DX Performance Management Reviews

Our primary use case for the product was to actually monitor the devices in our network. To actually help alert on problems and issues, then do some type of self-healing for the issue. It was also there to find a way to build trends and look at our network to see what we look like now, and where we may have to plan going into the future.

The tool does pretty well. It is pretty new to us. We are still learning it. It is a broad value. People were a little hesitant when they started using the product. Now, it has become a vital tool for our use in the company, from a network perspective. 

Since the implementation of the tool, it has cut down on probably 60% of our outages and letting us know what is going on. That little component has created significant improvement for us that we were able to put in place. 

There is another component of the tool called Network Flow Analysis. It gives us the ability to troubleshoot issues which do not appear right away. It was actually an added benefit to the tool for us.

Its ability to probe the POLAR Network and tell us about a device. That is the most valuable. It is important we are able to alert based on what we find. It has become useful, because we can interact it with another tool, like Splunk, to actually do other parts of alerting.

Since the direction is more cloud-oriented, I would like to see what modules or functions they are putting out there to say, "Hey, this is what we are doing to monitor your cloud or help monitor that issue." As we move more towards the cloud, we have to monitor what in that space can I do with the CA PC tool in that environment.

There are versions that are better. One of my concerns was it did not have a built-in HA component for availability, which was somewhat of a challenge for us. Because as we became more dependent on the tool, we had to find a way for it to be up all the time. So stability, I give it about a 85%, but we are getting there.

They have actually announced other versions that we need to get to. The challenge we find is, because this tool gathers so much data, which makes it hard to convert over. To upgrade it, you really need the solution backed up. That is the issue that we are facing right now.

I am happy with the scalability for right now. It is better in the later versions.

The company is 25,000 employees. Our department consists of two groups that work together. We are broken up into a monitoring group and a network group, both use the tool, probably about 20 of us. Maybe a little more that use the tool to get what we need out of it.

Customer service: I am quite comfortable with CA and love the people that we talk to about it. They are responsive working with us and made us feel like they really care about the product. I get that from the sales perspective, my representative. I would not trade him in for the world. He has done a really good job. I am really happy with him.

Technical support: I would give them about a "B" right now, because they do not respond as quickly as we like. They do get around to us with some issues. It seems like we escalate more than I would like to. If anything, they should look at how the tier support goes in place. 

If I call and it is critical, then I have to wait for someone to call me back with an engineer, I am not too happy about it. Because you only call when you need it, so if I need you, I need you right then. If it was some other issue, such as searching for knowledge, I can understand opening up a ticket.

We normally would not call unless we are trying to do something with the tool, and it is not performing the way that it is suppose to, and we are trying to find out why. Normally, I call because I need the tool up and working, then I need to know, "Why?" However, first of all, I need the tool up. 

The issue: There are sometimes they have to go and do research and get somebody to find out why the tool is down for a minute. That could be somewhat of a challenge for us, because we have people that are looking for the tool.

The initial setup, I wouldn't say was totally complex. I would give it on a scale of one to 10, it is about a six for the initial setup. Once you have the information, I did not think it was that difficult. The challenge was to find out what platform they were running on.

I come from a company that does both Windows and Linux. Of course when we asked them, which environment the tool should run on, they said they support both. They still support both. What I would like to know is, what is the most stable environment for the tool? 

That is where I am looking for them to say. I know no one wants to choose one environment over the other. I do not care what you say. I just need to know your recommended way from experience, which environment has less issues on it. That makes a difference.

We are using Linux, and I am glad we did. I think it would have been a disaster the other way.

We looked at SolarWinds. We looked Riverbed. I think we just looked at CA. We did not go looking at a lot of them. CA also came to us, because we had someone working on the other side to say, "Hey, we already had them in-house, take a look at a tool they had in place."

That helped them, because they were there. Once they could provide the tool that we wanted, and they were able to go through our use cases along with other vendors, that is how they got selected. They fitted with everything that we needed.

Kick the tires and get under the hood. Provide your use cases upfront, and tell them exactly what you need. Once you do that, it is fine.

They will provide you with what you want, and meet your criteria. Lay out everything that you need. Look at the sales person that you are dealing with (the sales engineer). See how knowledgeable they are about their product, and see if it does what they say it will do, and that it is available right now. Do not tell me something is here, then, "Oh, that will be available six months from now." That does me no good. Unless you tell me up front, "We're gonna have this in the future," then I will know.

We are still learning it, because there are still features that we need to implement. It is a slow learning process. Right away when you get a tool, you want it to be implemented to actually address the issue that you have at that time. Now, we are looking at it to see what else it can do for us. 

