Cross-Enterprise Application Performance Management Reviews

At our bank, we have two teams: 

1. one for Network Operations Center (NOC) and 
2. another for administration and innovation. 

I am the technical lead in administration. For daily basis, the NOC team uses the dashboards provided by CA APM to track all network devices, monitor interface and line utilization, and detect security attacks. 

CA APM also provides a topology map of all interconnected network devices. These are the main use cases for the NOC team.

The solution's real-time analytics impacted our application performance management strategy. The Performance Management analytics module provides two features: predictive analysis and historical analysis. 

The predictive analysis detects potential issues, such as congested packets on lines between branches and centers at 2 PM each day. It alerts network engineers to maximize line capacity, identify the cause of utilization (e.g., Cisco calls, attacks, unexpected application behavior), and take action.

For me, the most valuable feature is reporting. It offers a great reporting experience, with much customization and flexibility in extracting reports. It also supports many devices, even legacy devices not supported by other parties like Micro Focus and other competitors. 

NetOps portfolio for both network and performance management from Broadcom is the best in this area.

Features for identifying and resolving performance bottlenecks: 

Traffic utilization is the most critical feature we have found in this application. 

1. For example, if we have a traffic utilization issue with our ATM service, which is connected to 4G or Red Lion routers, it will impact our customers. 
2. Another example is in banking branches. Each branch has a network switch connected to the main data center at our bank. If we have congestion in the lines between the data center and the branches, it affects our customers. 

The main objective of any organization is to satisfy its customers. And this product helps.

My experience indicates that it needs enhancements in the UI. We are in 2024, and the GUI doesn't meet current expectations for user interfaces or Excel integration.

Mainly, CA Service Desk has such a bad user interface. All features and systems, like servers, should have a modern graphical user interface, but CA Service Desk remains classic and still uses a desktop-based interface. It doesn't add features easily; if you need additional functionality, you have to go through many steps. Competitors like ServiceNow, Micro Focus SMAX, and ManageEngine all have better user interfaces. This is the main solution that needs improvement.

I am very satisfied with the modeling systems, the grid, and the existing features, except for the graphical user interface.

I have been working with it for four years. I worked as an integrator for two years and as a customer for two years. It offers various models for better capabilities and is a great reporting tool for extracting information across the enterprise. 

I would rate the stability a ten out of ten. Since the initial installation of a simple application server for administration, it's been stable. We haven't had any issues with Spectrum, NetOps Performance Management, or CA Service Desk. It serves all customers and devices, and everything is fine.

I would rate the scalability a ten out of ten. I have worked with competitors like SolarWinds, but CA's Cross-Enterprise Application Performance Management is the best for performance and capabilities. I give it a ten out of ten.

When we need to add more servers, it works with horizontal scalability. So scalability itself won't impact our production environment. We can add whatever we need for servers or horizontal scalability.

We have 17,000 users and 7,030 network devices. We plan to increase the usage in the future. 

This product has adapted to changes in our application architectures. For network devices, it's just discovery. But when it comes to applications, we can install management, and the concept of horizontal scaling provides us more flexibility and availability in changing our application capabilities.

Myself and other parts of the team have been supported as technicians. They have a very bad experience in supporting, because I think they are outsourcing the technical support for their customers, which impacts Broadcom's image in Egypt.

Neutral

We had Micro Focus, BMC, and ServiceNow, but ServiceNow is cloud-based, and cloud solutions are not allowed in Egypt for the banking or governmental sectors. So, we eliminated that. We chose Broadcom from the remaining competitors: Micro Focus and BMC. 

This product is cheaper than other products with the same capabilities.

All solutions from Broadcom are very easy to install, except for the latest one called DX Operational Intelligence.

I would rate my experience with the initial setup an eight out of ten, with ten being easy. 

When it comes to Cross-Enterprise Application Performance Management, it means it is an old tool. It has more features but a poor graphical user interface. The installation of all tools is very easy, except for two tools, including DX Infrastructure Management, which is why I rated it an eight.

Deployment time: For all tools, three months. The only difficult one, DX Performance Management, took four months.

Deployment process: We created VMs with the infrastructure team, set up network guidance with the network team, downloaded the software resources, and then started the installation from the bank.

