Broadcom DX Application Performance Management Reviews

• Real-time information
• Historical info
• Smart instrumentation
• Customizable

• Centralized point to start studying a problem
• Fast analyses
• Getting quick solutions on most cases, but sadly, not for the hardest ones

• User interface customizable components
• Being able to establish relations with source code
• Being able to add some custom add-ons, such as graphical add-ons and/or computes
• 1.- To solve the lacks of nice graphical components i think that this area could be opened to parterns and community. If you develop some mechanism to add graphical
  components, with angular,etc, giving a template in some way that we can add your own html,css and javascript, community will generate his own widgets and share via marketplace, so they will improve your software and make it more visually appealing (same for java to workstation application). I attack some examples i have done to clarify objective.
• 2.- javascripts can be done now and added to introscope but it will better if you can add it and appear as an option same as sum, max, etc. I mean now you can create a javascript and select the metrics affected by one regex, but it will be nice to have the option to make a calculator that simply adds itself to the options and be applied on metric grupings just like sum, etc. And also share with all ppl.
• I will like to comment to you one more point. I think that introscope has to be more application focused, first question always is what applications are afectted/working,not servlets o jsp, so it will be nice that introscope has a mechanims to asociate a JSP, servlets, backend (DB schema), etc to 1 or more application or context, althoug it be manualy .

We have been using this solution for about four years.

Sometimes the workstation hangs or becomes unresponsive. However, the web application works worse, is ugly, and we prefer to use the workstation.

There were scalability issues. With a high amount of data, we found that there is some loss of information when asking for the CLW. We have an issue open on this and CA its working to solve it.

I would give technical support a rating of 7/10. They gave us fast answers when we asked for information, but there were delays to get a solution, even when the issue was clearly a bug.

The setup was easy. It was self-learning in my case.

I don't deal with pricing or licensing, but I think it is a bit expensive. However, the product is really good.

It is a very good product, but it has to fit their needs because it is mainly focused on JAVA/.NET applications, although it has agents for PHP and Node.js.

• Business transaction defects from CEM.
• ADA helps find response time issues in the network.
• Team Center gives an overview of whole system.

• It helps in proactive monitoring.
• We can assess a risk in a test environment if application is going live.
• We can do OS, application and EUM with some part of network monitoring on single dashboard.

• Documentation is not straight forward and it could be easier to understand and implement.
• Integration with other tools.
• Dashboard look needs to be more attractive and dynamic.

I have used it for seven years.

I have not encountered any deployment issues.

Stability will be an issue if you install and configure it wrong. Otherwise, it's good and stable.

We encountered a stability issue. A customer wants to see more metrics but performance will degrade if you disable Data limited to 100 matching metrics.

Customer service is 6/10.

Technical support is 6/10.

I did not previously use a different solution.

Initial setup was complex because we implemented it for the first time in 2010 and everyone was learning about it. :-)

A vendor team implemented it and I rate their level of expertise 8/10.

EPA provides more flexibility for meeting customer requirements. CEM and Investigator provide realistic data by which user feels more dependent on them.

The pricing and licensing costs are too high.

Before choosing this product, I did not evaluate other options.

The most valuable features for us are the visibility it provides, increased production, Command Center, and WebView.

As our production increases, we have visibility of everything that's going on, especially since we run a lot of applications and we're able to monitor all of them. If something goes wrong, CA APM plays the primary role in helping us perform root-cause analysis.

I have a hard time upgrading CA APM. When I upgrade from one version to another, everything must be done manually. If CA either had or let user create a tool to help with the upgrades, that would be a great improvement, specifically with something like a net command or automatic update.

We've been using it for almost 5 years.

We've had no issues with deployment. It's the upgrades that are the issue.

It's a stable product. We've had no issues with instability.

It needs to scale according to the CS support set and we can scale it as our needs require.

CA support is a little bit slow. I usually check with the CA community first before opening any support ticket. It takes a long time because support is based in Plano, TX, and the time zone difference causes a delay in them providing us a response that I can implement the next day.

Doing an upgrade is very complex, but afterwards the product operates in a very straightforward manner.

It'll build your confidence in your application server or whatever application you're monitoring.

We've found Team Center a very innovative and intuitive interface. It gives us the ability to link applications to other applications and services all the way down to the database.

We're just now upgrading to it, so we haven't gotten into Team Center a lot. For now, we've mostly been using Investigator in order to triage performance bottlenecks and other problems within our enterprise systems.

We've had some hits and some misses, but our successes have been well-noted. Overall, APM improves our total customer experience and reduces our operational costs.

That said, the downside for APM is, in our case, end-user acceptance and use. We're trying to expand to other departments, show them what the value points are, and show them that we can help them with their jobs, performance, and efficiencies. With version 10, CA shifted its marketing plan and its persona, and that's been rather disruptive. I'm hoping a good disruption, but a disruption to my end users, whom I'm still trying to get turned-on to performance monitoring improvements.

We'd like to see full integration of Unified Infrastructure Management to take over the infrastructure monitoring from APM. They should have APM sterilized away from the infrastructure using the custom scripts through the environment performance agents. CA should go over and use the technology from Nimsoft or Unified Infrastructure Management to gather that information and marry it up back to the application.