From when we first got the tool, it was there just to look and discover devices, and tell us if they were just available or not. Now, we are looking at it to say, "Well, we can trend on certain things." 

Most important criteria when selecting a vendor: 

1. Be able to meet my requirements.
2. Stability
3. Price. That makes a difference.

The benefit is having the one-stop shop where we can integrate all of our CA products into one dashboard. They can use that one dashboard as a portal to click around to wherever they need to go. The dashboard integrates our data from Spectrum and CA PC, like the data collectors.

It has improved efficiency because now there is the one-stop shop where you can view all your data, instead of needing to click around in four different tools. Everybody's looking at the same data. You don't have people using their own tools, or using a different tool. Everybody's using the same data to correlate what is happening.

I would like to see it integrated with UIM. That is the one tool that is not in there. Then I would like to see log analytics, which I know are coming; but are still not included.

Stability is good. It has improved; and we have not had any issues.

At our company, we have a large implementation, and we have not had any issues with scale. We just scale horizontally.

Technical support is pretty good. I would say that we always get to the bottom of the problem. The only reason it is not perfect is that sometimes it takes a couple of days; but we do get to the bottom of it.

I would say the initial setup is complex. CA does make it easy, but you need to have the right architecture for it to be successful. You have to design it correctly from the start.

Currently we have an issue where, if the store goes down, we get 20 tickets spread across different tools. We knew we needed to scale it back to only one actionable item. We needed to use one tool that would encompass everything and scale out, and be able to provide the flexibility to let us narrow it down to what we need.

Our most important criteria when selecting a vendor are scale, stability, and support. We evaluated CA, HPE, Riverbed, and BMC. We went with CA because of our partnership with that vendor. We are most confident in that partnership.

It is a good product that will meet their needs.

It's a pretty complex product. There are a lot of parts to it.

The biggest selling point is putting the power of creating dashboards and reports into end users' hands. They can create views that are most pertinent to them. That's been the big one for us, and one of the reasons why we went with the product.

From a business standpoint, it's hard to quantify. It's been used in the capacity planning process, as far as our network infrastructure goes. We've been able to utilize data that's been collected by the tool to more accurately predict usages.

The one area where I think it could be improved is the reporting capability. The dashboard features are very function rich, but the reporting feature is probably not as rich as we'd like it to be. There are some limitations in using it.

For example, the number of objects that you can simultaneously show or display in a report is limited. The reporting capability needs to scale up a little bit higher.

Compared to eHealth the reporting is limited. For example the number of graphs in a report is limited to 15. Another limitation is that you cannot copy or duplicate reports.

The whole non-root installation really needs to be clarified a lot more than they did.

We've been using it for just under a year.

We haven't really had any significant stability issues. I'd say that maybe we've had one issue in all that time, where there was data corruption. But we were able to solve that with the help of technical support.

One really needs to make sure that you follow their guidelines and recommendations regarding the database size and performance. They give you certain guidelines that you need to follow regarding the database. For example, given your size environment, this is the size of database you need, and this is how it will perform well. If you want to have good performance, you need to meet these specific requirements.

We have not had an issue with scalability other than in reporting. I would not necessarily say that's a scalability issue of the product, but that's scalability with respect to one of the functions of the product.

I've called technical support on different occasions. Sometimes just for assistance and sometimes to report an issue. They have always been very responsive and quick to call back. I prefer a phone call and I rank them very, very high.

We were using a different CA solution. Specifically, we were using a product called eHealth.

The reason why we migrated was a recommendation from CA. Their focus was going to be on the CA Performance Management product, and less on eHealth. They were trying to migrate users away from eHealth.

The setup was complex. There are a lot of components that had to be installed. The biggest issue that I had with the installation is that it's very much geared to a root installation.

In other words, if you use the root ID to install the product, you're most likely not going to have issues. We just ran into numerous issues because we did not have root access.

While they made some effort in the documentation to describe how to go about doing that, internally it was less than complete. We kept on getting issues that we could not complete because we didn't have root access.

It was a collaborative effort. Through support's help, a lot of time spent on this side, and with support personnel over here and on the server side, we were able to figure out what the issue was.

However, it wasn't a matter of, "Run this script and you're done installing." In no cases were we that fortunate, because we were not doing a root installation.

I wouldn't say it's too expensive. I'd say it's comparable to what you're going to find in the marketplace.

You have to make sure you have an accurate count of the number of devices, and more specifically, managed objects. I'll use that term. It is the devices and the managed objects that you want to put in your CAPM system.

