Broadcom DX Application Performance Management Reviews

We look at the load patterns and server health by looking at server health parameters. Heap memory is of prime importance as well as how the heap is behaving and how the memory is behaving under load, as well as the CPU utilization. These are generally the parameters we will check.

In a production environment we check all the parameters. We can detect any leakage, any problems, whether RAM is sufficient, and whether CPU is crossing a threshold. We can determine if we need to add new servers or RAM or adjust the heap settings.

It helps save resources for a company.

It also helps us look at business-critical transactions and how fast they are happening. It helps us pinpoint the methods or functions that are taking longer to operate and we can advise the development team to look into it and fine-tune those areas. They can make adjustments immediately.

For me, the most valuable feature is being able to check memory patterns. We check them when we do load testing or soak testing to see if there are any memory leaks.

A CA APM agent takes a lot of memory. That is one disadvantage. If you configure CA APM correctly it will still consume around 15 to 20 percent of memory.

We haven't had any issues with its scalability.

When you submit a support ticket it will take them two to three days to reply. They told us they would resolve issues within 24 hours, but so far that has not happened.

There have been times when we were doing performance testing, load testing, where it didn't capture the required information we were trying to monitor. We called the CA APM support team. They suggested we increase the RAM and restart the agents. That was the solution they gave us.

The setup is not straightforward. It is a bit complex. I have not configured CA APM myself, but I use it for performance testing. When we are doing performance testing, we configure CA APM for a pre-production environment which is similar to the production environment. We will do load testing and take all the parameters and observations and send them, along with our recommendations and conclusions, to development. But I have not really configured CA APM.

Dynatrace is the most expensive of these tools followed by AppDynamics which is "medium-expensive." Both CA APM vs Dynatrace and CA APM vs AppDynamics are a bit lower in price. Because of this, our clients insist on using CA APM.

In my opinion, if you can afford it, go for AppDynamics instead of CA APM. But if our customers don't have the budget, we'll go with CA APM.

We have a comparison chart showing the license costs for AppDynamics, Dynatrace, and CA APM and other monitoring tools as well. We provide that information to our clients along with the advantages and disadvantages of a particular tool. We provide our opinion on which it is best to go with but we also listen to our clients' opinions. We discuss this at length to finally come up with a decision on which tool to go with.

I use many tools, such as LoadRunner, Silk Performer, and IBM. I also use AppDynamics and Dynatrace. The last two are actually the best for me at the moment because they support even the database level. CA APM does not support that much. It will only give me minimal information about the DB.

It reduces the downtime of applications, and has, in fact, minimized it to approximately 5 percent, and possibly even less than that.

1. Root Cause Analysis. For example, I have an application in my environment and it suddenly it goes down. I then need to find out which team to consult and whose fault it is: coding, database, network, or something else. No one is ready to accept that it is their fault, leading to the blame game. As a result, it takes me a lot of time to identify the right person, assuming I can find the right team. Then, identifying the root cause of the issue and resolving it will take more time, leading to loss of business. CA APM, however, easily updates the exact location of the error, which not only saves time but effort as well.
2. CA APM not only does root cause analysis, but it is smart enough to proactively identify an issue that could happen and advise me to do something to prevent it.
3. Over time there have been positive changes. For example, it now has automatic investigation, through the use of AI. CA APM has the advantage that we can create plug-ins. We can do whatever we want to do. It's like a Linux machine. Whatever you want to do you can, by scripting. That kind of customization is not available in Dynatrace or AppDynamics.

Automatic report generation needs work.

No issues encountered.

No issues encountered.

Customer Service:

9/10

Technical Support:

9/10

I used logs to study applications' behaviour, but that requires a separate team to properly handle it. There was dependency on their workflow. Now, we don't require a separate team. Additionally, the CIO can see the reports on his mobile.

The initial setup requires some understanding of your applications. For example, you need to know how much response time is fair for a function in that program or the response time of a given page or the application overall.

Implementation should be done by an expert as an average implementer would only be able to provide 60 to 80 percent usage of the tool.

It varies depending on the environment.

You should only use a preferred partner of CA.

