Broadcom DX Application Performance Management Reviews

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.

I'm checking customer experience, how they experience our website and how they use the systems inside the company. Customer experience, outside and inside.

It performs okay.

It helps me know everything. When I know everything, like when there is a problem, I can find it very quickly. It reduces the time for solving problems in the website.

Seeing what the customer is doing on our website. This is important for us to understand that they use the website as we planned.

I would like to see intelligence, deep intelligence or deep analytics.

Great. No problem.

Everything is okay. I have no problems.

Their technical support is great.

I have always used CA APM.

Dynatrace and CA, these are the best vendors that we checked. They're at the top.

The most important criteria when selecting a vendor are support and wide use of the product. Not that the product is there in one company or two companies, but worldwide. We want the company to invest money to improve it. So I'm looking for a product that is worldwide and used widely by customers.

I give it an eight out of 10 because it does not include all the features that I mentioned above, like intelligence.

Do a significant PoC, and in the PoC including something very difficult, not something light. See if in the most cases, the product is giving you the answers, and not just for the easy ones. 

In many organizations I've seen this product working in, SEV1s have been reduced quite a bit. One particular organization, within the first 12 months, reduced their SEV1s by 90% just by introducing this product. They had previously been using a competing product, so it really speaks to the value provided by this one that they weren't getting out of the other products they were using.

Suddenly, we were able to evaluate based off how code was being traced. In one incident, it saved us 18 hours in finding the actual problem in the logic for that application once we had a problem.

The most valuable features I believe would actually be two things I would go into: The insight it gives into the applications that it's actually applied to, and the flexibility to do many things with those metrics, and also feed your own metrics from external sources.

I think as we're all moving forward to automated deployments, it'd be nice to have that out-of-the-box with this product.

Also, scaling it, the data nodes writing automatically would be a very nice feature.

We have had large environments, many millions of metrics feeding in, and never have we had to dedicate a single resource to maintaining it.

Actually coming in once in a while for maintenance, we do have to put some work into it once in a while, but there is nothing to the magnitude of having to have somebody dedicated to it.

It is scalable. We can keep adding collectors that store the data, as needed. We haven't had any issues with that so far.

Technical support has always been very happy to help us. They offer a community, which is often very helpful, where one can go to find their own answers if they'd like.

We already had a competing solution. We weren't getting the value we needed out of it. We were still having problems. We couldn't find the actual root cause very easily with that solution, so we started evaluating others.

We looked at many others and this seemed to be the best fit for our organization.

Really, the most important criteria when selecting a vendor is value for dollar. As any business, we're looking for values and it's not just, "Is it better?" But, "Is it better enough to be worth the cost?" Or, if it's cheaper, that's also great.

The initial setup is actually pretty straightforward. The install is very easy. I don't think one would even need a document for it. It's pretty straightforward and the questions it's asking are kind of self-explanatory.

My rating just reflects some of the features we'd like to see. I don't think I'd ever give anybody a perfect rating. There's always room for improvement, but my rating is definitely higher than any other competing products that I've used, against it.

• 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.

The product helps us to identify code problems very quickly. It can also help us identify other problems with the application as it's running. That's a significant for us because application failures can impact revenue and customer satisfaction. This product allows us to do even more. For instance, we've recently added CA Application Performance Management (APM). Prior to that, we were only able to look at the infrastructure stack. From the box perspective, this gives us additional ways to help us troubleshoot. Having tools with some level of intelligence can more accurately pinpoint the problems. This helps us cut down that whole blame game and helps us get to the root of the issue faster.

From the application speed perspective, we can install it in both the development and production environment for the applications. In the development environment, they're able to test and capture long-running transactions, database issues, too many threads, or memory leaks. We are able to identify those, in theory, before they make it to production. This gives us a much cleaner application when it goes up with potentially less issues from a newly deployed piece of code. That’s the kind of the big play that we're going for and we have yet to generate tickets because we're still working to capture the right level of noise. This is a better process then flooding application teams with a lot of details.

We have pretty much every tool we need. What I need for this tool to be able to demonstrate is that it totally surpasses the competition.

My partners are not just concerned about the back end of the system, they're are concerned about the users and what is happening to them. The user experience is everything. And it’s not fully baked into the equation. We are potentially going to buy a different product.

Stability has been good so far from my current experience and previous experience of APM. We are using an earlier version, 9.7. We're about to upgrade to 10.3. What is very important is making sure that you evaluate your application and what you want to measure and capture, in a development environment before you go to production. If you attempt to capture too much information in production it can lead to issues. Teams need to know what they're doing, because it can impact performance if you're looking for too many things you don't really care about.

We haven't hit the wall yet with finding the upper ends of the scalability. What we've been told is that we can deploy up to 60 apps in the current infrastructure without having some sort of performance degradation. We haven't experienced it yet, so that's still to be determined.

Technical support is usually the same in any big company. They tend to play the log game. I typically contact our support contact. I just reach out and we escalate. The account executives can help with that process as well. We ran into problems where my team was complaining, support wasn’t responding, or they were taking too long for issue resolution. I spoke with the account team, and then we were able to get the right connections so we can escalate more effectively and efficiently.

