Broadcom DX Application Performance Management Reviews

The usability and dashboarding. That's how our clients see the information. Also, deep trace analysis is valuable because that's how we figure out where our problems are.

It's helped us improve in terms of solutions by displaying key system data easily.

Data organization and creation of those dashboards. These seem to be getting better in the newer versions. Also, distribution and version control.

I’ve been using CA APM for between nine or 10 years.

The performance issues we have are on our end and we don't hold CA accountable for that.

The only problems we have are limited by our hardware.

We don't usually end up calling support because the other guy that works on it does a lot of high level development and he's out in Colorado. If there is an issue here I can't figure out, we usually end up having to go to engineers to get it solved. In the past when we've called them it's been really hit or miss. Like on a scale of one to 10, I'd give it a six.
Usually to get our questions answered because we consider ourselves pretty advanced users and we're kinda on the edge of what's going on. We usually have to get a couple of tiers in before we can get the questions that we have answered.

I personally haven't used other solutions. I was hired here specifically because I have experience with Intrascope at my previous job and we had actually deployed it there as our first APM solution.

I've set it up on new systems several times. It's pretty straightforward.

I don't remember back then because I actually wasn't involved in the decision making process. Since we've used it, we are constantly looking at other tools. We looked just to evaluate. We've evaluated a new solution at Dynamic and Dynatrace and a BMC solution or whatever they call it. We were impressed.

I would suggest that they don't underestimate the overwhelming amount of data that will come through and have their clients prepared for that. Because we end up spending a lot of time interpreting data for other people and really getting the users of the application involved is probably the most important thing in order to be successful. Then from a technical standpoint, just don't think for a second that you can skimp on some specifications because you will need all the resources you can get.

It's awesome. But I think CAPM is a little behind, at least up to this point with the versions we're on. On displaying data and making it easier to use for people that aren't in the tool eight hours a day.

CA APM is currently used in two areas of our business (SAP estate and SMART estate) but slowly we are delivering APM to a vast amount of people in the business. I think that is the biggest compliment I can give as more and more people are wanting to use APM.

I feel the ability to easily see a variety of metrics is great for us as a business, as we are able to view our systems in more depth. If there are any issues we are able to spot the exact problem very quickly. We are able to spot issues much quicker with the use of the out-of-the-box metrics given to us by CA. But we also develop that further with the use of the EPA Agent and expand what we can give and show the business by creating our own scripts. This has allowed us to develop our own self-monitoring and before anybody else sees the issue we are on hand to solve that as quickly as possible.

I don’t believe that there are many improvements from the product point of view, as the future upgrades which are coming will solve many of our issues.

No.

No.

The technical support is superb. They are always willing to help as well as give guidance as and when you need it. whether on a chat, face to face, or through the CA communities site where you can talk with other users.

Straightforward as we had a CA technician in with us to help us set up and tell us what was needed to be done and how we can do it.

Might seem quite expensive but definitely worth the money invested.

The CA APM product is great to show you how your business is doing and where improvements can be made. We are using this in our SAP estate and SMART estate and, as said above, we are exploring how we can deliver this product to more areas around the business helping our company grow!

It provides transparency into what's happening when there are problems that occur within applications.

It helps us identify and isolate issues when trouble arises; keep services up and running, basically.

I'd like to see the REST APIs, and specifically, refined. I believe that is one of the newer things that has been polished with the 10.5 release that's coming out. I look forward to that.

Other than that, I'd like to see more integration between nodes. For example, if there's a problem that arises in one server, I want to be able to drill down into it and have it automatically jump over to the next node and to see the continuation of the issue.

I have not rated it higher because I’d like more integration and more bells and whistles.

I'm pretty happy with how stable it is.

We have scaled it and we have not run into scalability issues yet; maybe we're close. We have a cluster of about five or six servers, I believe. So far, it's hanging in there.

Technical support has been pretty good. They respond pretty much in the same day. They've been very helpful. No issues to report.

We were not previously using a different solution.

I was not involved in the initial setup, but from what I heard, it looks pretty straightforward.

I have looked at other products. I've looked at AppDynamics. They have a pretty interesting looking product, but as far as for our organization, I think we're pretty happy with CA APM.

When selecting a vendor, support and the relationship are very important – we have a good one with CA – as is familiarity, as well. We have a lot of people who are familiar with CA's products, and they're fairly happy with them.

Do your homework. The tools pretty much open up a lot of possibility. You need the manpower to take advantage of that, so make sure you have the right skill sets in place to do so.

• The detail it provides, allowing teams to perform root cause analysis effectively
• The proactive monitoring and automated alerting
• Dashboards tailored to specific roles/users
• The ability to integrate, allowing for more of a complete picture

MTTR has greatly improved. Teams are now better focused on the cause of application performance issues, much earlier into any event. Additionally, development teams now leverage the data gathered in lower environments to ensure that a better quality product reaches production.

I think CA is on the right track. They’ve listened to their customers. They are working on making the product so that the data is more effective, the interface is more intuitive, allowing users to use the product successfully with less need for training or for monitoring teams to be experts in their applications. Work is also underway to improve the tasks of administration and deploying/maintaining agents.

I've used it for four and a half years.

My experience with stability issues have been mostly “self-inflicted”; poor configuration, insufficient hardware etc.

Only in instances where recommended limits regarding agents/metrics were exceeded.

8/10

No other solution has been used.

A mixture of both. The installations are pretty straightforward. Determining sizing, agents, agent configuration, upgrading, migrations, etc. can be more complicated.

Determine what needs to instrument/monitored based on priority, then work with your sales contact to determine options.

The product was being utilized when I was first exposed to it.

Understanding your needs, and having a thorough plan and buy-in from stakeholders is essential. Additionally, utilize your CA partner, their knowledge and experience will fast-track being able to leverage your APM solution.

The ability to quickly create alarms, actions, and dashboards is very valuable to us.

We have a key APM dashboard that is the primary dashboard utilized by IS Operations Center. We use it to evaluate the health of our primary customer and associated impacts on the application suite.

The documentation on customizing instrumentation of methods and classes (derivative files) could be improved, as well as some of the documentation interfacing into other APM products (ADA, CEM, ABA).

We've used it for three-and-a-half years.

Excessive errors in the application being monitored caused us to back off the level of monitoring due to the amount of traces being gathered.

The application has been very stable for us.

We've not had any issues with the scalability.

Customer service is excellent. Every time we have opened an issue, it is resolved quickly.

Technical support have a very high level of knowledge.

There was no previous solution in use.

The initial setup was straightforward. The biggest issues were getting internal people knowledgeable about the application to assist with defining methods and classes for instrumentation.

We used a CA team for implementation who were outstanding.

You should be aware when dealing with VM guests that you are required to license the entire VM host.

We also looked at Oracle Enterprise Manager.

Have your team who will operate be actively involved in the implementation. Get your application and infrastructure teams actively engaged in utilizing it for troubleshooting and analysis.

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.

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.

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.