Broadcom DX Application Performance Management Reviews

It’s used internally to help us get a grip of our infrastructure environment, including datacenters, network, applications, voice solutions etc. and to help serve over 10,000 customers utilizing the CA framework.

In-depth functionality, standard available reports and the dashboard.

Standard available reports provide us with an automatic insight into the top ten situations to watch. It would have been extremely difficult to program such a report ourselves, and to my knowledge no other competitor can match this functionality.

Dashboards are easy customizable and vary per persona, thus showing different kind/levels of information.

User interface - CA is moving towards HTML5, but still a lot is Java, old fashioned, non-customizable and not user friendly. It’s look and feel is still too technical.

No issues if you make sure you align the underlying infrastructure with the capacity needed.

It’s very scalable.

Customer Service:

9/10

Technical Support:

8/10

We have had numerous solutions. We are in a process of moving over towards the CA framework.

Complex, deep functionality matching with business requirements and design of platform.

We implemented it in-house with the support of CA.

Depends on the size of the product you need.

We evaluated many other vendors. We considered AppDynamics APM.

Plan before you act. Do not fall in the pitfall that you have extensive user requirements and try to implement this at once in the tooling. Start small and simple and gradually expand.

CEM (Customer Experience Manager) and Introscope.

With CA APM, we can see the performance regarding the transactions of our applications and analyse the availability and quality of our environment to provide the best experience for our clients. With this product, it is possible to resolve the problems faster because all of the features are connected.

For diagnosing problems, and considering that all products are connected to CA APM, it could indicate in the initial view or dashboard which layer - front end, middleware, back end - is most likely the source of the problem. Today, we can find the problem, but it requires three or more clicks.

Regarding creating dashboards, CA APM needs an enhancement to support building models in HTML5.

More than 2 years

Sometimes, the solution uses Java and this means you need a great environment to deliver high performance.

With CA APM, you can’t scale the ‘webview’ (Team Center), the feature that provides you with the views/dashboards. To do this, you need to build a new environment and start manually.

On a scale from 1-10 (1=worst, 10=best), I rate technical support a 6.

We switched because the product we used before CA APM didn't show application/transaction performance.

It was simple.

The price of the product is close to other similar products, but I think CA needs to change the licensing options because of the high price.

Oracle BPM, IBM Tivoli BSM, Compuware BSM, and BMC.

Get input from your different IT areas. Get help from your IT operations and, more importantly, get help from your business/production IT areas to map how critical it is to monitor applications and your transactions.

Most important is transaction traces, and we appreciate the integration with service tools like SOI, the ease of creating Dashboards and in the new version the team center.

The mean time to resolve has reduced dramatically since we started using CA APM Introscope. We found it very important for our DevOps strategy for resolving issues and for pre production tests.

Standalone workstation interface is most of the time slow. The licensing model and the prices are above the average.

3 years.

Yes, as any implementation of this level we found issues, but nothing worth it and the support has been as expected.

At first we had some, but we had months running this solution without interruptions. As far as the scalability, it's an important factor.

This tool is scalable as expected, we had to make some fixes to metrics explosion, and afterwords we needed to add a couple of enterprise managers.

Above average. We always get answer in less than 15 minutes, and the personnel are very kind as well.

Very proactive and with noted knowledge about the specific topics. It is 24/7 with people all around the world.

We have New Relic as well for a specific monitoring need.

It is very complex indeed, but we always had support.

In-house.

The price is high and the licensing is restrictive.

Yes, IBM and New Relic.

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 most valuable feature is the ability to find performance issue. It's a end-to-end software monitoring solution that uses an wide variety of technologies, which is also very valuable to us.

With this product, we were able to increase our applications' performance, their response times, and to improve the satisfaction of our customers.

The automatic identification of business transactions need to be improved. Also, the end-user experience and the web console should be improved.

We have been using it since 2008.

We've had no issues with deployment.

We detected some issues on the web console in regards to its stability.

We didn’t have any issues scaling it for our needs.

7/10

We used a different solution and we switched because this one was more stable and did not impact application response times.

The initial setup was straightforward. We just deploy the agents and started to have visibly.

Any company has its own needs we are not able to give any advice other than to make sure it fits your needs.

We checked all the major competitors in this area. We chose this because it was the only one that was compatible with all our technologies.

First, deploy the agents and get to know the user interface concepts. Afterwards, try to find the root cause of your biggest performance issue and you will see that it is very simple.

One of the great features of CA APM is the analysis of application performance problems. This allows us to find problems quickly so that we can resolve them before larger issues arise.

It helps speed up the identification of the cause of performance problems, making us more efficient in terms of cost and time spent resolving issues.

I think that the agent installation process needs to be streamlined. It could be a lot easier. In fact, it would be even better if it could be automated and allowed for remote installation.

I've used it for five years.

We had no issues with the deployment.

We have had no stability issues.

There have been no issues scaling it for our needs.

The technical support is good. We have always had good interactions when we've needed them.

We did not use any other solution.

The initial setup is very simple. We had no problems whatsoever with it.

We implemented it on our own with our in-house team.

Once you try it, you'll see that this product is easy to use.

• 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.

