TCP analysis from ADA

Introscope was our first modern APM tool, and the application deep dive capability gave us visibility into behaviours of requests from within the app engine & code. CEM was the first Business Transaction monitor that could report response times for every data hop. ADA reports TCP statistics that are app specific but still match command line output NW Engineers expect, and the tool revitalized a difficult relationship between app monitoring teams and Network support experts.

The main improvement areas for all three tools in CA APM are licensing, licensing and support. CA APM Introscope agents are licensed by CPU count which is fine for 1995, but in 2016 CPU is a less applicable measure for modern virtual and cloud hosting environments – not to mention MF IFLs used instead of CPU for zLinux.

CA APM licensing for CEM is tied to Agent licenses, and this prevented my team from leveraging it separately for broader benefit. The rationale from CA was that CEM was most valuable when integrated with Introscope, which is true. However, CEM has value on its own and could have justified additional spend on agents if we were allowed to configure it to capacity and use it broadly even where no agents were deployed.

ADA is not truly integrated with CA APM suite, and there should be both real-time data feeding from Collectors into APM consoles (not CAPC) & historical data from all APM tools in a single reporting repository (not separate DBs).

Go ahead and buy CA Professional Services, but expect CA to continue asking for additional purchases to deliver on committed APM functionality. Their APM solution is already one of the most expensive, and the extra spend should give you enough weight to get what you've paid for - support without hidden price tags.

What CA APM really does is that it allows us to see the inside of the managed code application, taking our performance to a more mature level. We're able to see things as they start to load up before we have a failure.

I don't know if I would call it proactive, because typically in our environment, things move so quickly. Only upon post-analysis do you see the actual build-up. Only then can we act and we end up having to build in thresholds.

It's not as agile in keeping up with the direction that CA is pushing it. They're trying, but it's still two or three years behind the curve.

We're really looking at being able to deploy it, say, in the cloud. We'd like it to have automated deployment, self-instrumentation, and a self-generating dashboard.

There are a bunch of workarounds, but after a while, you're just applying Band-Aids to the platform.

We're using version 9.6 with some patches. We have not gone to 10 yet. We typically run shipping minus a version. We're getting ready to go to 10 because, I think, CA is getting ready to do another GA release of 10. We'll probably jump to 10 at that time, but we've got some preparation work for it.

We have had a lot of challenges with APM. We've been using it since it was called Wiley, and the CA team has been absolutely wonderful. They've really stayed with it, they've researched, they've helped us. We've gotten custom patches, custom solutions that then get worked into the next product release. It has been a difficult maturation process. Now we're in a really good spot in terms of stability. We're happy with it.

I've been with the company for about four years. There was an installation of Wiley that was kind of done haphazardly and we were having a lot of stability problems. I wasn't there at the very beginning of it, but we did take it from essentially a single-pointed presence to the size where it is today. According to CA, we're probably in the top five in terms of installations, so we're one of the big ones.

For us, we rarely -- I don't think we ever, actually -- call the 1-800 technical support. We have a lot of experience and knowledge in-house. We have our entire CA support team that ranges from executive level to the highly-technical level. We can normally within a day be in touch with a developer. A lot of times the problems that we have will blast through the help desk pretty quickly. Our CA support team is vital to the success with APM.

When we made the decision, at the time there were no other vendors in this space. Periodically, we do a reassessment of the portfolio. Unfortunately, CA did not do well recently.

Actually, folks who originally were with Wiley Tech, their start-up companies have finally matured enough to the point where we can seriously consider them as alternatives.

Vendors like AppDynamics and New Relic, we're starting to see more and more of our internal customers move away from the white-glove, fully-managed model to a staff solution where they're managing their own little pieces.

The APM piece is really good for deep-dive. It is, as we like to say, the Cadillac of APMs. It does everything. It goes very deep and very wide. It does take dedication and you have to have some dedicated resources on-site. You have to be able to know it, and you have to be able to work with the developers in order to properly instrument it. It's not something that you can just throw out there and expect for it to work in an afternoon. You do have to learn the product. If you do, there are a lot of good rewards for it.

It's for monitoring application performance and end user experience.

It secures traffic through the HTTPS. There are a huge number of cipher suites which are enabled. Unfortunately, some of the cipher suites are not being recognized by the APM tools. However, we are able to manage with the other cipher suites in the market, apart from ones offered by CA APM.

We have had a tough time getting these topics monitored.

In terms of end user experience, it is very useful. We use it to organize our client requirements, for example:

• How many users utilize the vertical URL and what are their experiences? 
• How good is the response rate?
• How many errors are the users receiving?
• What errors do they get?
• What screens are being displayed? Are they receiving, "Page Not Found" or "Error 404"?

We receive good transactions from it with good graphs, as well, documenting the activities of total visitors on the site. We can pull the reports and provide them to the client, as required.

In terms of application performance, we are able to identify the memory leaks within applications. We have been able to identify how an application is behaving in terms of a custom method of classes and how well the response is being solved. We can find the KPIs of the application along with its performance indicators.

