Broadcom DX Application Performance Management Reviews

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.

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.

• Isolating issues, the dashboards, and the customization are the most valuable for us because they enable this tool to be used by multiple tiers. Let's say we don't know what the problem is when one occurs, we just know that we have multiple tickets generated, and there are customer groups down or experiencing slowness. These tools help us identify the issue quickly. That saves us a tremendous amount of money. That's the number one value.
• It is easy to use. That's a big one.
• The fact that it is a suite solution, rather than using just one technology.
• There are multiple offerings. That's nice as well.
• The agents are low-profile, and there is not a whole lot of overhead with the agents.

It sounds kind of corny, but it helps bring us together because when a problem strikes and it’s happening, there's the tendency to start finger-pointing at different groups. With this tool in the hands of a tier-one or a tier-two technical individual, or small group, they can identify the issues without needing to go back and forth between different departments, who are all saying "Oh, that's not our problem." It then turns out to be their problem in the end. That's the main benefit.

There are a lot of improvements to be done. One particular area is in the area of automation. That's a big thing for me.

• In my personal opinion, it's a bit of a weak point. I believe that they know that, and that they're working towards it. I would love to see that. I think they are heading down the right road. It’s a sound product.
• In APM, in triage, it's all about time and less effort. If an outage bridge or a severity breaks out, I want less people on the phone. I want a small group of individuals. I don't want every head of department on that bridge for hours on end. There are a whole lot of ways. That's a soft cost; but it's a cost: absolutely.
• I want to see more automation out of these products, especially in identity management. As we virtualize, and as we become more mobile, I want identity management to seamlessly move with the user and applications and systems. That's a hard nut to crack.

I have very high expectations for these tools. If it takes me more than a matter of minutes to identify a problem, it's not good enough. There's still a lot of growing to do. A lot of it is internal growth, too. It’s not just CA. It's not their fault; but our own company needs to adopt certain practices and change our ways. We need to be more open too, I guess, with more internal collaboration to use the tool to its full potential.

It is stable; and, more so, I like CA's direction. I am very inspired by it. It gives us hope.

The product has absolutely been scalable.

My team doesn't deal with technical support directly. We work with internal groups who are the actual customers of the product.

I was not involved in the decision process to purchase APM or in the setup. They have actually been in-house for quite some time, before my time; but I've learned to know them. I've learned their products. I've met with vendors, as well as other vendors and competitors. CA seemed to beat out everyone for our company.

Never be satisfied. Always ask for more, and always look for the next step. As long as the company's vision is really the future, then I think we're in good hands.

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.

It gives us a lot more in-depth information that we previously didn't have for monitoring capabilities. Some of the new tools will allow us to get issues into the hands of the right support staff immediately.

We're using this solution to turn our support into being more of proactive approach than reactive to issues that are reported to us from the customers. We're actually trying to bring those issues to their attention before they bring it to our attention. With new features in version 10.5, it looks like we're taking more of an inside out approach to actually bringing the root cause immediately to our attention. This is instead of us having to start and dig down to identify what the root cause was. It brings it right to the forefront immediately without requiring additional triage. It's really changing the way that we're doing our business. This improvement is not only from a monitoring perspective where we're getting advanced notice of system issues that are occurring, but I'm actually using it as a tool to even identify where there are tuning opportunities based on our current configuration. We are also using it in working towards global standardization for our entire client base, which is something that's been lacking. It was very difficult to find all of that information in one place, readily available, and historical information like transaction activities and things of that nature. They're all now available at our fingertips, whereas before that just wasn't a possibility.

One of things that I've noticed is that in the desktop product there are some features that are really nice that are not available in APM WebView. I know that there's a concerted effort to make sure that everything will be included in the WebView portion of that, but it’s not there yet. I actually spend most of my time using Introscope, because of those features that are really useful to me personally.

I don't think we've been faced with too many challenges with stability. I know that very early on in adoption that we were having some crashes, but it's being relatively stable for the last number of weeks, even months.

We've rolled this out for a single one of our products and we're already exploring the potential of expanding that across the company to incorporate multiple products. It's something that we're definitely considering.

I have not used technical support, but the feedback that I've gotten from our system engineers is that it's been tremendous actually.

Previous to using this solution, we had a really large gap in our monitoring tools, and so it was just something that needed to be addressed, and CA APM was the right solution for us.

I was involved in the installation on more of the functional side of things. I wasn’t involved in configuration. I haven't done any of the engineering work. I was involved in setting up business transactions and a lot of those features. Initially, this setup was little bit overwhelming. I think it does take some time to get up to speed to understand how to navigate through the product, but once you get comfortable and familiar with it, it's pretty intuitive.