Over the couple of years, since I first reviewed the product here, my rating of it hasn't changed. I still rate it at eight out of ten. I rated it eight because it is a good CEM experience but there is room for improvement with CA APM. It is it's quite tricky to implement because you need to have traffic monitoring, etc. in place.

I have been using Dynatrace for the last nine months or so and I would rate it at nine out of ten.

We are using CA APM for Layer 7 applications, like SQL, as well as application debugging.

Compared to other tools, it's not good. 

First, there is no auto flow diagram. Second, the alert mechanism is not as good when compared to other tools. Third, there are many different folders, such as front end, back end, and BB queries, but it's very critical to centralize all the business connections. Fourth, there is an issue relative to the build all view. 

It's a very stable product.

There aren't issues related to CA APM's scalability.

Compared to other tools, the technical support is not good. Other tools give support in real time, whereas CA will only reply 48 hours after I log a call.

We have multiple solutions, like CA APM, and Pinpoint. 

For implementation, it's just straightforward. There is no challenge to correlation, continuation or estimation, and there is no complexity in our environment.

Java-based enterprise application servers monitoring: for example, WebSphere Application Server, JBoss EAP, WebLogic.

• User-defined transaction profiling
• Application topology discovery and visualization
• Application component deep dive.
  

It should enable you to see the usage and performance of all application dependencies like databases, web services, caching, etc.

• Root cause detection
• Easy installation and configuration
• It should facilitate real user monitoring to see what your users are experiencing in real time.

Easily find bottleneck of our applications. We have a BSR (Business Services Reliability dashboard), so we can find out how our business is behaving, how we are getting the orders and how many errors we are getting. We find out how reliable our application is.

It's performed very well.

We can find out the bottlenecks before the customer encounters them. That's the major benefit.

It helps prioritize application performance issues because we can prioritize them in a test phase, or the development phase. We can find out that which queries are slow, what is the behavior of our application, and what we can tune our application to make it more reliable and faster.

Triage Map, Differential Analysis, Transaction Trace, error handling, cell counts. We have a complete dashboard, which tells us what's going on with our application, end to end.

It could be faster. For example, when we are upgrading the product, it takes a lot of time and there are a lot of things we have to do manually. If it is automated it would be really helpfull.

The stability is very good. We haven't had any lagging or downtime. 

We have already tuned it. It's very reliable. We have used suggestions from the CA communities and others. I already have experience with it so I have stabilized our environment.

It's very scalable.

I generally only use tech support when the issue is beyond my knowledge. Otherwise, I use the communities. 

When I have used their support I've been satisfied; not 100 percent, but a lot. The problem is it takes time. I prefer to use a community because lots of experienced people are using the communities and they reply faster than CA support.

It's straightforward.

The important things for us when selecting a vendor are 

• how good is their product and 
• the reviews of that product.

I would say try CA APM and tune it the way it is  recommended by CA Admins and from configuration guide. You'll find a lot of people complain about it because they do not tune the APM Cluster as recommended, and the agent as well.

This solution is an awesome monitoring tool for application monitoring, customized dashboards, and alerting. Many features are used, including its ability to dive into application data, the user experience, the application flow map, transaction traces, and the team center.

We use APM for application monitoring, which includes availability, performance of apps (stalls, errors, and response time), and transactions. The product is extremely customizable when it comes to setting up application monitoring. It provides app monitoring data with very effective, immediate alerting.

• Transaction traces
• Dashboards
• Email alerts
• Team center
• Average response time
• Error and stall detection
• Metric grouping to see combined data.
• CEM for analyzing and reporting

CEM needs to be simplified, because it causes too many interruptions in our daily work.

Stability is one of the strongest attributes of CA APM. It is very stable on all platforms.

CA APM is very scalable and used in a clustered environment because it supports more than its technical capacity.

Their support team is quite supportive and quick to respond. 

They communicated very well and their support was vastly experienced.

I have used AppDynamics in the past, and its customization is not as simple as that of CA APM.

Initial setup was very straightforward. It was simple to implement and customize.

I implemented this solution with an extensively experienced in-house team.

Setup costs are quite competitive relative to other solutions, and simpler.