The custom classes, suchs as hybrid net performance, we are able to identify and fix, accordingly. The solution is proactive. We can monitor how the application is connecting to the database and what queries are being requested, then how well those are being respond to by the solution.

Users no longer need to depend upon the console for a compatible Java version. Now, users can directly learn the version, perform all their actions, and see all of those performance-related issues.

Our users lag how to identify the root cause with this solution. If they could come up with a more user-friendly version, that would be a good thing, since other vendors currently have better features and more user-friendly products than CA APM.

As applications move to the cloud, we need more cloud-based solutions from CA APM. This is currently unavailable. I know that this is something that they are looking to do in the future, but I am not sure how with the current solution.

The stability is very good. CA APM is far more stable than any of the other tools available, though we have seen memory leaks with the solution.

Scalability is good. We haven't faced any issues.

We have about 50 users in our organization, from directors to analysts. Around 60 to 70 percent of our organization is using the solution.

We monitor more than 400 applications, which is done with two people who are system engineers (myself included).

The technical support has performed very well. We receive good information in a very quick and polite manner. They have very good technical personnel and have been very happy with them. Sometimes. I contact them when CA APM introduces new things.

The initial setup is very straightforward; it is not complex. It is well-documented. I can follow the documentation to get the tool working.

For a simple install, the deployment can take about a day, then I can monitor any application.

A complex install will need requirements to be gathered for how things are done and how deep the data is to be implemented and instrumented. If they are a huge number of classes to be monitored, then we need to collect all that information from the application team or client. Afterwards, we have to instrument the system. This may take a week or ten days based on the requirements. 

I'm not involved in the pricing.

We evaluated CA APM vs AppDynamics and CA APM vs BMC.

Consider the compatibility first, then consider the resources required, finally consider the applications that you will be monitoring. Then, you can go deploy them.

We used the Five-Pack when onboarding services. We also used SiteMinder and introduced synthetic monitoring, integrating with CA Spectrum and CA Service Desk. We use several CA applications. Everything is interconnected to get triggered and tickets routed to a particular thing automatically.

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.

My users are satisfied with this solution, most are financial institutions such as banks or card processors and telecom companies.

The primary use case is for the monitoring of business applications in production. Banks use it for monitoring Internet banking solutions, internal back-office applications that have high number of users distributed on many locations, monitoring back-office applications for card transaction processing, and also for front office applications monitoring. DX APM is also used in a test phase of apps life cycle especially during a performance testing. 

Business-wise very much. We have the best solution in the local market because we are the most experienced APM vendor in our region and have very satisfied customers. They said that UX is much improved and MTTR is significantly decreased.

The most valuable features are the low overhead, the ability to monitor production on 24/7 principle, the ability to decrease time to discover the point of failure in the IT infrastructure or the application environment in a short period of time, reporting for analyzing the performance of the application for improving the code optimizing process.

DX APM has a space for improvement in covering more technologies. I.e. monitoring of PHP should be solved in a more quality way. 

I have been familiar with this solution for 18 years.

This solution is stable. In the 15 years, we have not had any major issues. It's an excellent product.

We have a good approach and implementation. If we have any problems, we solve it in the testing phase before it's in production. I can't say that we have had serious problems in the last 10 to 12 years.

This solution is very scalable but we have not had the need to scale because our implementations not need more than one EM server. The new version of DX APM rely on microservices technology and scalability is automatized.

The technical support is good, we are satisfied. The transition period was a little bit problematic, but it only took a short time.

When Broadcom purchased CA they changed the support and the portal. We noticed but we had no real issues. They are responsible and responsive.

We are the first line of support the second line of support is done by Broadcom Support.

They have improved by making the documentation available publically, so it's not only available to partners anymore. The software documentation is really nice, approachable, readable, and searchable.

Positive

The installation is absolutely simple. The installation is quick.

You can install the system quickly and get results in monitoring.

The initial installation is not expensive for the customers.

Our company does the implementation for the customers. We have experts in our team to implement the solutions and for consulting the usage in the future.

We are there to support our clients, not only for the installation but also in exploring the solution.

Our customers are satisfied and there is no complaining about the price. All discounts are given case by case to accommodate the client's budgets. Setup is not expensive because projects are relatively short in man/days.

One of our customers has been using this solution for the last ten years since it was called Wily Introscope. They are really satisfied and they are buying more licenses, using the solution for the whole infrastructure.

All of my clients are using on-premises installation licenses. Most of our clients are at the enterprise level and they are some of the largest banks in the region. Broadcom DX APM is not only a tool, it's a solution. We have experts who are there to offer assistance in exploring the solution to give the customers the maximum value. In my opinion, it's the best product on the market.

I would rate this solution a ten out of ten.

We look at the load patterns and server health by looking at server health parameters. Heap memory is of prime importance as well as how the heap is behaving and how the memory is behaving under load, as well as the CPU utilization. These are generally the parameters we will check.

In a production environment we check all the parameters. We can detect any leakage, any problems, whether RAM is sufficient, and whether CPU is crossing a threshold. We can determine if we need to add new servers or RAM or adjust the heap settings.

It helps save resources for a company.