We're not really having issues. We're only half way through the total capacity that we've projected. We're currently at about 800,000 metrics. We originally wanted about two and a half million. We're getting there, slowly, but we're getting there.

We're hoping to scale it out to the entire IT staff with about 1200 total servers including a mainframe, which is massive, through four call centers. We've got it scaled to that, but it's our end users' uses of the technology in order to improve what they're doing in the varying departments that will ultimately determine how well it scales. And so far, so good.

We only had one main issue with our upgrade. It took longer than I would have liked. I pushed the issue up through our account manager, got a call, and within an hour, we got it fixed, though that took us a week-and-a-half to get to that point. We expected it to take an hour-and-a-half.

Other teams have their own products -- Splunk, NetFusion or NetQoS -- but we're slowly hoping to turn them over to CA.

When we first installed, it took us six months to install it and get it somewhat usable. Our upgrades, because we're having to step development or step environments, usually takes us about three months.

The step environment is where we do dev tests. This involves stress and QA cycles, and then production. Each one has to have a month to get everything installed, tested, and verified to make sure it doesn't impact our core applications.

We just now finished our Phase 2 upgrade to our second tier, which is our performance test environment and our QA two environments. It went really well. The reason why it took us a month to do our test was because we had to get everything lined up with CA support and to get the install and upgrade completed.

When we first installed, it took us six months to install it and to get it somewhat usable. Because we have to step development or step environments, it usually takes us about three months.

No other vendors were looked at. APM was part of an enterprise contract deal. We had several other CA products and CA offered APM as an add-on to our contract, which increased our costs, but the vice-president and CEO and CFO thought it would be worth it. It's been five years and we're doing pretty well.

When it was stable, Trending Reports and Response Time Distribution

Cultural issues prevent a product like this from making the impact it should have.

Stability

4 Years

No

Yes

Yes

Poor-fair

Poor-fair

Straight forward for technically competent people.

Minimal

No, it was part of a Business Partner larger purchase.

Java-based enterprise application servers monitoring: for example, WebSphere Application Server, JBoss EAP, WebLogic.

• User-defined transaction profiling
• Application topology discovery and visualization
• Application component deep dive.
  

It should enable you to see the usage and performance of all application dependencies like databases, web services, caching, etc.

• Root cause detection
• Easy installation and configuration
• It should facilitate real user monitoring to see what your users are experiencing in real time.

Monitoring of our internal business applications completely, through all business processes.

As all of our applications are monitored by CA APM, it's now easy to analyze unusual behavior in a normalized way.

In terms of container monitoring, we are currently in the rollout phase. In the end, all containers will be instrumented by CA APM agents in order to have a complete view of the current operative status of the dynamic and volatile container world.

All application servers are instrumented to provide a standardized monitoring baseline for the given technology. We defined sets of base monitors in order to normalize analytics capabilities from a technology perspective. On top of this we monitor application specific classes.

As we are currently in rollout phase we can't yet report on the visibility CA APM provides across application environments, yet.

Regarding monitoring and performance insights into the various technologies across our application environment, it identifies the "worst" application in terms of which app has the highest number of errors, slowest SQL queries, etc.

System changes, topological changes, or code updates that are introduced into our environment are analyzed by our architecture team using CA APM.

1. Cross-VM transaction traces provide a complete "what happened where".
2. Proactive snapshots of transactions and all details of a transaction are saved in case of an error.
3. Attribute decoration is a unique and very powerful feature. We can add meaningful meta information based on our internal demand.

1. Integration of third-party content into app maps (e.g. data coming from beats/elastic platform).
2. Support of new application server technologies, time to adopt new versions of them.
3. Dashboarding capabilities (as with all other vendors).
4. Application architecture of the central Enterprise Manager should be developed into a cloud native architecture.
5. Mitigation of SPOF – PostgreSQL database, behind Team Center.

Yes, we enountered stability issues. They were mitigated by performance tuning within infrastructure.

Yes, we encountered issues with scalability inside Team Center, a massive amount of universes, perspectives, applications.

Good.

No previous solution.

Straightforward.

Back in 2009/2010: HPE Diagnostics, Dynatrace; 2016: AppDynamics.

It's for application monitoring and it's extensively used for application performance management.

It works very well and we can get to know how the application really behaves internally, and based on that we will to know who the culprit is and figure it out.

We have just started looking at version 10.5 and it has a lot of built-in features for a cloud platform. That is what we are really impressed with.

In terms of stability of our application, that is key, it really helps, APM really drives that factor.

It helps prioritize application performance issues. Through the stress test environment we really evaluate it. We are able to determine what the application requires so that we will provide it and take it from there.

I think the new version of APM is going to a new dimension. It really covers the cloud platform. They covered up and they abstracted the layers of the infrastructure and they're giving it an analytics tool as well. Instead of just putting monitoring in place, they are coming up with an analytics solution as well.

If they can come up with a use case of machine learning and artificial intelligence it would be even more useful.

Stability is quite good.

In terms of scalability, because APM is tightly coupled, it doesn't have the scalability as a built-in feature. Starting from version 10.5 it has a different approach for the scalability, while it grows, it really captures that way.

We have, pretty much, good support from them.

I was using this product even before I started with my current organization. I feel it really helps in the application strength, from an analysis perspective.

In application performance, it's the best one in the market. Go for it.