Broadcom DX Application Performance Management Reviews

We are using CA APM for Layer 7 applications, like SQL, as well as application debugging.

Compared to other tools, it's not good. 

First, there is no auto flow diagram. Second, the alert mechanism is not as good when compared to other tools. Third, there are many different folders, such as front end, back end, and BB queries, but it's very critical to centralize all the business connections. Fourth, there is an issue relative to the build all view. 

It's a very stable product.

There aren't issues related to CA APM's scalability.

Compared to other tools, the technical support is not good. Other tools give support in real time, whereas CA will only reply 48 hours after I log a call.

We have multiple solutions, like CA APM, and Pinpoint. 

For implementation, it's just straightforward. There is no challenge to correlation, continuation or estimation, and there is no complexity in our environment.

The traditional Introscope portion of the product is the most valuable. It provides good visibility to the JVM and Java application.

We use CA APM for monitoring and alerting of our Java applications.

CA has very recently upgraded its “Browser Response Time Monitoring”, as it was previously known. CA has been listening to its customer requirements, and the Digital Experience Collector is a positive step forward.

Unfortunately, my application is Java version 6, and CA has removed support for Java 6 starting with CA APM, Version 10.5, where the Digital Experience Collector is available.

I have used this solution since 2008.

Because my application is running on IBM WebSphere and Java 6, there were ‘workarounds’ I needed to apply. CA would provide a distinct copy of the Java agent and the associated configuration files to avoid the trouble spots. Unfortunately, these workarounds also disabled important functionality, such as deep tracing.

I have not had any scalability issues.

Technical support is good. They work with urgency.

We did not have any previous solutions.

The support documentation has gotten much better over the last few years. Installation is not difficult, once you understand the different components of the APM solution.

Consider the needs of your application and compare a few vendors.

I recognize Dynatrace and AppDynamics as leaders for e-commerce application APM.

Do a thorough proof of concept.

If your application is not current and can’t be upgraded, you are at risk because CA is moving very fast to catch up with Dynatrace and AppDynamics on functionality. But in the process, they will leave behind older technology, such as support for Java 6.

I run an IBM WebSphere Commerce application, which uses Java 6, and I bumped up against several limitations. As my application is public facing and has a large breadth of URLs, it is difficult to configure for very specific URLs. Rather, I needed to implement “URL groups”, which are generalized URL buckets. In an e-commerce application, that might be “product pages”, “category pages”, or “checkout pages”. Implementing the URL grouping is not easy, and if you get it wrong, you’ll have what is termed a “metric explosion”.

A metric explosion means too many distinct metrics are collected, which can put stress on the Java agent and/or the Enterprise Collector. Cleaning up a metric explosion is complicated, unless you are willing to delete all your historically collected metrics.

Again, I experienced these limitations with version 10.3 of APM and lower. The 10.5 version has made improvements, but my Java 6 application is not supported for version 10.5, so I cannot effectively provide feedback on it.

It’s used internally to help us get a grip of our infrastructure environment, including datacenters, network, applications, voice solutions etc. and to help serve over 10,000 customers utilizing the CA framework.

In-depth functionality, standard available reports and the dashboard.

Standard available reports provide us with an automatic insight into the top ten situations to watch. It would have been extremely difficult to program such a report ourselves, and to my knowledge no other competitor can match this functionality.

Dashboards are easy customizable and vary per persona, thus showing different kind/levels of information.

User interface - CA is moving towards HTML5, but still a lot is Java, old fashioned, non-customizable and not user friendly. It’s look and feel is still too technical.

No issues if you make sure you align the underlying infrastructure with the capacity needed.

It’s very scalable.

Customer Service:

9/10

Technical Support:

8/10

We have had numerous solutions. We are in a process of moving over towards the CA framework.

Complex, deep functionality matching with business requirements and design of platform.

We implemented it in-house with the support of CA.

Depends on the size of the product you need.

We evaluated many other vendors. We considered AppDynamics APM.

Plan before you act. Do not fall in the pitfall that you have extensive user requirements and try to implement this at once in the tooling. Start small and simple and gradually expand.

Easily map between transaction and method recall

Useful automatics alerts

Easily understand graphics

The way these tools show the information is very useful. this is a tool that records information from Java and .NET applications, and obtain information about how many times an method has been call in a period of time (usually 30 sec), how many times respond in this span of time or is delayed or stall.

