Broadcom DX Application Performance Management Reviews

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.

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.

Primary use case is to monitor our critical applications.

It performs pretty well. Right now, we use it to create dashboards and executive view dashboards, so our higher up managers can take a look and see where our application status stands. It creates transparency. We are satisfied with how it performs.

It brings our operation side and our application side together. When it comes to implementing the tool, like when we supply the agent, we have to get permission from the application side to say, "Hey, we're installing such and such agent on this server. Are we able to go forward with it?" Then, whether they tell us, yes or no, we can do it.

It helps us prioritize application performance issues. It has assisted triage where we can drill down and see where exactly the problem lies. If it is a database issue, we can see the exact query that is causing the issue. Or, if it is a web service call that is having any issues we can look there as well. It is pretty accurate when it comes to that stuff.

The dashboards.

The ability to dynamically create dashboards. Right now, we do custom dashboards. Everything is created manually. If there is a way when we deploy the agent it can automatically figure out how the application is set up, so we do not have to manually create everything, it would save a lot of time. It needs to be more intuitive.

It is pretty stable. We have not had any major issues. There has been some issues here and there, but for the most part nothing major or critical.

It scales pretty well.

Technical support is slow to respond and also asks redundant questions. For example, they will ask for some logs being sent, then we will send it and hear back from them again in a couple of days requesting pretty much the same things. Like "well let's take a look," "alright send the logs again," and I was like, "we just did that like four or five days ago." That is one of my few complaints. I would rate technical support a seven and a half out of 10.

I was not involved in the initial setup, but I have been involved with an upgrade.

The upgrade was complex. The documentation could have been a little bit better, but other than that, it was okay.

It was pretty much just us; just our team at work.

We have seen other competitors and what they provide. It is not as good as what CA APM provides. 

I would recommend this solution.

Understand what exactly you need to be monitored. For us, our biggest issue is making sure that our customer and our other critical applications are up and running 24/7. We understand for APM, it has the ability to drill down and do the end-to-end monitoring that we are looking for. Just understand what you are looking for.

Most important criteria when selecting a vendor: customer service. Making sure that they are responsive. If I call them, I want to get ahold of someone right away. Also, if it is too expensive, we are going to count them out.

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.

• Deep-dive application instrumentation allows us to diagnose application performance and availability problems.
• Powerful querying capabilities of the metrics data.
• Ability to build custom dashboards and reports.
• Ability to create custom metrics using calculators or custom JavaScript calculators.
• Ability to capture and feed custom metrics into CA APM. This same capability allows us pull metric data from other monitoring tools and feed that into CA APM to provide that single-pane-of-glass view.
• Metric Data API that allows querying and extraction of metric data.
• Java and .NET application monitoring.

It has provided application teams with another tool in the tool box to diagnose complex performance and availability issues. It also allows for the early detection of an issue before we hear about it from our customers. CA APM reduces our time to resolution and improves our customer confidence.

While calculators are present, they don’t support the ability to create a custom calculation on a metric. To do this, a custom JavaScript calculator must be built.

The dashboard functionality is what one might expect from the early 2000s. The dashboard tools need a significant update in terms of the widgets that are available, usability, and ability to modify how data points are labeled.

The custom report functionality also needs to be updated with the ability to apply different widgets, rather than just a line graph, and the ability to modify how data points are labeled.

The capability to execute a shell command on an alert condition is present. However, the implementation makes it difficult to find potential use cases. In our environment, it’s unfortunately something we are unable to make use of, at least directly. In short, CA APM is not a tool I would recommend for implementation of self-healing. However, it can be used to automatically advertise that a condition under which self-healing should be kicked off exists.

.NET agents are not at par with Java agents and there is a gap that needs to be closed.

We’ve been actively using CA APM 10.2 in non-production and production environments since March 2016.

We have had stability issues, but we have worked out the major issues with CA and are working towards resolution of the minor stability issues. The fixes for the stability issues we experienced have been implemented in versions of CA APM following APM 10.2.

We have not had any scalability issues. I will note that it is important to have an understanding of how APM works and, if you’re new to the product, to work closely with CA on environment sizing, optimizing the configuration, and understanding how much load an environment can handle.

Initial technical support is excellent for common, easy to identify and medium complexity issues. For difficult, complex, issues it’s necessary to escalate things to get the experts from development and engineering involved to get traction on resolution. Otherwise, things can get stuck and drawn out.

Initial setup is moderate to complex (there are a number of factors in the complexity of setup) and needs to be done with someone who has experience setting up and configuring CA APM environments.

No other products were evaluated prior to using CA APM.

Having expertise from CA to help you with implementing CA APM is essential. It is also essential to understand that deep-dive instrumentation can have a significant impact on an application and even enabling or disabling certain agent features can cause significant impact. It is critical to understand how to configure the agent, what to configure, and test out a configuration before deploying to production. Also, any updates to applications must be tested with the agent in place, before deploying to production. If there are issues, it’s important to know how to start tuning down the level of instrumentation.

I will note that CA has, and continues, to bend over backwards in responding to our needs and requirements in ways that few vendors do.

Its ability to deep dive into the application code is the most valuable feature for us. It has help us to be more proactive instead of reactive when it comes to incident management.

It's improved our ability within the instant management realm. We are able to get the root cause faster than we had done before. We had to uninstall it two years ago, it was a matter of looking through log files and then making basically and guessing as to what the root cause was. It allowed us to avoid the same incidents occurring over and over.

Continued improvements with the integration of the URL and the ability to use AWS would be great. Understand that it may at first potentially break your application, but it might just be a case that maybe it's just poorly written and it's not Interscope that's the issue.

We've been using it for about eight years.

We ran into all kinds of problems and most of it was because of just the onboarding as our new-product education was a huge issue.

It's pretty stable. I just don't think that we've done a very good job of lifecycle management of the product.

We've had no issues with scalability.

We had nothing in place previously.

The setup was straightforward, but the interaction of it initially with our applications was the tough part. We needed to make sure the instrumentation itself did not break our application.

We did use some professional services to assist us in getting both the buy-in and in helping us to set up some bells and whistles to really get people excited about the product.

Our ROI is the fact that our applications have the ability to stay up longer because we are more proactive in how we monitor and performance test our applications so that when they go to market, they're fully functional.

I was not part of the process at that time.

If you purchase this product, work closely with their technical teams to help plan and deploy it. Make it as much of a repeatable process as possible.