We evaluated other solutions, such as AppDynamics.

Its presence is needed in our cloud solutions. Other solutions have been present from early on, but we use this solution to focus on the cloud.

It is a first line of defense for application performance monitoring and management to understand the customer usage patterns. When we get any major incident or a production issue, we can isolate the area where there is a probable problem. 

Adding a layer with built-in some service level guarantees between the operations, development, and support, give us one of the key disciplines that this product has pushed us to evolve into. Previously, it was bunch of loosely built operations metric infrastructure applications. I would get a call (someone I know), you know me and let's start working together, because there is a problem. Now, having this alerting in place and metrics showing themselves for what is in store and what we should work on, there is a service level that is being built across these teams so they exactly know how to work. That is a very good thing to bring as a discipline.

It is very hard, especially for banks working from the Canadian space, because we are traditional in nature. So, it is very hard to bring about change. A product like this has broken the ice in two years in good amount of time in Canadian market and Canadian technical space. It has been able to establish itself. There has been a little push for certain disciplinary changes and behavioral changes within the teams that work in the bank.

The first line of defense; we know we have a problem. We never knew we had a problem until we got calls into the call center saying, we have this coming up from the customers. Before, the customers would pick up the phone and give a call to our call centers. Now, we know we have a problem, because there is a primary layer of alerting or metrics monitoring put in place, that is the good part.

Its profiling. The uniqueness instead of me looking at sampling data, I need to know the m-1 event that actually triggered my scenario where that m event caused a catastrophic event, like a ripple effect; I need to know that m-1. What triggered my major event means I need to understand the event that triggered it and before the cause of that event itself. If I don't know that, and if I look at it from 10,000 feet, it's going to look like a blimp, but actually if I get into it, it's so nasty there. Without understanding that gap, no APM product can claim itself to be an APM product.

The only drawback of this product that CA has, actually it was Wiley product they purchased and they started adding patches on top of the Wiley product to make it an APM dimensional product, but it is a sampling product. Essentially it means it samples one every 15 seconds. A lot of things happen in that 15 seconds especially when its financial transactions. If you miss one spike within that 15 seconds, that means you are looking data from a 1000 mile height, which might not look like a problem until you go and take closer look.

The way the product itself is it allows you to identify a problem area but not exactly tell what the problem is. It is like you have a problem good. 15 years ago it would better to know that I have a problem and I have a problem in a specific area it works better. Now, the speed at which the technology and the customers are moving on, I need to exactly know what my problem is right then and there. That is a huge gap with CA APM.

No predictability and pattern analysis is hugely dependent on the sampling. In today's financial world, your individual attention is your success path for your business growth. That means, the more I get a product that suits me exactly, that means I am unique. Even if I transfer two dollars, I am unique in my own nature as a customer. If I get mixed up with a bunch of other boats, folks who are doing one dollar $10 and I get my product customized to them, that means I'm not being individually identified as a market. The same goes with your application dynamics as well.

If you are not able to do that individual identification of spikes and surges use cases, you are not looking at it very closely the way the market is actually driving you to look at it. Other than, that it is a huge relief. We had nothing before, so something is better than nothing.

It is a very stable platform, I can vouch for that. That first line of defense is not going to fail. It is a fairly stable product because it has been there for a while and all the knicks and knacks have been worked out. I can call it a matured product in what it does, but what is being sold is a different topic altogether.

Amazing. It is very nice for what it does.

Every customer is unique. Again to this market, it is that unique need, unique feature, unique necessity, or unique technology that brings forward your need to adopt your technologies or adopt your lifecycle to meet that need. With CA, if I throw out a solution, one pill does not work for everything, so you need to make that customization. You need to draw a line on what customization is, then what support is. Everything cannot be customization. 

I have a product that is unique to me, but I did really tinker it out, so you need to talk to me and understand what the tinkering is. It cannot be a customization request, it is a support. Drawing lines between customization and support, there are a few dialogues, a few dialogue lines that really need to happen along those lines. Otherwise, it is fairly good when we actually escalate. We have heard some nays back and forth, but it has been good.

