Broadcom DX Application Performance Management Reviews

Most important is transaction traces, and we appreciate the integration with service tools like SOI, the ease of creating Dashboards and in the new version the team center.

The mean time to resolve has reduced dramatically since we started using CA APM Introscope. We found it very important for our DevOps strategy for resolving issues and for pre production tests.

Standalone workstation interface is most of the time slow. The licensing model and the prices are above the average.

3 years.

Yes, as any implementation of this level we found issues, but nothing worth it and the support has been as expected.

At first we had some, but we had months running this solution without interruptions. As far as the scalability, it's an important factor.

This tool is scalable as expected, we had to make some fixes to metrics explosion, and afterwords we needed to add a couple of enterprise managers.

Above average. We always get answer in less than 15 minutes, and the personnel are very kind as well.

Very proactive and with noted knowledge about the specific topics. It is 24/7 with people all around the world.

We have New Relic as well for a specific monitoring need.

It is very complex indeed, but we always had support.

In-house.

The price is high and the licensing is restrictive.

Yes, IBM and New Relic.

We are using the on-premise and cloud versions of Broadcom DX Application Performance Management.

Broadcom DX Application Performance Management could improve its supportability to the current technologies and the end-to-end correlation feature should be done automatically without custom configurations. Additionally, there should not be any configuration changes to the client-side when deploying the solution.

I have been using Broadcom DX Application Performance Management for approximately two years.

The scalability is very poor. When you expand your application, you have to do it manually on the deployment.

The support could improve because most of the support has no commitment to their SLAs.

The deployment could improve because it is complicated and not user-friendly on how to deploy the agents. You have to do many changes on the client-side. There are a lot of improvements needed.

The deployment for one client-server or one client target can take approximately 30 to 60 minutes. However, it does depend on the client.

We are implementors of Broadcom DX Application Performance Management. We do the implementation of this solution for clients.

When maintenance is required it can take one to two people up to two days to complete.

The license for Broadcom DX Application Performance Management is annual. The licensing model could improve because there is not any limit to deploying the agent, there should be some limits on it.

My advice to those wanting to implement this solution is to do many sanity tests before doing the deployment. It's very hard to find the issue and a high possibility of issues when doing the deployment.

I rate Broadcom DX Application Performance Management a six out of ten.

This solution is an awesome monitoring tool for application monitoring, customized dashboards, and alerting. Many features are used, including its ability to dive into application data, the user experience, the application flow map, transaction traces, and the team center.

We use APM for application monitoring, which includes availability, performance of apps (stalls, errors, and response time), and transactions. The product is extremely customizable when it comes to setting up application monitoring. It provides app monitoring data with very effective, immediate alerting.

• Transaction traces
• Dashboards
• Email alerts
• Team center
• Average response time
• Error and stall detection
• Metric grouping to see combined data.
• CEM for analyzing and reporting

CEM needs to be simplified, because it causes too many interruptions in our daily work.

Stability is one of the strongest attributes of CA APM. It is very stable on all platforms.

CA APM is very scalable and used in a clustered environment because it supports more than its technical capacity.

Their support team is quite supportive and quick to respond. 

They communicated very well and their support was vastly experienced.

I have used AppDynamics in the past, and its customization is not as simple as that of CA APM.

Initial setup was very straightforward. It was simple to implement and customize.

I implemented this solution with an extensively experienced in-house team.

Setup costs are quite competitive relative to other solutions, and simpler.

We evaluated other solutions, such as AppDynamics.

Its presence is needed in our cloud solutions. Other solutions have been present from early on, but we use this solution to focus on the cloud.

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

The solution is primarily used for monitoring such as network monitoring, application performance monitoring, infrastructure monitoring, et cetera. We also use it for the AI/ML to understand the kinds of effects that are coming from their different monitoring solutions. It can give a root cause analysis using multiple data points. It can monitor for and explain downtime and reduce the work of the ID operations team as it provides them with a root cause analysis for downtime events.

