Broadcom DX Application Performance Management Reviews

It's for monitoring application performance and end user experience.

It secures traffic through the HTTPS. There are a huge number of cipher suites which are enabled. Unfortunately, some of the cipher suites are not being recognized by the APM tools. However, we are able to manage with the other cipher suites in the market, apart from ones offered by CA APM.

We have had a tough time getting these topics monitored.

In terms of end user experience, it is very useful. We use it to organize our client requirements, for example:

• How many users utilize the vertical URL and what are their experiences? 
• How good is the response rate?
• How many errors are the users receiving?
• What errors do they get?
• What screens are being displayed? Are they receiving, "Page Not Found" or "Error 404"?

We receive good transactions from it with good graphs, as well, documenting the activities of total visitors on the site. We can pull the reports and provide them to the client, as required.

In terms of application performance, we are able to identify the memory leaks within applications. We have been able to identify how an application is behaving in terms of a custom method of classes and how well the response is being solved. We can find the KPIs of the application along with its performance indicators.

The custom classes, suchs as hybrid net performance, we are able to identify and fix, accordingly. The solution is proactive. We can monitor how the application is connecting to the database and what queries are being requested, then how well those are being respond to by the solution.

Users no longer need to depend upon the console for a compatible Java version. Now, users can directly learn the version, perform all their actions, and see all of those performance-related issues.

Our users lag how to identify the root cause with this solution. If they could come up with a more user-friendly version, that would be a good thing, since other vendors currently have better features and more user-friendly products than CA APM.

As applications move to the cloud, we need more cloud-based solutions from CA APM. This is currently unavailable. I know that this is something that they are looking to do in the future, but I am not sure how with the current solution.

The stability is very good. CA APM is far more stable than any of the other tools available, though we have seen memory leaks with the solution.

Scalability is good. We haven't faced any issues.

We have about 50 users in our organization, from directors to analysts. Around 60 to 70 percent of our organization is using the solution.

We monitor more than 400 applications, which is done with two people who are system engineers (myself included).

The technical support has performed very well. We receive good information in a very quick and polite manner. They have very good technical personnel and have been very happy with them. Sometimes. I contact them when CA APM introduces new things.

The initial setup is very straightforward; it is not complex. It is well-documented. I can follow the documentation to get the tool working.

For a simple install, the deployment can take about a day, then I can monitor any application.

A complex install will need requirements to be gathered for how things are done and how deep the data is to be implemented and instrumented. If they are a huge number of classes to be monitored, then we need to collect all that information from the application team or client. Afterwards, we have to instrument the system. This may take a week or ten days based on the requirements. 

I'm not involved in the pricing.

We evaluated CA APM vs AppDynamics and CA APM vs BMC.

Consider the compatibility first, then consider the resources required, finally consider the applications that you will be monitoring. Then, you can go deploy them.

We used the Five-Pack when onboarding services. We also used SiteMinder and introduced synthetic monitoring, integrating with CA Spectrum and CA Service Desk. We use several CA applications. Everything is interconnected to get triggered and tickets routed to a particular thing automatically.

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.

We have an e-commerce application. It's more of a business-to-business model, and employees of most companies come to our websites to order product. The APM tool allows us to monitor performance of that application, where are the pain points, where are the slowdowns, to focus on where we can fix those.

Product performance is awesome. It's covering all aspects of the application; good database metrics and internal application metrics. Just tons and tons of data.

The improvement for us is in the customer experience. The quicker the websites are, the more satisfied, the better experience the customer's going to have, hopefully the more product they're going to buy. The sales sites are more reliable, more up time.

That it's customizable. If there's something that you really need to get at that doesn't come out of the box, you can pretty easily put together some custom metrics and get those in place.

One of the challenges is agent releases. So as we employ agents, they are done relatively manually. A little bit of automating of agent release would be helpful.

We've not had any problems with it.

It scales. We have a bunch of different applications using it.

We get really good support.

We did not have a previous solution. This was brought in because we had a new app. The app was not stable, it wouldn't stay up.

Initial setup is probably somewhere in between straightforward and complex.

It's the configuration, you have to know your application, you've got to know what parts to monitor. It's not a product that you install and it does everything for you. You have to put a little bit of effort into configuration.

There wasn't anything else on the market at that time. There have been some other players that have come in since then. CA was the first.

The most important criteria when selecting a vendor are 

• good support
• a company that's been around for awhile.

I give it a nine out of 10. It does pretty much everything we need it to do. It's just little things, fringe things, that need a slight upgrade, like configuration. It's getting better.

I would say get your employees some training, get some help from CA to make sure you know what best practices are.

We are using APM for troubleshooting and because of this product, the delay to solve and to fix issues has been reduced by 40% on average. We also use the APM data to analyze and predict if an application will work.

For us, the application is a new eye on the same data. Its quality and the way we access it is going to make the difference between an application you keep using and an application you won't. There are a lot of DevOps methodologies to improve the time to market and to deploy applications quicker. Sometimes it's not enough because at the end, the application expands some issues and the isolation of a root cause is quite complicated. We analyze about 3,000 incidents and predictions, classify them, choose our toolbox, including APM tools (the CA APM solution), and we are able to predict, to anticipate incidents and to assess a risk for an application to go live.

An application is quite complicated in the environment of a software reliability engineer, because our applications are like a black box. Thanks to CA APM we are able to transform this black box to a gray box by using the transaction trace functionality services. For me it's the most valuable service of the solution.

The product displays some graphics and sometimes we want to have some different metrics in the same graphic but it doesn't display in the same scale, so it's quite complicated to see the metrics. If the product would be able to manage a double scale, it would be perfect.

We measure the limit of a solution by the number of users. The application is developed in Java and only 10 to 15 users can connect to the application. It's quite a limit for massive deployment in a huge company like Orange.