Usually you can map the java / .NET method to some type of transaction, so the graphic shows how the transaction is working (or not working) then you can establish a base line and alerts when the behavior is not that is expected.

The graphic display that shows the variables in the time is very intuitive and almost everyone is able to obtain useful information.

You can add other standard monitors like SNMP or even personalized monitors that are integrated with the platform. the platform itself is easily integrated whit the manager of manager (CA Spectrum or others) or even you can access the database with affect the tool behavior. We have been integrating the tool with splunk in a way to obtain deep correlation.

Release new features, but in an intelligent way. We need more capabilities to analyze the information that tools collects; for example, using artificial intelligence, or something like that. There is a lot of artificial intelligence, for example, in cars, and other things. These technological advances has not been translated to the monitoring tool yet. We would like something like AI in monitoring tools. There is a lot of information to correlate and useful information to obtain about what is happening in the company's systems.

Some few times the agents lost connection whit the manager, but usually for changes made in the java / . net server.

The solution is technically scalable, but it is very expensive for our business especially it the way that CA calculates the price, that is based on the number of processors. If we use it too much, it will be too expensive.

Customer Service:

It is fairly good.

Technical Support:

We have the solution in a SaaS schema with a local partner, they give us the first and second level support then the partner used the CA support. I have not worked directly with the CA service or with technical support but I fell it is not the best.

Nope similar, there was a tool from IBM but was not as good as this one.

Initial setup was very fast. It was very easy to deploy.

We need to be able to obtain new solutions for full feet new necessities . When there is a new technology, if the application is not able to monitoring it, we must research new technologies to enable monitoring these new technologies. Now we are looking for a news solutions.

This was the model we used when we made the change a five years ago. We also considered IBM and HPE. We chose CA APM. They do the most for us.

Ensure use the tools to develop good instrumentation and to make the best use of its capabilities; for example, to define correlations and setting the levels when alarms must be sent.

Detailed alert settings give more control on when they should or should not appear.

The tree-structure tracing shows where we are spending the most time in a call-by-call sequence. But the tracing capabilities of other APM tools are more advanced than CA.

APM tools are essential for finding performance bottlenecks and pervasive issues. It gives a high level point of view on where there is a problem. This tool, in particular, is not as good at deep dive analysis. Newer versions, like 10.5 with AXA, Dynatrace, and AppDynamics may be better at going deeper into root-cause analysis.

Deep dive analysis and performance need improvement. Introscope scalability performance lags behind for our team, which looks after 3,000 JVMs and millions of metrics.

I have used this product for a half a year.

The product is stable most of the time. However, like any software out there, there are bugs. Few crashes have been experienced, but incorrect metrics and improper collector behaviours have been observed.

We have had scalability issues. Performance slows down with the number of JVMs our team supports.

I would give technical support a rating of 7/10. Few people are available to support the product. However, good, proper attention is given to urgent matters.

We didn’t have a previous solution.

I was not involved in the initial setup.

This is out of my scope.

Other alternatives are being actively considered.

For APM, the most valuable solution is being able to do a root cause analysis quickly, and find the root cause visually so that we don't have to hunt around for the actual cause of the problem.

Our organization has over 21,000 agents running. Being able to monitor all those agents at the same time, with the ability to be alerted when thresholds are exceeded. We can know when we are having problems without having dedicated people to watch monitoring screens all the time.

I would like the ability to see a full end-to-end path of a transaction. I know the next version will be getting closer to that. I’d also like to see it get to the root cause of the issue faster.

Some of the visual aspects of the current version and reporting need to be improved. I know that you are fixing all this. It's a little harder to do some of this because I know so many of the things that are coming up.

Stability is pretty good. They are improving it with every version. I'm hoping that when the latest version is out, we will have a really stable environment that we can rely on 100%.

It is very scalable. As I said before, we're running more than 21,000 agents in all of our development operations. We feel that it could scale very well by just adding more servers and enterprise managers.

Technical support is very responsive. They will work with us to solve any of the issues that we are encountering.

I'm the administrator for our environment, so I do all the installations for our environment and also set it up. The setup is fairly straightforward. There is some complexity to understanding some of the tuning mechanisms that you can do to it. But that's with any enterprise-level software.

You definitely need to understand the size of your environment. Try to get a plan together before you start implementing it. It is a big help because then it goes a lot smoother.