We evaluated other options in the past when we selected eHealth. We did a full evaluation and we went with the CA solution.

After we had only been on it for two or three years, we felt comfortable with CA, their approach, and their strategy for handling network performance management. We just decided to stick with CA and migrate to their next generation, the CAPM.

I would definitely take advantage of the training that CA offers. Certainly take that training, just prior to, or just after you've done the installation. That will put you in a position to really exploit the features of the product.

There's so much you can do with the product and not just the dashboard and the reports that users can generate.

There is more customization that you can do to the product and tweak it to your site's needs.

We are gathering the SNMP data from many input devices, especially those which are used to monitor the status of the switches, the routers. It is very helpful to know about any CPU spike, rate of the CPU memory utilization of the network devices, along with interface utilization.

Also, we are using this product to get some QoS metrics from the network devices within our network. We are also using the Network Flow Analysis, to analyze the traffic, the conversation between the offices.

We have one more product called SNMP Trap Explorer which we are using to receive the traps from the network devices. The network devices are configured to send these traps to the CA application, which is all set on our internal network. Then we use the traps to send out the notifications to our internal support teams.

It is very easy to add devices; just be aware that it requires SNMP to be enabled.

It is very easy to use because most of the administrative tasks through the UI are documented. If I have any doubt, I can just go to the CS support. In the UI itself, you have a lot of helpful information on each administrative task, such as adding a special profile, conferring the vendors' specifications.

The documentation is very good, they have the documents up to date.

It would be helpful if CA provided online training for its customers. Whenever a release happens, the latest version, we have meetings with CA meeting and they explain the latest features and enhancements, which is really helpful. But then I'm training my internal support on our tool, if there were any training that CA provided directly, online, that would be good.

It's very much a stable product, because we are running it stand-alone. We have a two-tier architecture we run on. It's a stable product.

Currently we're not facing any issue with our infrastructure. There are around 5000 devices monitored using CA Performance Management. To be frank, I don't have any idea what the capacity of the product is, going forward. But currently, I don't see any issue with the capacity, the amount of devices. 

The 5000 devices are monitored from data collectors housed in three datacenters.

Currently we're on version 3.2; we had some issues while upgrading to 3.2, but we received very good support from CA within a short time. They were able to resolve the issues and communicate to us without any delay. We are getting a pretty good amount of good support from CA.

Normally we submit a case using CA portal, their support website. They'll reach out to us within 24 hours after we submit it. If we need support from the local, India CA support team, they are very flexible and can transfer the case, based on the customer's time zone. Because I'm based out of India, I have some issues with working during US time. They will help me to work with one of the engineers who is based out of India, I think. That kind of flexibility is really very good. 

Also, documents are very available from support.

I wasn't involved in any decision on that. But it's all based on management's decision.

It took some time because we could not just upgrade production. We have CA PM on two environments, one is Development, and then we are running on Production. Whatever changes or upgrades need to be made, first we'll perform then on Development. Based on the results, if anything is found, or if the activity goes well, then we'll proceed with the Production system update.

There is a really good amount of documentation, and whenever we need help, they will set up a WebEx session directly, and they'll help us during the implementation, installation, or upgrade activity. 

If I were to talk to others who are considering this product, I would explain the features, that it's easy to use, and its scalability, stability, and about the capacity it has.

I would also tell them that CA is upgrading the versions to stay current in the market, that is done very frequently. Whenever there are changes made - take the example of a Cisco router - if there is a new series of router, CA will include that in the next release.

Also, there is a good amount of vendor certification which comes with the product. That's all factory-loaded, no need to load any custom-made files. Most of the metrics are calibrated and captured from the devices based on the defaults available from vendor certification. 

Considering all these factors, it's really a good and easy product for analyzing your network performance, health status, and the quality of services.

I rate it a nine out of 10, only because I still need time to explore it more. It has a lot of good features, but I am still in the learning phase.

It allows us to have a quick, upfront view of our multiple data centers. We have multiple connections to hundreds of customers; and it provides us with a quick dashboard look at issues we might be having; bottlenecks we might be having; and things that might go wrong in our network without us needing to dig through endless screens of issues to get to the root of the problem.

It makes things faster when we have our network operations center. They can look at their dashboards that we've created for them, and they can see problems immediately. We can catch a problem before it really starts impacting the customer. It enables our network engineers to look deeper into the source of the problem after alerts are raised. So it's quick, it's fast, and it gets things done. We can get past a problem before it becomes a real problem.

What's missing is stuff that they're already putting on the roadmap: the quick dashboards that they're building; the ability to create dashboard quickly; for example, with ADA and NFA, has been pretty amazing.