Our scalability is great because you can add servers. It works.

I don't use support, I do everything myself.

It was the only tool in 2006 to provide the transaction trace feature. As mentioned before, it transforms an application from a black box to a gray box, that's why we knew that we needed Introscope (now CA APM).

It was quite easy. The solution is easy to deploy and we had the support of a vendor team.

We deployed it on 5 or 6 applications and now it's deployed for over 200 applications.

• Thread & Method level tracing from within the app engine (JVM or .NET) from Introscope Agent
• Easy isolation of business transaction defects from CEM
• Fantastic delineation & TCP analysis from ADA

Introscope was our first modern APM tool, and the application deep dive capability gave us visibility into behaviours of requests from within the app engine & code. CEM was the first Business Transaction monitor that could report response times for every data hop. ADA reports TCP statistics that are app specific but still match command line output NW Engineers expect, and the tool revitalized a difficult relationship between app monitoring teams and Network support experts.

The main improvement areas for all three tools in CA APM are licensing, licensing and support. CA APM Introscope agents are licensed by CPU count which is fine for 1995, but in 2016 CPU is a less applicable measure for modern virtual and cloud hosting environments – not to mention MF IFLs used instead of CPU for zLinux.

CA APM licensing for CEM is tied to Agent licenses, and this prevented my team from leveraging it separately for broader benefit. The rationale from CA was that CEM was most valuable when integrated with Introscope, which is true. However, CEM has value on its own and could have justified additional spend on agents if we were allowed to configure it to capacity and use it broadly even where no agents were deployed.

ADA is not truly integrated with CA APM suite, and there should be both real-time data feeding from Collectors into APM consoles (not CAPC) & historical data from all APM tools in a single reporting repository (not separate DBs).

Go ahead and buy CA Professional Services, but expect CA to continue asking for additional purchases to deliver on committed APM functionality. Their APM solution is already one of the most expensive, and the extra spend should give you enough weight to get what you've paid for - support without hidden price tags.

What CA APM really does is that it allows us to see the inside of the managed code application, taking our performance to a more mature level. We're able to see things as they start to load up before we have a failure.

I don't know if I would call it proactive, because typically in our environment, things move so quickly. Only upon post-analysis do you see the actual build-up. Only then can we act and we end up having to build in thresholds.

It's not as agile in keeping up with the direction that CA is pushing it. They're trying, but it's still two or three years behind the curve.

We're really looking at being able to deploy it, say, in the cloud. We'd like it to have automated deployment, self-instrumentation, and a self-generating dashboard.

There are a bunch of workarounds, but after a while, you're just applying Band-Aids to the platform.

We're using version 9.6 with some patches. We have not gone to 10 yet. We typically run shipping minus a version. We're getting ready to go to 10 because, I think, CA is getting ready to do another GA release of 10. We'll probably jump to 10 at that time, but we've got some preparation work for it.

We have had a lot of challenges with APM. We've been using it since it was called Wiley, and the CA team has been absolutely wonderful. They've really stayed with it, they've researched, they've helped us. We've gotten custom patches, custom solutions that then get worked into the next product release. It has been a difficult maturation process. Now we're in a really good spot in terms of stability. We're happy with it.

I've been with the company for about four years. There was an installation of Wiley that was kind of done haphazardly and we were having a lot of stability problems. I wasn't there at the very beginning of it, but we did take it from essentially a single-pointed presence to the size where it is today. According to CA, we're probably in the top five in terms of installations, so we're one of the big ones.

For us, we rarely -- I don't think we ever, actually -- call the 1-800 technical support. We have a lot of experience and knowledge in-house. We have our entire CA support team that ranges from executive level to the highly-technical level. We can normally within a day be in touch with a developer. A lot of times the problems that we have will blast through the help desk pretty quickly. Our CA support team is vital to the success with APM.

When we made the decision, at the time there were no other vendors in this space. Periodically, we do a reassessment of the portfolio. Unfortunately, CA did not do well recently.

Actually, folks who originally were with Wiley Tech, their start-up companies have finally matured enough to the point where we can seriously consider them as alternatives.

Vendors like AppDynamics and New Relic, we're starting to see more and more of our internal customers move away from the white-glove, fully-managed model to a staff solution where they're managing their own little pieces.

The APM piece is really good for deep-dive. It is, as we like to say, the Cadillac of APMs. It does everything. It goes very deep and very wide. It does take dedication and you have to have some dedicated resources on-site. You have to be able to know it, and you have to be able to work with the developers in order to properly instrument it. It's not something that you can just throw out there and expect for it to work in an afternoon. You do have to learn the product. If you do, there are a lot of good rewards for it.

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.

Detailed alert settings give more control on when they should or should not appear.

The tree-structure tracing shows where we are spending the most time in a call-by-call sequence. But the tracing capabilities of other APM tools are more advanced than CA.

APM tools are essential for finding performance bottlenecks and pervasive issues. It gives a high level point of view on where there is a problem. This tool, in particular, is not as good at deep dive analysis. Newer versions, like 10.5 with AXA, Dynatrace, and AppDynamics may be better at going deeper into root-cause analysis.

Deep dive analysis and performance need improvement. Introscope scalability performance lags behind for our team, which looks after 3,000 JVMs and millions of metrics.

I have used this product for a half a year.

The product is stable most of the time. However, like any software out there, there are bugs. Few crashes have been experienced, but incorrect metrics and improper collector behaviours have been observed.

We have had scalability issues. Performance slows down with the number of JVMs our team supports.

I would give technical support a rating of 7/10. Few people are available to support the product. However, good, proper attention is given to urgent matters.

We didn’t have a previous solution.

I was not involved in the initial setup.

This is out of my scope.

Other alternatives are being actively considered.