DX Performance Management Reviews

The most valuable features to date are the alerts, reports, and integration with other CA products:

• The alerting feature allows us to quickly identify and begin remediation on network devices that are experiencing performance/capacity issues.
• The reporting feature has allowed us to quickly share information with customers, keeping them up to date on critical devices that are being monitored.
• The integration aspect is also important, as it allows us to feed inventory to the system from tools designed to walk our networks, and also pull in flow data for additional troubleshooting in one place.

Utilizing the capacity/performance data alongside the flow we are able to quickly determine the root cause of impact. This allows us to reduce mean time to resolution on network impacting events due to capacity/performance.

There is always room for improvement, which CA continues to do based upon community feedback.

One of the greatest challenges we have encountered are the polling cycles. We currently poll at 5-minute intervals, but at times need to have up-to-the-minute data. Products we have leveraged from other vendors allow us at the click of a button to turn on up-to-the-minute polling for up to an hour. CA Performance Management does not have a similar feature. It may be emulated, however, by setting up a new group for one-minute polling cycles; however, leaving this rate on will impact data storage, so only administrators are provided this feature in our organization.

The solution has been in place for 15 months, and has already provided information helpful in network cleanup.

To date, we have not encountered any stability issues.

To date, we have not encountered any scalability issues.

I have not been required to work directly with technical support. However, based on feedback from the team that does, support often starts with the standard runbook, even after we have described similar troubleshooting steps to them. This results in lost time in resolving issues. Once we have moved beyond the basics, support has been handled well.

Our prior solution was dated and in need of refresh. We switched to the CA solution after going through a proof of concept and rating it against two other competitors.

The initial setup was mostly straightforward, with assistance from onsite technical resources from CA. The majority of issues we encountered were with our corporate requirements on server configurations and not the tools themselves.

Regarding pricing and licensing, keep in mind that bundling will provide the best value. As a result, doing your best to anticipate growth and future needs may save you money in the long run.

We did evaluate two competing options from HPE and Alcatel Lucent.

Take advantage of the professional services and leverage your solution experts from CA. They will help you define the right solution keeping in mind current utilization and future growth.

The benefit is bringing all the performance-related data and gathering of our environment with the customer's environment together. Therefore, we can analyze it over all the tenants and the tenants can also analyze the performance data by themselves.

It is the gathering of the whole performance data in our environment and our network environment, for us and our customers. Also, a multi-tendency insight, SCN, and Cisco ACI implementation, which we need very urgently.

 What we want to see:

1. More integration inside of Spectrum and integration of role-based access.
2. Our admins must be able, not only, to analyze the data, but combine the data.
3. Admins must be in a role-based administration feature. 
4. That is looking at the site under administration, and saying, "What is the daily job if an alert is coming on?"

In the last three years, it has had a great improvement in its stability. It is great that is works and we have had no outages in this time. That was really great.

It has high scalability. You can have thousands of devices inside and hundreds of thousands of interphases without a problem.

We have some premium support, which was created to talk to the technical support and the product management when we have a challenge. I don't want to say an issue, when we have a challenge inside of the product, like an enhancement. It is great to see that the product management hears us, too. We have received more out-of-the-box solutions inside the product.

On our side, it depends on the customers' needs. We test on one customer to be honest, as a solution. However, we are thinking pricing, scaling, and so on. Also, to use PM for all other customers.

I would say a seven to eight out of 10, because it needs role-based administration. They ceased integrations. That is why I say a seven to eight.

• Troubleshooting
• Capacity planning
• Alerting

It gives multiple groups the ability to view dashboards and quickly obtain data about historical performance of network gear, with near real-time data.

Historical data, to help with trending and capacity planning.

The dashboards are easy to use and can be viewed on any web browser.

Product has issue collecting IP SLA data.

No issues yet with stability.

No issues with scalability.

Good.

Previously we used eHealth which is a CA-owned product. We moved because they are phasing out eHealth.

Complex. Install is done as root, which is a security no-no, and the database IO requirements were not stated correctly, which lead to a year of instability.

Do your homework and know how many devices you will be managing out of the gate. Be sure to project what your growth will be each year.

I think the product has matured a lot, and I’m impressed with CA when I hear about new features. The product continues to improve and the future is looking bright.

The auto-certification is valuable to us. It reduces the time consumed to certify a new device, as in the past with CA eHealth.

CA PM is able to monitor more equipment, or only specific requirements, as necessary.

The database should have higher availability in case of an incident.

We have been using the solution for six months.

We haven't encountered any issues with stability. So far, it's been working properly.

It requires higher availability in case of any incidents with any of the servers.

The technical support is excellent.

Previously, we used CA eHealth, which was changed to CA PM.

We would welcome some online demos to be available, or something similar to CA UIM Snap.

CA's support is 24/7 during the entire year and the tools are guaranteed.

We looked at some open code tools. However, they don't have any support or guarantees like CA.

It's a solution which is highly recommended. It will meet and exceed your expectations.

It is easy to use, and the performance metrics are helping us to know our network better.

It provides metrics to users.

The certificates are not complete. CA needs to provide more support for the product through certificates. They need to discuss this with their product team.

Certs are the drivers to support the devices. Some of the vendors are not fully covered. An example of this is Brocade. Certain types of Brocade used in our company is not in certs published. There are others as well.

I have used this solution for two years.

There was a big problem with HPE Vertica.

There were no scalability issues.

We always use CA.

The setup was straightforward.

The price is too expensive.

We looked at other solutions such as IBM, HPE, etc.

It is important to know what you need.

The primary use case of this solution is performance management, and it can be useful to help teams with performance gains. This solution is deployed on-prem. 

One of the most valuable features is the ease of use. 

This solution's implementation process could be quicker. They could also optimize the hardware requirements. 

We have been working with this solution since 2004. 

This solution is stable. 

This solution is scalable. 

The technical support is fine. 

The implementation process could be quicker. For deployment, you need a team of one to three people. 

We implement this solution for customers. 

The licensing is very straightforward. It doesn't matter how many devices you have and would like to monitor—it's very straightforward. 

I rate DX Performance Management a nine out of ten, and would recommend it to others. 

Most of of our CA suite is for network infrastructure monitoring, reporting, and fault management.

The most valuable of CA Performance Management is consolidated network infrastructure monitoring and reporting.

For CA PM, there should be a way of easily migrating the reports coming from eHealth going to CA Performance Center, since CA PC is replacing eHealth.

With CA PM, I haven’t encountered any stability issues.

I haven’t encountered any scalability issues.

The CA support team has been very helpful, including chat and engineering support.

We haven’t used a different solution.

Initial setup is complex.

I do not handle the pricing, but they should provide more scalable licensing for the product.

Since I inherited CA products in this job, choosing CA PM was the first choice for compatibility.

You need to have a CA support representative on the call during implementation and upgrade to eliminate issues.