Broadcom DX Application Performance Management Reviews

We use APM to monitor our production, our QUAIL Java environments, and our web framework environments.

It is heavily utilized. It functions very well. We look forward to new features, because as technology grows we look to incorporate some of that newer technology in our monitoring solutions as well.

We use this for ticketing. This helps us to realize not only from the monitoring standpoint, but we make custom dashboards for our development areas so they can understand how busy traffic affects their application with traffic. They can see how traffic directly affects their application in positive or negative ways. It gives immediate feedback to know, when we have a bad day, we have to look at this area because that slows down first.

It shows us where our weakest link is.

Our ability to know how our application is performing in real-time.

Client-side JavaScript monitoring, so we can have that end-to-end from the client all the way back to our host areas.

Stability could actually be helped because it is a wrapper or an agent on our system. If we are having a bad day in production or if other resources are being utilized, then we will get get gaps in our monitoring system. It does not happen very often, but it usually happens at the worst possible time.

I do not think we have had any problems with scalability. Other than right now it is just for Java agents. It does not have much JavaScript client-side monitoring.

Our monitoring team has used them and would need to be the ones to evaluate them.

I have heard good things. We work very closely with CA. We are a very large customer, so they get back to us pretty promptly.

I was not involved in the initial setup. We have had the solution for years.

I was also not involved in the upgrade setup. I was involved in a lot of the testing of the upgrade processes to make sure that it suited the needs of not only the development departments, but also the applications they monitor.

I think it is above a lot of the other monitoring solutions that are out there.

I would give it an eight out of 10, only because I know the ins and outs of the application. I know its capabilities and strong points. I think it has room to improve. 

It could be that we have it configured in a way that is not advantageous. However, it is also upgradability to it is a project instead of a patch. If it was actually an automated process to where it just fed updates to our product that would be great. Now, we have to spin up an effort to actually upgrade the solution. I think cost of upgrading holds us back from getting to the latest and greatest, where if it was more patch level, it would be easier for us to use those newer features.

Make sure to look for interoperability and ease of upgrade. Just because they have the solution, what is it going to cost to maintain the solution, because that is the cost that is hidden down the road.

Most important criteria when selecting a vendor: Of course, they have to be competitive on cost. Always. But now, it has actually shifted towards interoperability with other solutions. We have to have open APIs that are easily tied into so we can actually hook them up to our existing pipeline features.

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.

APM is a master in monitoring application performance. When we emphasize performance, it focuses on business transactions and helps provide a good amount of successful transactions. In order to enhance application availability, rigorous monitoring of its components’ performance is very important.

APM helps in monitoring performance of application with end-to-end application component visibility.

• Reduced troubleshooting time by identifying the exact point of failure
• Capacity planning of infra based on application performance

Out-of-the-box report templates need to be incorporated. Agent performance reports and transaction statistics report need to be incorporated. Agent performance reports will help us to monitor agent communication and availability. Transaction statistics will help us to monitor what are the transactions flowing into the system.

LDAP and EEM integration should be simplified like in other CA Solutions.

I have used it for one year.

Until now, I have not faced any stability issues.

Until now, I have not faced any scalability issues.

Technical support is mind-blowing. They are really a big helping hand with administrating the application.

This is the first time I am working with an APM solution.

Initial setup was very simple. We did our implementation in a day and were able to provide output to our management in a short amount of time.

Pricing and licensing are straightforward. It is very easy to plan the license requirement, as the license terms are clearly documented.

Before choosing this product, we did a proof of concept for Zenoss. We felt CA APM is agile and aptly engineered to meet our requirements.

It is the very best solution. It will surely enhance anyone’s application performance and resource utilization.

It helps you get to the root cause much faster when you have issues.

The visualization of the solution takes you to the problem areas much faster.

The GUI feels sort of archaic. It doesn't have a modern look and feel to it.

I'm looking forward to some of the stuff on the new version that automatically maps the topology. We're just getting started with the tool in my group, so we're not actually utilizing it yet.

It's very stable. We have had no incidents of crashing.

It does scale well, from what I understand. I'm not the person who does the deployments.

I'm not a person who gets to make the investment decisions. I basically get to use whatever the company provides or makes available.

Some of the previous versions were available, but they were much more difficult to implement. The newer version takes a lot of that complexity out of it.

I'm more of an end user of the product, and it's much easier. Some of it is automatically implemented. That's what I like about it.

I was involved similar to a customer. We have an internal team that does the deployments and they got it done. They don't really have issues with it. It's really a straightforward setup.

When selecting a vendor, accessibility is important. We've had issues in the past with some vendors who kind of disappear after they sell you a product. We like having a contact person who is readily available to guide you or refer you to somebody else who can help.