They are starting to support additional products and every time we come out here, and every time there is a product release, something new is added to it. Honestly, CA should just keep doing what they're doing. I'm sure there's going to be stuff out there we haven't thought of; and I hope they figure it out first.

Stability has never been an issue. That's one of the things that's so great about CA products is that we've never had that kind of issue. We don’t have servers crashing on us for CA products. We're not dealing with issues with connections or whatever. CA just works. There are no stability problems whatsoever. So it's fantastic.

Things work. I get up in the morning, I open the console, and it's there. I don't have to worry about it.

We have multiple large data centers and we've never had any issue getting those data centers hooked into CA. If we have to connect to something with our ADA or NFA products, we find it: it's there. We don't have any problems with size or scalability. It's quick, and if we need to bump it up a little bit, we can do that as well.

We use technical support all the time. In fact, they just resolved an issue for us this week with a name tag for IP SLA products in Cisco. The nice thing about them is that they're so quick and responsive. When we have a problem, they will get on it, and they will find us an answer, usually quickly. They come back and fix problems and bugs, so that it worked great. Their technical support has always been fantastic.

Actually, I was not involved in the initial setup. I inherited an old mature system. It seems to be straightforward. I worked with a guy who did set the product up initially, and he had no issues with it. But again, I'm now working on a mature system, so I haven't done that yet.

Get CA involved up front. Let them help you. CA has done this for years. Let them help you with the things that you might not even realize that you don't know. Let them help implement it with you because they're going to know some of the bumps and hassles and pitfalls that are out there. That's what my partner did before I came onboard; and he said it was as smooth as pie. So, that would be my advice.

Probably the most valuable feature is the integration that the tool provides for us. We're able to present data from multiple back-end collection sources into a single dashboard for the users. So they don't have to go to multiple locations to get data about a particular item, or device.

Stability has been fantastic so far. We've got quite a few different options available to us for business continuity, things like that, and the just inherent stability has been fairly impressive so far.

Scalability is the reason we bought the product to begin with. It was designed from the ground up for carrier-grade services, and we are in effect a MSP ourselves. So we were really interested in looking at something to be able to handle the multi-tenancy and scale as large as possible. This was the only solution that we really considered at that level.

Everything has been very responsive to us so far. I've been impressed with the followup that the engineers have as well. Even after we have fixed whatever issue has come up, it's not uncommon to get a followup email a week or so later just checking to make sure everything is still all right, and I appreciate that.

Previously we were using multiple products, multiple individual point solutions, and it was getting to the point where it was really difficult to maintain every one of those individual products. That's the reason we looked at Performance Management, because it gave us one location, one place to do all of group administration, and to build dashboards, and device administration, inventory counts, things like that. So it really reduced our overall administrative overhead.

At this point I would give it an eight out of 10, but that's only because I know of a lot of really cool new stuff that's coming down the line, that's not available yet. So that number is subject to change.

We are a service provider and we have a lot of in-house servers using DX Performance Management. On the customer's network, we provide events and performance data, and we can control the network, such as the performance, and give service to our customers.

The most valuable feature of DX Performance Management is the quick way we can collect data without putting much effort. They have a lot of customization and features with the solution internally and out of the box. We can discover the device, and start collecting information. For example, if the device is available, we can receive the CPU and memory utilization, and the interface optimization is simple and very fast to implement.

The solution could improve the database model. It is also not very good because they have a lot of interconnections with other data sources, such as NFA and VNA.

The synchronization when we have tenants could improve. For example, the multi-tenancy synchronization process with the other data sources could improve.

In a feature release, the solution should have templates. It does not have tenant templates that we need, and there are a lot of features that we would like to have but do not. We are in touch with Broadcom and are asking them to implement these features in a future version.

I have been using DX Performance Management for more than five years.

The solution is stable but has some issues with synchronization with DX Spectrum that we use.

I rate the stability of DX Performance Management a four out of five.

DX Performance Management is a highly stable solution.

We have a lot of customers that use this solution because we are an MSP. We have over 1,000 users and 80 servers.

The support quality depends on the issue that is presented to the support.

There are issues that we have, but the support is very good. Other times when we need to involve engineering and the second line of support it is not good. Additionally, parts of the support come from Europe, the United States, and others from India. It depends on the issue we are facing to where the support will be received. For example, web access to the development team is very difficult.

I rate the support from DX Performance Management a four out of five.

Positive

We use DX Spectrum for full management and DX Performance Management to correct performance data.

The setup of DX Performance Management is not difficult but when we did the first installation, we had some support from Broadcom.

