Broadcom DX Application Performance Management Reviews

The investigator section where we can observe the agent metrics.

We were able to use CA APM to help diagnose a vendor provided product where we were experiencing slower than normal performance. While using the product, we were able to see that the issue resided in the database and were able to make adjustments to correct it.

The cost of licensing of the product could be better. The overall cost has sometimes prohibited us from installing an agent to monitor an application.

I've used it for four years.

We did, although minor. We ran into issue with some of the rights with some of the back-end files used by the enterprise manager, although newer versions seem to have less issues.

No, the application is very stable in our environment.

We are experiencing an on-going issue with our CA APM to Spectrum integration where we are unable to send alerts to the Spectrum console.

Customer Service:

Customer service has always been very helpful thus I would rate them 9/10.

Technical Support:

Technical support, as with any company, is hit and miss depending on who is assigned to your ticket. Overall we have had a positive experience as we have had very technically proficient folks and have had a few people who seem to struggle with supporting the product. With that said I would rate them 7/10.

We used an in-house developed application before CA APM. Our monitoring needs had grown and the solution we previously used no longer could meet our needs.

It was complex for we had to have some custom modules developed for us. We required the monitoring solution be able to monitor IBM's DataPower appliances, which CA APM could not do right out of the box. We were able to work with CA to have a custom module developed that provided us all of our DataPower monitoring needs.

Our implementation was accomplished by a mix of CA and PHI employees.

Our ROI has been high. It has allowed us to adjust applications to perform better, thus reducing our need to install high-end servers.

We did evaluate several other products. Solutions from BMC and Microsoft were evaluated but fell short of our total monitoring needs.

Keep on top of the amount of metrics that you are accumulating and make sure you have enough disk space to accommodate.

• Proactive alerting is one of the key elements of APM and works really well. The ability to detect problems before they become widespread high severity incidents is critical when you are managing production systems. All of our APM is visible to our global support operations centres, and each service is represented by a RAG summary alert button. Any AMBER/RED status alerts are checked instantly by our 24/7 support teams.
  
• Ease of deployment
• Product stability

APM is the tool used by all support areas to monitor Java application and infrastructure performance. We have standardised support for the services running on the Java platform into one tool.

Dynamic instrumentation, at the moment, I think it is a bit clunky to use and it should be available outside the transaction tracer. It can only be enabled during a transaction trace session. Ideally it would be nicer if this could be done via the Investigator view, and the available options are shown with a right click. That way they could be done without having to invoke a transaction trace session.

I've used it since 2004.

No issues encountered.

No issues, it's one of the main strengths of the product.

No issues, the product has evolved to increase scalability on existing infrastructure which is very good.

Customer Service:

Excellent, really top quality always.

Technical Support:

Same as customer service, top quality.

No, but we have retired similar solutions in favour of APM, e.g. Tivoli.

Straightforward, but we had professional services from the vendor to guide us as well.

Combined, and the vendor team was top quality.

It's not easy to quantify as the product is used to prevent mission critical services from going down. We can’t really put a figure on it.

Two full time employees are needed to manage the whole operation, which covers all production environments and two test environments.

Not before, but we have evaluated others since, such as AppDynamics, Optier, Dynatrace and others.

• Stay close to the vendor guidelines at all time
• Don’t customise it too much
• Always patch
• Join the user community

• Applications graphs
• Dashboards
• Error snapshots
• Ability to receive metrics from various ways

An example would be the error reports, which shows the services with the higher error percentage and which errors occurs most, to they can be easily spotted to improve the application performance.

The application's discovery/triage mapping.

I've used it for seven years in three different companies.

Had some performance problems with a few applications and had to disable some probes.

Yes, but due the product being installed on a VM environment without the proper I/O speed.

No, it's pretty easy to add more collectors/servers.

Customer Service:

10/10, CA is pretty close with our company, and they are actually in the same building.

Technical Support:

8/10.

Only open source solutions.

Only open source solutions.

Both with an in-house and with a vendor team. They had the necessary expertise for the installation.

Could be better if other teams were convinced to use the tool, but it's good.

Make sure to test to see if there's any performance issues and do use a physical server.

• Policies
• Audit feature
• Warning mode policy
• APM

Application suite was installed to bring in compliance with international security standards like ISO 27001 and SAUX

Integration with other applications and easier log management via automated procedures. Also needs an easier way to be able to segregate app admin duties.

