Broadcom DX Application Performance Management Reviews

Application teams gained visibility into application performance. CA APM improved our ability to troubleshoot application issues and shorten resolution time.

The deep-process instrumentation gave us an opportunity to understand application process performance in detail.

We are using an old version of the product and I see a lot of improvements in the new release: better interface, and the ability to run predictive analytics.

The infrastructure is stable and scalable to the recommended capacity.

Customer service and technical support are very good.

We chose the CA APM solution several years ago for the set of features and the stability of the company behind the product.

The initial setup was straightforward.

We had a POC with the vendor before the implementation. That helped with better understanding of what to expect from the tool and the tool implementation.

It is difficult to measure ROI for the implementation. We has an ELA with unlimited licensing.

CA APM is a good product and I would recommend it. It might be specific to our company, but adoption by the application development community was not easy. I would recommend a dedicated team of APM SEMs to champion the APM implementation effort.

It show us a clearer view of our business and we can take proactive decisions using data collected by CA CEM.

With the CA Customer Experience we take Marketing actions, for example, we know how many transactions ocurred in our internet banking.

With the CA CEM value settings we can measure the size of ours earnings and even more of our losses caused by defects.

CA CEM show us a business vision from the transaction hierarchy. It provides easily understandable information to users with little or any knowledge. Assigning a monetary value to transactions is very useful for understanding the amount of money being lost by an organization because of a problem or even the total gain for a specific transaction.

The icing on the cake is the troubleshooting tab that helps us see possibilities for the continuous improvement of the business.

With the new feature CA Team Center is much easier to view the information of my user experience, with this unified vision, it was even practical for lay users to use the tool

The CA APM workstation (console) connection is too slow with some metrics.

The integration with CA Spectrum is quite difficult to create, and it is also only one way, only being used to view alarms coming from CA APM. It would be interesting to visualize APM metrics in CA Spectrum OneClick. I see a need to improve this integration.

The CA APM Comand Center is very good, on paper, but in pract does not work in the best way, this promises to be a and indispensable feature of the product, but has much to evolve.

I have not encountered any stability issues, in the newest version Workstation Works fine

I have not encountered any scalability issues.

Customer Service:

Customer service is excellent.

Technical Support:

Technical support is high quality, but little quantity... I'd like to have more APM support.

No.

If you have a Postgres DB, is annoying to Update CA APM, i have some difficults to update this, but if you can simply forget the previous base withou need to save previous data, it is much easier to install directly.

I implemented the solution in my enviroment, but following the advice of a Support team of the manufacturer.

I neve calculated my ROI, but i have date on how my transaction improved, in a more Technical way, I hada a 25% rection in defects and 37% redection in transactions response time, as well as a nearly 100% increase in the number of transactins ocurring on a daily basis.

Althougth it is a bit expensive, it is really worth it

Yes, Dynatracer and AppDynamics, but i prefer CA APM because of the Customer Experience feature, we are a financial institution, we use the CA CEM to Marketing actions, financial and etc. I think the Customer Experience of the CA CEM is the best in the Market.

During the implemetation, you must understand "where you are today". From that, you should think about "where you want to be" in a certain period of time, and what you have to do to get there. CA APM will help you get there, but you must first draw up your goal. This tool requires a certain maturity to deliver the expected results, so start with a less-complex enviroment, mature the use of the solution use and from there, add the more complex structures.

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.

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 feature we've found most valuable in our daily use of it is the deep-dive analysis of Java-class transactions performance.

It's important that our managers are able to measure the SLAs of our applications. They're able to do that with APM as it provides both real-time and historical performance data so that adjustments can be made accordingly.

The biggest area of improvement of APM is with the GUIs. Many of them are quite clunky and dated. For example, there is the thin client which doesn’t have all functionality, and then there's the thick client which has three different modes -- investigator window, management module window, and console window.

I've used it for 18 months.

We've had no issues with deployment.

We have had issues with APM's stability, but it is sometimes hard to tell if this is due to our virtual infrastructure or in the product itself.

We have had some issues with historical metric limits as the agents get load balanced between collectors.

In our experience, technical support has been excellent. They have very good turnaround time and very good technical knowledge.

The company has used a different solution previously, but I haven’t personally.

The initial setup is complex. It’s a large suite of products that need to fit into a large, complex organization.