The initial setup is complex. Size made it complex, and understanding the complex nature of our application landscape itself. It is very diverse. 

We acquired a bunch of banks and a bunch of wealth management companies which were put together as one bank. This means each of them have their own technical landscapes. You need to understand each of them and they also talk to each other. It is complex in nature from how we are as a bank from a technological front. This makes a complex nature to deploy a tool to work across the board.

CA was engaged for implementation

I'm checking customer experience, how they experience our website and how they use the systems inside the company. Customer experience, outside and inside.

It performs okay.

It helps me know everything. When I know everything, like when there is a problem, I can find it very quickly. It reduces the time for solving problems in the website.

Seeing what the customer is doing on our website. This is important for us to understand that they use the website as we planned.

I would like to see intelligence, deep intelligence or deep analytics.

Great. No problem.

Everything is okay. I have no problems.

Their technical support is great.

I have always used CA APM.

Dynatrace and CA, these are the best vendors that we checked. They're at the top.

The most important criteria when selecting a vendor are support and wide use of the product. Not that the product is there in one company or two companies, but worldwide. We want the company to invest money to improve it. So I'm looking for a product that is worldwide and used widely by customers.

I give it an eight out of 10 because it does not include all the features that I mentioned above, like intelligence.

Do a significant PoC, and in the PoC including something very difficult, not something light. See if in the most cases, the product is giving you the answers, and not just for the easy ones. 

Monitoring application performance.

As such, no improvement after using CA APM.

Regarding how we utilize CA APM for container monitoring, our implementation team is not able to this information. Our implementation team was not able to understand and share information regarding the impact CA APM has when attempting to triage complex application issues; and similarly regarding the visibility CA APM provides across complex application environments. We are not aware of how the solution allows you to monitor and gain performance insights into the various technologies across the application environment, like docker monitoring and the ability to see into the database. The same is true of how the solution helps monitor system changes, topological changes or code updates. We would like to receive documentation to understand the above features.

CEM - We have to produce reports of defective URLs by selecting the client site IP group, which helps us to identify status code of IIS. This gives an idea regarding obtaining the defect and finally understanding the issue.

Tool is so complex to understand.

No issues with stability.

No issues with scalability.

It's average.

This is our application monitoring solution.

Complex.

A few 24/7 Web monitoring solutions were evaluated for comparison.

Its complex to understand.

Monitoring of our internal business applications completely, through all business processes.

As all of our applications are monitored by CA APM, it's now easy to analyze unusual behavior in a normalized way.

In terms of container monitoring, we are currently in the rollout phase. In the end, all containers will be instrumented by CA APM agents in order to have a complete view of the current operative status of the dynamic and volatile container world.

All application servers are instrumented to provide a standardized monitoring baseline for the given technology. We defined sets of base monitors in order to normalize analytics capabilities from a technology perspective. On top of this we monitor application specific classes.

As we are currently in rollout phase we can't yet report on the visibility CA APM provides across application environments, yet.

Regarding monitoring and performance insights into the various technologies across our application environment, it identifies the "worst" application in terms of which app has the highest number of errors, slowest SQL queries, etc.

System changes, topological changes, or code updates that are introduced into our environment are analyzed by our architecture team using CA APM.

1. Cross-VM transaction traces provide a complete "what happened where".
2. Proactive snapshots of transactions and all details of a transaction are saved in case of an error.
3. Attribute decoration is a unique and very powerful feature. We can add meaningful meta information based on our internal demand.

1. Integration of third-party content into app maps (e.g. data coming from beats/elastic platform).
2. Support of new application server technologies, time to adopt new versions of them.
3. Dashboarding capabilities (as with all other vendors).
4. Application architecture of the central Enterprise Manager should be developed into a cloud native architecture.
5. Mitigation of SPOF – PostgreSQL database, behind Team Center.

Yes, we enountered stability issues. They were mitigated by performance tuning within infrastructure.

Yes, we encountered issues with scalability inside Team Center, a massive amount of universes, perspectives, applications.

Good.

No previous solution.

Straightforward.

Back in 2009/2010: HPE Diagnostics, Dynatrace; 2016: AppDynamics.