It also helps us look at business-critical transactions and how fast they are happening. It helps us pinpoint the methods or functions that are taking longer to operate and we can advise the development team to look into it and fine-tune those areas. They can make adjustments immediately.

For me, the most valuable feature is being able to check memory patterns. We check them when we do load testing or soak testing to see if there are any memory leaks.

A CA APM agent takes a lot of memory. That is one disadvantage. If you configure CA APM correctly it will still consume around 15 to 20 percent of memory.

We haven't had any issues with its scalability.

When you submit a support ticket it will take them two to three days to reply. They told us they would resolve issues within 24 hours, but so far that has not happened.

There have been times when we were doing performance testing, load testing, where it didn't capture the required information we were trying to monitor. We called the CA APM support team. They suggested we increase the RAM and restart the agents. That was the solution they gave us.

The setup is not straightforward. It is a bit complex. I have not configured CA APM myself, but I use it for performance testing. When we are doing performance testing, we configure CA APM for a pre-production environment which is similar to the production environment. We will do load testing and take all the parameters and observations and send them, along with our recommendations and conclusions, to development. But I have not really configured CA APM.

Dynatrace is the most expensive of these tools followed by AppDynamics which is "medium-expensive." Both CA APM vs Dynatrace and CA APM vs AppDynamics are a bit lower in price. Because of this, our clients insist on using CA APM.

In my opinion, if you can afford it, go for AppDynamics instead of CA APM. But if our customers don't have the budget, we'll go with CA APM.

We have a comparison chart showing the license costs for AppDynamics, Dynatrace, and CA APM and other monitoring tools as well. We provide that information to our clients along with the advantages and disadvantages of a particular tool. We provide our opinion on which it is best to go with but we also listen to our clients' opinions. We discuss this at length to finally come up with a decision on which tool to go with.

I use many tools, such as LoadRunner, Silk Performer, and IBM. I also use AppDynamics and Dynatrace. The last two are actually the best for me at the moment because they support even the database level. CA APM does not support that much. It will only give me minimal information about the DB.

Easily find bottleneck of our applications. We have a BSR (Business Services Reliability dashboard), so we can find out how our business is behaving, how we are getting the orders and how many errors we are getting. We find out how reliable our application is.

It's performed very well.

We can find out the bottlenecks before the customer encounters them. That's the major benefit.

It helps prioritize application performance issues because we can prioritize them in a test phase, or the development phase. We can find out that which queries are slow, what is the behavior of our application, and what we can tune our application to make it more reliable and faster.

Triage Map, Differential Analysis, Transaction Trace, error handling, cell counts. We have a complete dashboard, which tells us what's going on with our application, end to end.

It could be faster. For example, when we are upgrading the product, it takes a lot of time and there are a lot of things we have to do manually. If it is automated it would be really helpfull.

The stability is very good. We haven't had any lagging or downtime. 

We have already tuned it. It's very reliable. We have used suggestions from the CA communities and others. I already have experience with it so I have stabilized our environment.

It's very scalable.

I generally only use tech support when the issue is beyond my knowledge. Otherwise, I use the communities. 

When I have used their support I've been satisfied; not 100 percent, but a lot. The problem is it takes time. I prefer to use a community because lots of experienced people are using the communities and they reply faster than CA support.

It's straightforward.

The important things for us when selecting a vendor are 

• how good is their product and 
• the reviews of that product.

I would say try CA APM and tune it the way it is  recommended by CA Admins and from configuration guide. You'll find a lot of people complain about it because they do not tune the APM Cluster as recommended, and the agent as well.

We are using APM for troubleshooting and because of this product, the delay to solve and to fix issues has been reduced by 40% on average. We also use the APM data to analyze and predict if an application will work.

For us, the application is a new eye on the same data. Its quality and the way we access it is going to make the difference between an application you keep using and an application you won't. There are a lot of DevOps methodologies to improve the time to market and to deploy applications quicker. Sometimes it's not enough because at the end, the application expands some issues and the isolation of a root cause is quite complicated. We analyze about 3,000 incidents and predictions, classify them, choose our toolbox, including APM tools (the CA APM solution), and we are able to predict, to anticipate incidents and to assess a risk for an application to go live.

An application is quite complicated in the environment of a software reliability engineer, because our applications are like a black box. Thanks to CA APM we are able to transform this black box to a gray box by using the transaction trace functionality services. For me it's the most valuable service of the solution.

The product displays some graphics and sometimes we want to have some different metrics in the same graphic but it doesn't display in the same scale, so it's quite complicated to see the metrics. If the product would be able to manage a double scale, it would be perfect.

We measure the limit of a solution by the number of users. The application is developed in Java and only 10 to 15 users can connect to the application. It's quite a limit for massive deployment in a huge company like Orange.

Our scalability is great because you can add servers. It works.

I don't use support, I do everything myself.

It was the only tool in 2006 to provide the transaction trace feature. As mentioned before, it transforms an application from a black box to a gray box, that's why we knew that we needed Introscope (now CA APM).

It was quite easy. The solution is easy to deploy and we had the support of a vendor team.

We deployed it on 5 or 6 applications and now it's deployed for over 200 applications.