Integration of CA AC at first and then APM/ELM/PMDB was initiated in 2008 and finalized stage was in 2012 for a major telecom provider.

As I implemented the additional tools, I would rate ELM as 6/10, and PMDB 8/10.

In earlier versions like 8.5 and 12 we ran into many incompatibility problems while a lot of other problems existed with JBOSS and assigned certificates.

No. Application was stable enough after APM installation.

No. There was a 3 phase staged expansion of this application which did not need any additional planning other than installing new agents on computers and servers.

Customer Service:

Good enough, although I would have expected a better way of dealing with cases than having to explain every time from the start when a ticket was paused or opened in relevance to another one.

Technical Support:

7/10 - They need to leave the automated way of asking from a client all tech details from start when a ticket is opened under his account ID.

No. Telecom clients (more than 3) were not using a solution similar to this one.

Initial setup was very hard due to lack of proper phrasing and instructions in manuals. It became even harder when there was a need for transition from older versions to newer ones.

I certified by CA on installing/integrating/developing the application as an outsourcing consultant.

A client claims that they have had better management and administration along with advanced reporting capabilities to the Privacy Authorities of State.

Original cost of licenses and working labor was estimated at €500,000 - €600,000 for a 4 year period. Day to day cost is not known to me.

Need to build questionnaires to establish priorities in policies and resources which are going to be developed and applied to his company. CA has no template/questionnaire in place and this is additional custom job needed by vendor (plus additional cost in money and time)

When it was stable, Trending Reports and Response Time Distribution

Cultural issues prevent a product like this from making the impact it should have.

Stability

4 Years

No

Yes

Yes

Customer Service:

Poor-fair

Technical Support:

Poor-fair

Straight forward for technically competent people.

Minimal

No, it was part of a Business Partner larger purchase.

As a support engineer, the most valuable component was Customer Experience Manager (CEM). Being able to detect end user defects based HTTP response code and slow time, while differentiating between geographical locations or individual users was the biggest advantage to proactively managing root-cause analysis. And once integrated with the APM agents on those same applications, transaction tracing from end user to middleware/backend systems really did give that end-to-end view that organisations always get pitched when there is an open tender on any APM solution. From a Consulting aspect, this would have to be the new ABA (Application Behaviour Analytics) engine that is now available. It makes my job both easier and more efficient as well as clients. Being able to easily identify the end user transactions to low level internal java methods in the same screen automatically with bare minimal configuration is impressive.

Back in the support days, we were able to provide Business Service availability and performance statistics rather than just the number of P1 / P2 Incidents rose within the service desk each month. With the change of mentality to a Service Offering approach through CA APM, we first used the SLA numbers for each day to then determine which incidents where of most criticality to the business and technical support team. This meant that support resources where used more efficiently to resolve bottlenecks in load and performance during peak periods of the day.

The one thing that needs improving is the uplift of dashboards capabilities to HTML5 and flash based widgets. Some new vendors coming into the market have dashboarding capabilities that are flashier and shiny which can sometimes be a deterrent to CA APM’s proven track record to diagnostic triage.

I initially spent 2 years as a Web Application Support Analyst focused solely on using and administering the toolset for a large Victorian government department. Over the last 3 years, I have been working for a Professional Services Company implementing the CA APM solution for a number of different large companies.

Deployment of CA APM infrastructure and agents is quite easy and pain free. Issues do start to arise when you have a large enterprise environment comprising of multiple Pre-production environments and Production. The administration and configuration tasks involved to changing the configuration on agents and uplifting versions can be a long process without the use of a centralized management console for agent configuration purposes.

One of the biggest strengths with CA APM is that it is incredibly stable. In the 5 years I have used the toolset, I raised 2 support tickets about stability of which were resolved by configuration changes to suit the environment it was hosted in. The main deterrent of stability is whether it is designed to scale.

Scalability will only become a problem if your initial scope of deployment doesn't allow for the adopting of the solution in the wider business. Most solutions like CA APM are implemented in large commercial organisations that stem from siloed projects, which have an initial role of configuring, installing and providing a business benefits realization. Once this occurs and when done well, the solution needs to be able to grow and grow fast. The standalone or clustered architecture that CA APM adopts allows you to upscale and downscale your solution with minimal impact to the business, allowing for a solution that will fit all organisations deployment plans.

Customer Service:

My experience with CA Customer Service, from Sales and Pre-Sales teams, has been of the highest standard. The team always frequently drops by to just say high and follow up any enquirers.