When selecting an APM product, I would suggest looking at the cost benefit. Find out if they are competitive with pricing, and if you are going to get return on your investment. I think I would just share some of the success that we've had already today, including, like I said, that shift of being reactive to proactive, and sharing some of the new advancements that are being made in the most recent releases that are going to make that experience even better.

The product helps us to identify code problems very quickly. It can also help us identify other problems with the application as it's running. That's a significant for us because application failures can impact revenue and customer satisfaction. This product allows us to do even more. For instance, we've recently added CA Application Performance Management (APM). Prior to that, we were only able to look at the infrastructure stack. From the box perspective, this gives us additional ways to help us troubleshoot. Having tools with some level of intelligence can more accurately pinpoint the problems. This helps us cut down that whole blame game and helps us get to the root of the issue faster.

From the application speed perspective, we can install it in both the development and production environment for the applications. In the development environment, they're able to test and capture long-running transactions, database issues, too many threads, or memory leaks. We are able to identify those, in theory, before they make it to production. This gives us a much cleaner application when it goes up with potentially less issues from a newly deployed piece of code. That’s the kind of the big play that we're going for and we have yet to generate tickets because we're still working to capture the right level of noise. This is a better process then flooding application teams with a lot of details.

We have pretty much every tool we need. What I need for this tool to be able to demonstrate is that it totally surpasses the competition.

My partners are not just concerned about the back end of the system, they're are concerned about the users and what is happening to them. The user experience is everything. And it’s not fully baked into the equation. We are potentially going to buy a different product.

Stability has been good so far from my current experience and previous experience of APM. We are using an earlier version, 9.7. We're about to upgrade to 10.3. What is very important is making sure that you evaluate your application and what you want to measure and capture, in a development environment before you go to production. If you attempt to capture too much information in production it can lead to issues. Teams need to know what they're doing, because it can impact performance if you're looking for too many things you don't really care about.

We haven't hit the wall yet with finding the upper ends of the scalability. What we've been told is that we can deploy up to 60 apps in the current infrastructure without having some sort of performance degradation. We haven't experienced it yet, so that's still to be determined.

Technical support is usually the same in any big company. They tend to play the log game. I typically contact our support contact. I just reach out and we escalate. The account executives can help with that process as well. We ran into problems where my team was complaining, support wasn’t responding, or they were taking too long for issue resolution. I spoke with the account team, and then we were able to get the right connections so we can escalate more effectively and efficiently.

I was not part of the initial setup. I'm involved in the upgrade and the new Implementation.

Make sure the staff who runs, manages, and implements the tool with their customers or their partners has a middleware background or WebSphere experience. These individuals should understand how that all works, because that will shorten the learning curve. A person with these skills can really translate between the app team and the infrastructure. This can make adaption go a lot faster and gain the benefit and value faster.

For APM, the most valuable solution is being able to do a root cause analysis quickly, and find the root cause visually so that we don't have to hunt around for the actual cause of the problem.

Our organization has over 21,000 agents running. Being able to monitor all those agents at the same time, with the ability to be alerted when thresholds are exceeded. We can know when we are having problems without having dedicated people to watch monitoring screens all the time.

I would like the ability to see a full end-to-end path of a transaction. I know the next version will be getting closer to that. I’d also like to see it get to the root cause of the issue faster.

Some of the visual aspects of the current version and reporting need to be improved. I know that you are fixing all this. It's a little harder to do some of this because I know so many of the things that are coming up.

Stability is pretty good. They are improving it with every version. I'm hoping that when the latest version is out, we will have a really stable environment that we can rely on 100%.

It is very scalable. As I said before, we're running more than 21,000 agents in all of our development operations. We feel that it could scale very well by just adding more servers and enterprise managers.

Technical support is very responsive. They will work with us to solve any of the issues that we are encountering.

I'm the administrator for our environment, so I do all the installations for our environment and also set it up. The setup is fairly straightforward. There is some complexity to understanding some of the tuning mechanisms that you can do to it. But that's with any enterprise-level software.

You definitely need to understand the size of your environment. Try to get a plan together before you start implementing it. It is a big help because then it goes a lot smoother.

The most valuable features for us are the visibility it provides, increased production, Command Center, and WebView.

As our production increases, we have visibility of everything that's going on, especially since we run a lot of applications and we're able to monitor all of them. If something goes wrong, CA APM plays the primary role in helping us perform root-cause analysis.

I have a hard time upgrading CA APM. When I upgrade from one version to another, everything must be done manually. If CA either had or let user create a tool to help with the upgrades, that would be a great improvement, specifically with something like a net command or automatic update.

We've been using it for almost 5 years.

We've had no issues with deployment. It's the upgrades that are the issue.

It's a stable product. We've had no issues with instability.

It needs to scale according to the CS support set and we can scale it as our needs require.