CA APM gives us a holistic view of our applications, specifically regarding performance monitoring. We are able to see errors in the code that users would experience and then give that information to our developers to troubleshoot. For example, some of the errors we see are error 404 or 500. There are also "stalled transaction” errors that pop up. The fact that APM collects information every 15 seconds is a good thing.

We're able to remediate issues with quicker turn around time. So instead of taking a couple days to figure out what the issue is, we're able to figure that out probably within half-an-hour.

It helps us by simplifying the triage of application performance issues. We have a buy in from our developers that they're able to trust the information that we provide them. It has proven itself. It's really a trusted source of monitoring.

I would like to see better integration with third party monitoring applications from an API perspective. We could inject information, such as metrics, and state health, and be able to put it into one view.

For example, we have SolarWinds, Microsoft SCOM and Operations Manager. I think those are the three biggest ones including CA.

There are a couple of improvements that could be done on the agent side of APM. The agent stops collecting data if the machine is under stress. We lose that visibility at the worst time that it could be happening. I understand the agent works according to a store-and-forward type of architecture, so there's only so much it could do. Perhaps there is a different way that they could collect the data, rather then depending on whether the machine is up or not.

It scales okay, but there are some limitations as far as the amount of collectors you need to be able to scale.

I would say technical support is pretty good. I don't have any complaints. I get a response time in a fair amount of time, depending on the issue.

I was not involved with initial setup, but I have been involved in multiple upgrades of the APM product. It has been pretty straightforward.

We've checked out AppDynamics, and Microsoft Operations Manager, which is an APM solution as well, but it leans more towards the cloud.

I would definitely recommend CA APM to anyone that's looking to triage any kind of application performance monitoring.

The most valuable feature is the ability to find performance issue. It's a end-to-end software monitoring solution that uses an wide variety of technologies, which is also very valuable to us.

With this product, we were able to increase our applications' performance, their response times, and to improve the satisfaction of our customers.

The automatic identification of business transactions need to be improved. Also, the end-user experience and the web console should be improved.

We have been using it since 2008.

We've had no issues with deployment.

We detected some issues on the web console in regards to its stability.

We didn’t have any issues scaling it for our needs.

7/10

We used a different solution and we switched because this one was more stable and did not impact application response times.

The initial setup was straightforward. We just deploy the agents and started to have visibly.

Any company has its own needs we are not able to give any advice other than to make sure it fits your needs.

We checked all the major competitors in this area. We chose this because it was the only one that was compatible with all our technologies.

First, deploy the agents and get to know the user interface concepts. Afterwards, try to find the root cause of your biggest performance issue and you will see that it is very simple.

The most valuable features are:

• It's simple to use,

• The interface is a light engine,
• It uses almost no Java, which for us is excellent.

It's provided us with consolidated reports and a monitoring dashboard. With the monitoring dashboard, it’s easy to monitor things all in one place.

Also, it's helped us greatly that the dashboard allows us to create very customizable views that give us the information we need to determine the overall status of network health.

I'd like more what-you-see-is-what-you-get functionalities. That is, I want more customizable features that require less back-end configuration.

Once we moved past the basic setup and customized it for our needs, there have been no issues with deployment.

It’s very stable. It at least works to the specs. But we plan to push the solution more and, eventually, find out more about it.

It’s scalable, but not right out of the box, even though we were told it was designed to be out-of-the-box scalable.

The support is superb. They have the technical knowledge, but you just have to get to the right person. They are very quick to respond and follow up as promised.

It was a management decision five years ago as they wanted to work with CA. It was because we wanted to keep our IT management software under one umbrella. This was a high-level decision.

The basic steps are straightforward, but there is probably more documentation for customized set-ups that they should provide. We needed support, so, yes, the basic setup was straightforward, but not in customizing it.

It was a management decision 5 years ago as they wanted to work with CA.

Research the logistics of the implementation specific to your needs. See how other customers are using it, so go to them and find out about implementation and see how it works in real life.

The most valuable features are performance monitoring and alerting. You can set baselines and anything above them will trigger an alert.

The monitoring tool is able to monitor many teams at a time. We also use it to monitor our web agent. It’s also Java-based and versatile.

The documentation could better. It doesn't provide good descriptions of what some data are doing, and there's no good place to see what all the data might mean. You just kind of have to understand how everything works and make your own interpretations and draw your own conclusions.

It’s great, there are no issues with stability. We've just installed it, turned it on, and it just runs.

There are no issues there. It’ll run on as many platforms as you can run it on.

Technical support is quick to respond and very knowledgeable.

I was not involved in the initial setup, but I've not heard that it wasn't anything but straightforward.

CA is great to work with, but to use it, just learn the product suites and how they interact. Make sure you have a good layout and make sure you have everything you need.