I was not part of the initial setup. I'm involved in the upgrade and the new Implementation.

Make sure the staff who runs, manages, and implements the tool with their customers or their partners has a middleware background or WebSphere experience. These individuals should understand how that all works, because that will shorten the learning curve. A person with these skills can really translate between the app team and the infrastructure. This can make adaption go a lot faster and gain the benefit and value faster.

The Introscope feature is the most valuable for us, specifically the part that shows us errors in the application.

We are a government IT company that provides services to the government. Because of that, we're required to use a very wide range of products and applications. We also need to have a multitude of interconnections with diverse systems, and one of the biggest difficulties we had was how these interconnections were made. CA APM has provided us a solution for this, allowing us to discover the root cause of some speed issues we had in the systems that were very difficult to diagnose.

• Report
• Management module
• Dashboards

I've used it since January 10, 2014.

We can't implement the TIM in our environment because we have issues with a virtualized environment. VMware and TIM was not thought of in a way that could receive the data in a cloud environment.

There were issues, but we have fixed them now.

There have been no issues scaling it.

10/10

10/10

It's very simple, as we are an IT company and we are accustomed to new system implementations.

We did it through a sales team, and without their support we would not be as we evolved in APM as we are today.

We did tests with AppDynamics, but had to discard the use of this software because to do analysis of a user experience we had to submit the data to the US, and then only return with the answer.

Prepare a team to manage this tool, as if you don't have a full team to review the APM data, it will not work as it should.

The CA Introscope dashboard of applications is the view our operations team uses to quickly identify any issues within the application space especially during peak trading season like Christmas/Easter. It is extensively used for quicker root cause analysis within the application area.

Introscope along with CA CEM and ADA is expected to further decrease the time taken for root cause analysis for critical customer facing incidents and also to identify bottlenecks before they impact our customers.

CA CEM's customer transaction view is valuable because it gives an insight into how our customers networks are performing. The ADA helps in isolating any response time issues on the network and hence, aid in root cause analysis (but we are yet to realise the benefit of it in production). Also, the transaction recording feature is valuable in understanding the paths our critical business transactions take within our IT environment.

The APM tools themselves work well within their respective silo's, but they need to work better in an integrated manner to give the end to end view of any business service.

CA Introscope has performance and data collection issues.

CA Introscope has had performance issues due to large number of metrics collected though it was scaled accordingly.

Customer Service:

Good.

Technical Support:

Average as they need more experts in APM technology.

For cloud monitoring, we had another tool and we had to switch because of the costs and features. Introscope has been running for a while.

• Too complex to get an integrated outcome
• ADA/CEM is complicated as it requires an understanding of networks
• CA Cloud monitoring is complex when creating customer journeys
• Introscope is complex when presenting and grouping metrics for dashboards
• The triage process is complex

It was through a vendor team whose expertise was above average.

Yes we did.

• You need strong architectural skills along with tool-set skills to implement such a tool
• You need to focus on integration as without this, the value might not be as expected
• Start it simple and then add more complex scenarios
• Document and design the system according to requirements
• It's easy to get carried away with all the features, so keep it simple to fit the business need
• Make sure what metrics are required to be monitored is clearly defined. Do not just collect data for all the metrics
• Make sure that RACI is clearly defined with various owners as this can easily slow down the implementation if it is not properly documented and agreed
• There is a lot of external team dependencies, like the application team, support team, network team, architects, an service owners, so make sure that this is documented along with RACI and efforts agreed
• A top down approach is always good, from the end users to actual technical metrics

• Policies
• Audit feature
• Warning mode policy
• APM

Application suite was installed to bring in compliance with international security standards like ISO 27001 and SAUX

Integration with other applications and easier log management via automated procedures. Also needs an easier way to be able to segregate app admin duties.

Integration of CA AC at first and then APM/ELM/PMDB was initiated in 2008 and finalized stage was in 2012 for a major telecom provider.

As I implemented the additional tools, I would rate ELM as 6/10, and PMDB 8/10.

In earlier versions like 8.5 and 12 we ran into many incompatibility problems while a lot of other problems existed with JBOSS and assigned certificates.

No. Application was stable enough after APM installation.

No. There was a 3 phase staged expansion of this application which did not need any additional planning other than installing new agents on computers and servers.

Good enough, although I would have expected a better way of dealing with cases than having to explain every time from the start when a ticket was paused or opened in relevance to another one.

7/10 - They need to leave the automated way of asking from a client all tech details from start when a ticket is opened under his account ID.

No. Telecom clients (more than 3) were not using a solution similar to this one.

Initial setup was very hard due to lack of proper phrasing and instructions in manuals. It became even harder when there was a need for transition from older versions to newer ones.

I certified by CA on installing/integrating/developing the application as an outsourcing consultant.

A client claims that they have had better management and administration along with advanced reporting capabilities to the Privacy Authorities of State.

Original cost of licenses and working labor was estimated at €500,000 - €600,000 for a 4 year period. Day to day cost is not known to me.

Need to build questionnaires to establish priorities in policies and resources which are going to be developed and applied to his company. CA has no template/questionnaire in place and this is additional custom job needed by vendor (plus additional cost in money and time)