CA support is a little bit slow. I usually check with the CA community first before opening any support ticket. It takes a long time because support is based in Plano, TX, and the time zone difference causes a delay in them providing us a response that I can implement the next day.

Doing an upgrade is very complex, but afterwards the product operates in a very straightforward manner.

It'll build your confidence in your application server or whatever application you're monitoring.

• Provided greater visibility to IT regarding necessary actions on its governance and relationship with suppliers and business areas. In the previous scenario, IT was surrounded by tools, but did not possess a vision focused on quality of service delivery and end-to-end. With the adoption of CA APM, we have accurate mapping, we're updated on what supports each business service and what, when, where an incident occurs and how it affects the business.
• Regained credibility of IT's role as a driving force for improvements result in greater business performance. In the previous scenario, IT was surrounded by tools, without any integration which forced us to dispense resources with a late result and sometimes without solving the issue. With the adoption of CA APM, there was a change in the relationship of the areas of IT, its own role and value to the success of the business.

The features which were instrumental in our choice of CA APM include:

• The options that we have to create use cases providing synthetic vision when applicable to the needs of the business
• The ability to accomplish the identification of the root cause of problems with applications in drill-down level by integrating the suite with tools for managing and monitoring.
• The existence of components for collecting information from other platforms and applications.

From my perspective, as I had the opportunity to evaluate CA APM compared to other vendors, one of the improvements we highlighted which would be necessary to improve the targeting interface is to make it more user-friendly and current.

No.

No.

We selected CA APM as opposed to other solutions in the market because it has a solid install base and is notorious for integration with other products including monitoring platforms, service desk and ERPs. We had the challenge of promoting a radical change of posture of the IT organization from reactive to proactive. One of the biggest factors was that the impact was a heterogeneous IT environment!

It was a simple initial configuration. In order to minimize impacts on the operations of the business, a strategy was adopted taking into account the application of low-impact stretching forward to the greatest impact. During this process there were continuous disclosure processes and changes to management which enriched the lessons learned that contributed significantly to the achievement of success.

The implementation was carried out by the CA team. We had difficulty finding professionals to deploy and maintain the solution in Brazil.

I also evaluated AppDynamics, BMC Software, Compuware - Dynatrace and Microsoft – SCOM Avicode

To have a proper result, consider:

• Spend time to do a proper mapping of your business processes, interfaces, dependencies carried out and the support (IT). In certain situations we are faced with a fragile and inadequate monitoring which doesn't amount to any APM!
• Any APM tool will not perform a miracle, it will only be an instrument with other existing tools, which should have processes and people behind them to reach the desired results. In our case, success occurred only when there was a fusion of interests and efforts of the areas of IT infrastructure and systems development.

This is a very particular vision of the existing IT environment in Brazil, however one can not generalize based on this.

Before APM, all the support/information diagnostic retrieval was post-mortem. Logs retrieval with tons and tons of useless info would generate a report after several days of an issue, with no clue as to a root cause, but with several hypotheses on what was it. Now, different teams can get info even before the system crashes and can take proactive steps and find the exact point to focus their efforts to fix it.

Also, not only are the main services now monitored, but the main website with no transactions at all are included. This helps us to monitor customer experience and verify the correct functions.

There are several types of products implemented and on each one there are different features used to remark the value of it:

• In an initial pilot it helps with Error Collection, Transaction Traces, and providing general info such as Average Response Time and Responses per Interval.
• Once it's implemented with application and backend services. After the initial feedback, almost all the other app owners start to review all the info compiled from the Application Performance Monitoring (APM) platform and they also check if their architecture maps are as stated and found by APM.
• Service maturity when you can retrieve the normal metrics for every major aspect of each module and delivering this info to the correct eyes.

They need to add support for new frameworks, or at least provide a broader guide/perspectives to add them to monitoring specific agents to retrieve metrics with thresholds as a reference to guide the customer as to where they must go to achieve this.

The only issue is when the customer platform is really old. For example, where people are using client server apps developed on Delphi 1.0.

There are more issues with the app monitoring itself, since the architecture can be a little bit confusing, and in some ways even incomplete on paper. Several times after an implementation, there are a lot of other services involved and supporting the main app with the service owner not knowing, or to the contrary, the documentation doesn’t include this info.

Excellent, they are always calling and resolving issues. If there is a need to escalate it internally to get a fix or a workaround, they will do it quickly.

Several customers were using others like IBM Tivoli or an HP solution, but they don't offer an easy way to quickly check the state of the monitored app. Also, they didn’t offer a good customer experience.

Everything is swift and smooth, even when a PoC is developed, it only takes five days to complete.

I just implement it and make it work to fit the customer requirements

We didn't look at anything else.

You need to check the requirements, such as the network ports, traffic forwarding, and the supported apps. Do not be afraid of the initial response from the stakeholders, and they will quickly become supporters.