The different layers of monitoring helped to optimise the resource and reduce MTTR.If I found the issue in Infrastructure then team only focus in the infrastructure layer 

The solution has very good capacity and performance analytics. That is one section, which actually provides a lot of insights. I can see, for example, how my system is performing, and what kind of load is there in the systems. 

The dashboard is excellent and allows me to get quite granular, which I find quite helpful.

The initial setup is straightforward.

Technical support is good and the solution does offer pretty good documentation.

The AI/ML is still not quite giving the right results, the right root cause analysis. That needs to be improved. They claim that they give the root cause analysis in the exact right percentage, however, we find that usually whatever the root cause analysis it shows actually isn't the actual root cause. Therefore we've found that the AI/ML is actually not working properly. That needs to be improved a lot.

If I'm getting not the right root cause analysis, then definitively I have to go back and verify the different monitoring solutions to look for the root cause, which takes time.

The stability could be more reliable.

It would be ideal if correlations had their own dashboard. It would help to minimize the time gaps we create when we have to individually go back to check all the monitoring data points.

The pricing is high. We aren't getting the value we imagined out of the product.

I've used the solution for at least the last 12 months or so.

I don't find the reliability to be so good on the solution. The stability could be better. 

We have 50 users on the solution currently.

In terms of scalability, I would say it's good, however, it's definitely not perfect. If you aren't yet getting the right results, it doesn't make sense to scale it.

As of right now, we have no plans to increase usage.

We have found that both the documentation on offer and the technical support is quite good. there are no complaints in that regard. They are helpful and responsive and we're quite happy with the level of service we receive when we need it.

The real setup was straightforward, as all the monitoring solutions we were using were CA only. Due to that, there is a no-hassle login figure thing for the DX setup. Therefore, I wouldn't describe the process as overly complex or difficult. 

The solution uses a subscription-based model.

The pricing could be better. From the perspective of a value proposition, what I'm expecting from products that I'm not getting. That makes us assume that the pricing is high.

There aren't additional costs beyond the main licensing fee.

We are a customer and an end-users.

This solution does not have an on-premises deployment option. It is only available on the cloud.

I would advise a company looking for a solution such as this first start do a POC, and really look for the results on the raw data, your own broad data, rather than just going with a company that hasn't been tested. You should place your data into the system and see how the AI/ML is working. If the result is you can get 60, 70, 80% accuracy, you should go with it. 

I'd rate the solution at a four out of ten. There are many aspects of the solution that still need improvement.

We primarily use this product for monitoring our IBM WebSphere environment. It more generally monitors all of our JVMs for our web environments, used for all of our websites.

JVM memory monitoring and connection pool monitoring are valuable features.

It provides visibility into the performance of SQL statements, allowing for the identification of those that are performing poorly.

With respect to SQL monitoring, it would be nice to have a little more information because it doesn't provide the full statement all of the time. If it's really long then it only provides part of it.

It would be nice if the parameters that were used could be reported, as currently, it doesn't.

Having it monitor more of the environment would be helpful because we use applications such as Mule and Informatica, aside from the JVMs.

We began using this product between five and ten years ago when it was known as Wily Introscope.

This is a stable product.

In terms of stability, with our current setup, it is not so much. Unlike a situation where it was on the cloud, we'd have to be involved and it would be difficult to scale it up.

We have about a dozen people in the organization who use it.

We have had to call them and I find that they are not very supportive now.

The initial setup is complex.

We had assistance from either the vendor or somebody that they directed us to and are affiliated with.

The licensing costs are expensive.

We did not implement the latest release because they made some big changes to the framework. They probably have some of the stuff in their newest release that we would like. However, we didn't do that because they went to Kubernetes and some other technology that we weren't ready to adopt because it isn't in our environment yet.

Since Broadcom bought it, I would no longer recommend this product to other users. I think that they increased the price and the support isn't very good anymore.

I would rate this solution a seven out of ten.