This is not something I deal with, but off-hand comments seem to indicate that it is more expensive than expected.

Dynatrace and a few others were looked at by my team. I wasn’t involved in the evaluation, however.

Keep the deployed agents up to date in a large organization. You’ll need mature automation and configuration processes and techniques.

• 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 investigator section where we can observe the agent metrics.

We were able to use CA APM to help diagnose a vendor provided product where we were experiencing slower than normal performance. While using the product, we were able to see that the issue resided in the database and were able to make adjustments to correct it.

The cost of licensing of the product could be better. The overall cost has sometimes prohibited us from installing an agent to monitor an application.

I've used it for four years.

We did, although minor. We ran into issue with some of the rights with some of the back-end files used by the enterprise manager, although newer versions seem to have less issues.

No, the application is very stable in our environment.

We are experiencing an on-going issue with our CA APM to Spectrum integration where we are unable to send alerts to the Spectrum console.

Customer service has always been very helpful thus I would rate them 9/10.

Technical support, as with any company, is hit and miss depending on who is assigned to your ticket. Overall we have had a positive experience as we have had very technically proficient folks and have had a few people who seem to struggle with supporting the product. With that said I would rate them 7/10.

We used an in-house developed application before CA APM. Our monitoring needs had grown and the solution we previously used no longer could meet our needs.

It was complex for we had to have some custom modules developed for us. We required the monitoring solution be able to monitor IBM's DataPower appliances, which CA APM could not do right out of the box. We were able to work with CA to have a custom module developed that provided us all of our DataPower monitoring needs.

Our implementation was accomplished by a mix of CA and PHI employees.

Our ROI has been high. It has allowed us to adjust applications to perform better, thus reducing our need to install high-end servers.

We did evaluate several other products. Solutions from BMC and Microsoft were evaluated but fell short of our total monitoring needs.

Keep on top of the amount of metrics that you are accumulating and make sure you have enough disk space to accommodate.

The ability to monitor real time customer experience and to correlate the performance degradation back to system events. The ability to measure customer/user impact during outage and to assign a cost impact to the “outage”.

Prior to the product, we only measured user/customer experience when they actually reported the issue however now we have the ability to understand user/customer experience when it takes place or even predict it with appropriate metrics. This means we can respond proactively when service is impacted without disputing/denying user/customer complaints.

Linking the business transactions back to the backend systems, in other words properly following and mapping the business transaction through the entire backend environment (Webserver -> Application Server -> SOA -> Database -> User).

6 Years

No, however I have many years in this space. I do however know of other implementations that were not as smooth.

The CEM (Customer Experience Management) product is still immature and do have hiccups. Most of the time it is very stable with an occasional glitch.

Yes, but this was related to infrastructure capacity. We could not expand our infrastructure how ever we exploited the product beyond its original design (so self inflicted).

Professional and helpful however I got frustrated many times due to their level of expertise. When we experienced issues with the product or had questions, we rarely got quick and proper answers and had to figure it out ourselves (we found that we had more “working” experience)

Yes, we used open source utilities. We could not scale the open source utilities to manage our enterprise applications.

The product setup is straight forward, however then you need to understand the business transactions and expectations to align the requirement and expected results. You also have a very good understanding of APM else you would not be able to link the expectation and product capability. I have handed this solution over to individuals who knows the product very very well and they fail to deliver as they do not comprehend APM.

Interesting question as I was part of the 3rd party vendor who did the implementation at the time. So let me refer this back to my previous comment. If you do not have an implemented (vendor or in-house) who understands the concept of APM and who to derive business value out of it then you have a problem. Making the product work is one thing…..

Hmmmm… Huge J!

We had a strategy that we realised over a period of 10 years which means that we introduced certain elements piece by piece, we did not deploy all at one go. It is however a very expensive outlay and I am currently reviewing the strategy due to our annual maintenance that is becoming very expensive.

Yes, we also looked at Dynatrace

This is not a IT initiative alone but a IT/Business partnership. This is not a IT Operational deployment alone either but a joint venture with the application developers as well. If these three parties collectively approach this tool then you will have proper ROI, else you will not realise the true potential and then it becomes a very expensive monitoring tool (which it is not - if you think it is a “monitoring” tool then you are looking at the wrong tool).