Technical Support:

While working at different organisations I have overheard people talking about the lack of urgency and turnaround time when it comes to support. The CA Support team are very good at ensuring you know the progress of any given issues with constant updates.

At the end of the day, you should be selecting an APM tool that best suits your organisations requirements when it comes to Performance and Availability Management. I would recommend CA APM because I have used it both for Support and as a Consultant and seen that when done well, you can get instant quick wins straight out of the box.

The ability to monitor real time customer experience and to correlate the performance degradation back to system events. The ability to measure customer/user impact during outage and to assign a cost impact to the “outage”.

Prior to the product, we only measured user/customer experience when they actually reported the issue however now we have the ability to understand user/customer experience when it takes place or even predict it with appropriate metrics. This means we can respond proactively when service is impacted without disputing/denying user/customer complaints.

Linking the business transactions back to the backend systems, in other words properly following and mapping the business transaction through the entire backend environment (Webserver -> Application Server -> SOA -> Database -> User).

6 Years

No, however I have many years in this space. I do however know of other implementations that were not as smooth.

The CEM (Customer Experience Management) product is still immature and do have hiccups. Most of the time it is very stable with an occasional glitch.

Yes, but this was related to infrastructure capacity. We could not expand our infrastructure how ever we exploited the product beyond its original design (so self inflicted).

Professional and helpful however I got frustrated many times due to their level of expertise. When we experienced issues with the product or had questions, we rarely got quick and proper answers and had to figure it out ourselves (we found that we had more “working” experience)

Yes, we used open source utilities. We could not scale the open source utilities to manage our enterprise applications.

The product setup is straight forward, however then you need to understand the business transactions and expectations to align the requirement and expected results. You also have a very good understanding of APM else you would not be able to link the expectation and product capability. I have handed this solution over to individuals who knows the product very very well and they fail to deliver as they do not comprehend APM.

Interesting question as I was part of the 3rd party vendor who did the implementation at the time. So let me refer this back to my previous comment. If you do not have an implemented (vendor or in-house) who understands the concept of APM and who to derive business value out of it then you have a problem. Making the product work is one thing…..

Hmmmm… Huge J!

We had a strategy that we realised over a period of 10 years which means that we introduced certain elements piece by piece, we did not deploy all at one go. It is however a very expensive outlay and I am currently reviewing the strategy due to our annual maintenance that is becoming very expensive.

Yes, we also looked at Dynatrace

This is not a IT initiative alone but a IT/Business partnership. This is not a IT Operational deployment alone either but a joint venture with the application developers as well. If these three parties collectively approach this tool then you will have proper ROI, else you will not realise the true potential and then it becomes a very expensive monitoring tool (which it is not - if you think it is a “monitoring” tool then you are looking at the wrong tool).

Memory Leak in CA Wily Introscope

Handling of Issues has become proactive rather that reactive, with Introscope flagging issues before they become a crisis.

Product could be made more lean. POC for customers is troublesome.

I've used CA Wily Introscope and CEM for 5 years.

Deployment for large scale systems is an issue with lot of add-ons/additional products required. For example add-ons for Oracle / Siebel / Peoplesoft, etc.

We haven't had any stability issues with CA APM.

We haven't had any scalability issues with CA APM.

Yes. Other Products were evaluated. This product was found to be a close match to our requirements.

Java agent monitoring for IBM Websphere JVMs.

It helps the developers with performance testing, production pro-active monitoring and troubleshooting.

More monitoring capabilities and more flexible for setting up different monitoring alerts.

5 years

Yes. I had an issue when we were trying to deploy on Glassfish environment and WebSphere portal.

Yes, previous version APM infrastructure was not that stable. We have 5 collectors and collectors kept disconnecting from MOM, which caused false alert like JVM status.

I was not able to monitoring a WebSphere portal on a previous version.

Customer Service: GoodTechnical Support: Depends on different technicians. Some of them who I have been working with are very good. They really know this product and can provide me good suggestions and solutions. But some of them, I don't think they are familiar with or understand our issue. For example I had an issue when I upgraded and the support person gave me wrong directions.

Yes. IBM Tivoli ITCAM.

For Websphere it's straightforward, but when we implemented on glassfish, it took me a while to figure out where to put the argument. And the issue comes up when doing a glassfish system upgrade.

In-house

HP Diagnostic and ITCAM.