It is difficult to say how much time it took to do the implementation because we did it in multiple steps and multiple phases. Phase one was more than five years ago, the installation was done in one to two days. We did the integration with multiple servers it the whole process took approximately two to three months.

Our first step in our implementation strategy was revised because we are an MSP and we need to involve the security and the data center teams to revise where we need to put the servers from the customers who can connect the networks. It took us three months for the first phase of the project and the full completion of the project took approximately one year. There were a lot of servers and customization involved.

I rate the initial setup of DX Performance Management a three out of five.

We had some support from Broadcom for the implementation of the solution. We had two people from our team and one person from the Broadcom team that participated. The assistance from Broadcom was once per week.

We purchase a license to use the solution every three years and we have multiple contracts. They have been increasing the price annually. We have a baseline for three years and then we need to pay the difference from the baseline, and we are in the process of negotiating a new price for all the licenses we need. The price overall is affordable.

Overall the solution is good.

I rate DX Performance Management a seven out of ten.

The integration to the other products that we use: NFA, we use ADA, we use Spectrum; and CAPM integrates all those into a single pane of glass, for performance. CAPC is good for developing reports around those multiple data sources and giving us a single vision on what's going on in our environment.

In the past we've had multiple monitoring tools and products being used simultaneously. The goal of the product - and we're still working on eliminating some of the overlap that the other products have - is to allow us to have a single monitoring system, or as close to a single monitoring system as possible on network performance. That way, the network engineers don't have so many places to look for performance data. Prior to using the CA tool suite, we probably had - and I would hate to say this - but we probably had a hundred monitoring tools.

Some of the individual report views, the way some of the columns sort, there's room for improvement in giving us more flexibility in being able to sort reports based, for example, on what columns the metrics fall under.

I would say for the most part, most of the improvements I would identify would be on individual reports that are produced by PM, that we instrument to be produced by PM. They may not necessarily do everything we want them to do.

We've had CAPM deployed a little over two years. I have experience with CA's NetQoS NPC for about five years prior to that. CAPC basically replaced NPC.

Not really stability issues. We've run into bugs but I wouldn't call those stability issues with PM, specifically. We have run into software bugs where certain features weren't working right, in the past, that CA would have to address. I don't think that would fit under stability. Stability's like crashing.

Now, the one thing I will say. When our CA performance management system is on a Linux system, when that Linux system needs to be updated with patches - and this is the server itself - of course PM has to stop. All of our monitoring stops while that patching is going on for those services, while they restart those servers, but I don't know that that's a CA thing. While that reboot is going on for those servers, for those patches to take place, of course the system has to restart.

No issues with PM. We use other products like NFA and ADA. We've had scalability issues in those areas, but with PM we have not. I don't think we've run into a situation where we have too much. We actually designed our system around a million interfaces to monitor, and I think we're probably less than half a million at this point.

I would probably give them an eight out of 10.

We switched because there were multiple other solutions, and we were already using CA Spectrum, so the natural progression was to go to CA and use their performance management tool, also known as CAPC, Performance Center. We used multiple tools. We had NetCool out there, we had SolarWinds out there, CiscoWorks, numerous tools.

For us, I would say it was complex. But I think a lot of customers that use the tool rely heavily on the out-of-the-box reporting that CA produces with the tool naturally. For those types of deployments, it might go easier. For our needs, we highly instrumented reports. We have built literally hundreds and hundreds of individual reports ourselves, for our own needs and, I would say that that comes with a level of complexity to accomplish.

I was not on board at the time that they were doing of the selection of this tool set, with Anthem. I'm aware that they were also looking at NetCool as another option, and I am not sure why CA was ultimately selected. I also don't have any information about pricing. I'm not sure what they spent on it.

On the positive, if you can rely on the out-of-the-box reports, it should be a fairly straightforward deployment. If you're looking at instrumenting your own views and stuff, it gets more complex the more views you want, the more complex your views, and the more you want to instrument the tool for your environment, versus using the out-of-the-box solution. My advice would be to understand how you're going to implement this and what you're expecting from it.

You're going to go one of a couple different ways. You're either going to instrument it to satisfy some specific needs that you have, or you're going to depend heavily on the out-of-the-box reports that only do instrumentation in a few examples that you find you need. When they demonstrate it to you, you should ask those questions about the differences.

In follow-up to my rating it an eight out of 10 overall, I've used a few other products. There aren't a whole lot of other products I could even give a five to, to be honest. I've used SolarWinds, I've been exposed to NetCool. I've heard horror stories about HPE OpenView. I would give it an eight, which isn't perfect but it's high on my scale.