Most valuable features and characteristics for me are:

• Quick setup and good out-of-the-box value provided
• Usable interface and navigation
• Variety and value of the provided metrics
• Qualified and motivated Support services
• Customization options, you can monitor almost everything with EPAgents

Most of our customers use the tool mainly for incident diagnostic and incident early detection. In this sense, I know that is quite useful for customers. Sometimes it is used to validate results of stress tests before going to production.

In my opinion the are some areas for improvement:

• CEM setup is significantly more complex to set up than Introscope, more automation of transaction detection will be useful.
• Command Center should be integrated in the Web environment and the server part should be integrated in the MOM.
• Support for commercial solutions (Oracle Coherence, e-Business Suite and other market leading solutions) is sometimes limited. Official fieldpacks from CA can surely improve this point.
• TeamCenter needs a little more maturity, although I know it is a new feature. CA is working on it. CA should provide new use cases for this new feature in order to adopt the new Team Center.
• End-to-end visibility of transactions in complex environments is not always satisfactory (for instance, transactions crossing OSB).

I've been using it for the last seven years.

Overall, we've had no issues with deployment.

I think stability of the CA APM software is one of the strong points of the solution.

We have managed environments up to five Enterprise Manager instances which can be considered a middle-sized environment. We have not find any problem with scalability.

SLAs are great. Technical level of the technicians is quite good and the level of motivation in resolving cases is very valuable.

It is the first APM suite that I have used.

The setup is quite straightforward, but in middle-sized environments it could be long. It would be interesting to have some kind of “cheat sheet” to hasten the initial setup, especially for non-experienced consultants. Documentation is good, but it can be costly to read.

This is a management role, but as far as I know pricing is in line with other top market tools.

No other options were evaluated.

I would advise them to look for an experienced partner, have clear objectives and expectations of what they need, and take a time to obtain the most of the tool.

It gives us a 360 degree view of application performance. We can see the frontend, backend, middleware transactions, and URLs all in a single dashboard.

I have personally audited the number of incidents opened for the Application Support Team before I implemented CA APM for one of my clients. The incidences raised by end users for application performance-related issues decreased from 1700 per quarter to 250 per quarter. CA APM/Wily was proactive in its monitoring.

It needs better documentation to help make the implementation easier.

We've been using it for five years.

The issues during deployment were with the documentation. Documentation needs to be improved.

It is the most stable tool I have ever used. We've had no issues with instability.

We didn't have any issues scaling it to our needs.

I rate technical support a 9 out of 10.

There was no solution in place previously.

The initial setup was a little tricky, and not too easy.

We're implementation partners.

We also looked into Aternity.

You should just go for it.

The ability to deep dive into the root cause of any given issue has always been the most valuable feature. JAVA and .NET applications are black boxes without any sort of monitoring. Being able to determine which component is causing the issue helps to pinpoint the issue and allows the triage teams to focus on the actual component causing the issue. The feature that helps the most in the triage is the transaction trace component. The transaction trace feature allows us to look all the components that are called during a particular transaction.

When there is an outage or performance issue, the on-call teams are called to a conference line where we can triage the issue. Before APM was used, these calls would require all areas of support, which include network, server team, middleware, database and any other areas of expertise. Now, the Incident Management team has a set of APM dashboards that allow them to narrow down the issue and call the specific team(s) to the bridge call. One of the first questions that is asked now on the bridge calls is, “What does APM show?” For example, if it was a database issue, we can tell which query or stored procedure is having the issue.

One of the areas that I think needs improvement is the central management of the agents. I know that CA has started working toward this in its current releases with APM Command Center, but it still has a long way to go. One of the hardest things about the upgrades is upgrading all of the agents.

Another thing that is difficult is when you need to make a configuration change to a set of properties, it has to be done manually.

I believe all these things are on the future road map of the product, but right now they are a major hurdle for us.

I have used this product personally for over 15 years. I have used it at three different companies which include a utility company, banking institution and a healthcare insurance company. The current company that I work for has used it for over eight years, and we recently upgraded to v10.1.

There have been no issues with the deployment.

The overall stability of the product is very good. The only time I normally see issues is right after an upgrade. Sometimes a few tweaks are necessary to stabilize everything after an upgrade. It might require a small change to the EM configuration or an agent configuration change. This is normally because of a new feature that was introduced.

We have not had any issues with scalability. We have been able to add Collectors as needed to support the growing number of agents that we support. I think in comparison to some other APM users we have a pretty small footprint. We have a staging and production environment. Each environment has one MOM and seven collectors with about 400 agents.

The level of support has been like a rollercoaster ride. Early on when it was owned by Wily, the service was great, but right after the purchase by CA it when downhill. I generally try not to go to support unless I have to, but I must say over the past six months, it has improved greatly. My cases have been handled very well and escalated to higher-level engineers when necessary.

There was nothing in place previously.

The initial setup was very straightforward. We only had three collectors with only about 120 agents. When we first starting using the tool, we only used the Introscope component. Overtime, we added the CEM and Synthetic Monitoring tool. So it got more complex over time but at each step we had the right support from CA to help us through the difficult parts.

I personally don’t deal with the pricing and licensing, so I don’t have anything to offer here.

It is a great product but not quite perfect. My advice would to be make sure you have a champion on the user side. It is a hard sell in my opinion if you don’t have someone from the application support side that will help sell the tool. It doesn’t do anyone any good if you have a monitoring tool and no one uses it.