Deployment resources: We had four people for the deployment process. And three people take care of the maintenance. 

We serve customers in the banking sector. If we have any downtime or outage for our applications or branches, it would negatively impact the bank's customers. They might take their money and go to another bank. 

So, we have many types of ROI cases. We developed total management to help us in-store, marketing solutions, and performance management solutions.

I would rate the ROI as seven out of ten, where one is NO ROI and ten is a hundred percent ROI.

I would rate the pricing a three out of ten, with ten being expensive. So, it is rather cheap. On a yearly basis, we pay $400,000.

It is fixed, but it differs from year to year because we can add more licenses.

My advice for Broadcom itself as a company is to invest more in their support section and sales activities in the Middle East. They don't have any sales activities or events in the Middle East. As a competitor to Broadcom, Micro Focus is more active in the Egyptian market. They provide more advanced and attractive sales activities and support.

Even though, as a technical architect and lead, I showed them the capabilities of Broadcom, I did not receive support from Broadcom. We pay Broadcom almost $400,000 yearly, while a perpetual license for Micro Focus would cost $7 million, with an annual fee of $1 million. It's more expensive, but we might switch to Micro Focus because they are more active and provide better support. They even organize events.

Broadcom has powerful tools, but they lack support and presence in Egypt. They don't have the mindset to market Broadcom tools.

Overall, I would rate the product a seven out of ten.  Other users should consider sizing and capacity for devices and users that will use the system, and the sizing for applications that will be monitored by the tools. It's about capacity and sizing.

We primarily use the solution for monitoring, including the application performance management monitoring in order to monitor how our infrastructure is working, how the network is working, and the general monitoring of databases.

The dashboard is pretty good. I can filter it out based on the application layer, for example. 

If I'm interested in how our data is working I can just go and take a look, or if I want to look at applications or filtering, I can look at that as well. I get pretty good visibility from multiple angles. 

The technical support and documentation are quite good.

The cloud deployment model allows for pretty good scaling. 

The UI could be better. When I look at the dashboard, for example, the information looks cluttered and unorganized. It needs to work on having better visual representations on hand for the users. 

Sometimes you don't get real-time data on if an application goes down. I need to look for data points in the dashboard, and usually, it takes some time to get loaded into a system. Therefore, there's a delay in seeing the information that' the most important to us. It would be ideal if we had guaranteed real-time visibility on everything.

We have a few hiccups during deployment. It didn't go as smoothly as we hoped. It's a bit complex. 

The solution could be more stable.

It would be useful if there was container monitoring and monitoring for Kubernetes. Analysts are expecting this.

The solution needs to ensure it is relevant for current complex IT environments.

I've been using the solution for at least the last 12 or so months. It's been a while. 

There is still a lot of improvement that is needed in terms of stability. We figured out that it was not able to monitor or offer some forms of self-service capabilities. It's not fully reliable. 

The more applications that are getting introduced into the organization, the faster the deployment needs to be for us. Overall, as a complete monitoring solution, if a new deployment is coming up, and takes too much time to get running, it may affect the overall monitoring prospect for us. On-premises, for example, it's a bit limiting. However, the cloud is much more effective in terms of scaling big and fast. 

On my project, we have about 300 users using the solution.

I'm not sure if we have plans to increase the solution at this time. If a new application is being onboarded and it needs monitoring, it's a possibility that we might require it to scale. 

The documentation and the technical support are both quite good. We're quite happy with the level of service we receive.

We did an agent deployment that needed to collect some metrics. In retrospect, there were a couple of hiccups. I figured it out when I was just trying to deploy different agents on different applications. I realized it totally depends on which application you are using. Some applications take more time to deploy. There's a bit of complexity involved. 

The full deployment took about two weeks or so to complete. 

We currently pay for a yearly subscription.

The pricing is a very complex thing. New Relic and Dynatrace are just much more economic, or, at least, offer a better value. This solution seems to charge differently for different features.

We did evaluate other solutions before choosing this product. We evaluated Dynatrace and New Relic.

We are just a customer and an end-user.

I would recommend this solution, however, I would also advise that a company check their requirements and if their existing and possible future applications will be compatible. Otherwise, not everything may be monitored correctly.

I would rate the solution at a six out of ten.