I use Broadcom DX Application Performance Management for performance optimization, tuning, problem analysis, troubleshooting in production, and load testing support.

The most valuable feature of Broadcom DX Application Performance Management for me is transaction monitoring. The technical support provided for the solution is also an advantage.

What comes to mind when you speak of a room for improvement in Broadcom DX Application Performance Management is the infrastructure agent, but my company doesn't use it, so I can't say if it's really a problem or not, but it could be the container support or cloud support that could be improved in the solution.

An additional feature I'd like to see in the next release of Broadcom DX Application Performance Management is for it to have one agent for cloud and one agent for legacy, with all features included.

I've been using Broadcom DX Application Performance Management for more than ten years.

Broadcom DX Application Performance Management is a stable product.

Broadcom DX Application Performance Management is a scalable product.

The technical support team for Broadcom DX Application Performance Management is helpful. On a scale of one to five, with one being the lowest and five being the highest, I'm rating support a five.

The initial setup for Broadcom DX Application Performance Management was done ten years ago, so I don't remember it much.

The implementation of Broadcom DX Application Performance Management was done by my team, so in-house.

I'm unable to give information on Broadcom DX Application Performance Management licensing costs, but all Application Performance Management products have expensive pricing. This means that it's not only Broadcom that's expensive, and it would be an advantage if the cost would be a little bit cheaper.

I evaluated other products apart from Broadcom DX Application Performance Management. One is Dynatrace which I would also recommend as it's a very nice product. As for the other products, I can't give any other information.

I'm using the latest version of Broadcom DX Application Performance Management.

Within my company, 200 people use Broadcom DX Application Performance Management, in particular, developers, operators, and IT managers.

Only one person is required for the deployment and maintenance of the solution.

I would recommend Broadcom DX Application Performance Management to others looking into implementing it.

As a whole, I'm rating Broadcom DX Application Performance Management eight out of ten. I'm not giving it a nine or a ten because there's still some improvement needed.

My company is not a reseller nor a partner of Broadcom DX Application Performance Management. My company is just a customer.

We are a network operation center. We measure the performance of the system.

We monitor the network and the application performance for any degradation in the performance of the system. 

If it is down then we need to get notified very quickly so that we can inform the consulting team to resolve the issue. 

We also have to inform the management of the incident management process, and the customer response team to notify the customer's agents.

I like that it gives you a wide range of data where you can see the application outage response from concurrent locations and the number of stalled jobs.

I like these variant features that are present.

It's quite easy to understand.

It doesn't have a proper database, and the configuration is very difficult.

Broadcom APM has two solutions. One is the infrastructure monitoring and the other is the application monitoring.

The infrastructure monitoring is not very user-friendly. When it migrates the application APM tool, the configuration it's on an individual basis. There is no template that you can apply to all of the related servers or applications. You have to configure one by one and set the thresholds, set the periods, and the monitoring times. Everything needs to be configured manually, which is pretty bad, it's not good.

The main feature that I am expecting to be included in this solution is the template for the configuration. Also, the UAM tool should be more user-friendly. 

They should have the proper database setup where we can change the values on the backend. We don't have that option, it is mostly XML-based data files that can't be read.

I have been working with Broadcom DX Application Performance Management for almost two years.

We are not using the latest version. We are using version 10.7

There are a couple of issues in terms of stability. 

Sometimes, the interlinking between APM and UAM doesn't happen regularly. You need to restart other services, which is not convenient.

Technical support is good, but you don't always get a solution that works. It seems to be more of a trial and error process. At times you will be told that the issues will be resolved in the next issue, but it doesn't.

They respond immediately, and the communication is good.

We are currently doing a POC with AppDynamics.

It's more or less straightforward.

You deploy the agent based on the type of framework, whether it is Java or, .NET.

You deploy it and reset the services.

Pricing is not my area because I am a technical developer, technical engineer who coordinates the different teams but I know the pricing.

It is definitely expensive for what we get, but there isn't an alternate option at the moment. We can't really compare with other solutions.

I have evaluated other solutions to understand the market and which applications were leading.

I wouldn't recommend this solution. 

I don't have enough experience with AppDynamics but from what I have researched on YouTube and other sites, it seems that Appdynamics is definitely better than Broadcom. 

If they don't have anything in place, I can recommend Broadcom products, such as UAM and APM. It's easy but the configuration requires a lot to be done.

I would rate Broadcom DS Application Performance Management a seven out of ten.