Broadcom DX Application Performance Management Reviews

Application teams gained visibility into application performance. CA APM improved our ability to troubleshoot application issues and shorten resolution time.

The deep-process instrumentation gave us an opportunity to understand application process performance in detail.

We are using an old version of the product and I see a lot of improvements in the new release: better interface, and the ability to run predictive analytics.

The infrastructure is stable and scalable to the recommended capacity.

Customer service and technical support are very good.

We chose the CA APM solution several years ago for the set of features and the stability of the company behind the product.

The initial setup was straightforward.

We had a POC with the vendor before the implementation. That helped with better understanding of what to expect from the tool and the tool implementation.

It is difficult to measure ROI for the implementation. We has an ELA with unlimited licensing.

CA APM is a good product and I would recommend it. It might be specific to our company, but adoption by the application development community was not easy. I would recommend a dedicated team of APM SEMs to champion the APM implementation effort.

Easily map between transaction and method recall

Useful automatics alerts

Easily understand graphics

The way these tools show the information is very useful. this is a tool that records information from Java and .NET applications, and obtain information about how many times an method has been call in a period of time (usually 30 sec), how many times respond in this span of time or is delayed or stall.

Usually you can map the java / .NET method to some type of transaction, so the graphic shows how the transaction is working (or not working) then you can establish a base line and alerts when the behavior is not that is expected.

The graphic display that shows the variables in the time is very intuitive and almost everyone is able to obtain useful information.

You can add other standard monitors like SNMP or even personalized monitors that are integrated with the platform. the platform itself is easily integrated whit the manager of manager (CA Spectrum or others) or even you can access the database with affect the tool behavior. We have been integrating the tool with splunk in a way to obtain deep correlation.

Release new features, but in an intelligent way. We need more capabilities to analyze the information that tools collects; for example, using artificial intelligence, or something like that. There is a lot of artificial intelligence, for example, in cars, and other things. These technological advances has not been translated to the monitoring tool yet. We would like something like AI in monitoring tools. There is a lot of information to correlate and useful information to obtain about what is happening in the company's systems.

Some few times the agents lost connection whit the manager, but usually for changes made in the java / . net server.

The solution is technically scalable, but it is very expensive for our business especially it the way that CA calculates the price, that is based on the number of processors. If we use it too much, it will be too expensive.

Customer Service:

It is fairly good.

Technical Support:

We have the solution in a SaaS schema with a local partner, they give us the first and second level support then the partner used the CA support. I have not worked directly with the CA service or with technical support but I fell it is not the best.

Nope similar, there was a tool from IBM but was not as good as this one.

Initial setup was very fast. It was very easy to deploy.

We need to be able to obtain new solutions for full feet new necessities . When there is a new technology, if the application is not able to monitoring it, we must research new technologies to enable monitoring these new technologies. Now we are looking for a news solutions.

This was the model we used when we made the change a five years ago. We also considered IBM and HPE. We chose CA APM. They do the most for us.

Ensure use the tools to develop good instrumentation and to make the best use of its capabilities; for example, to define correlations and setting the levels when alarms must be sent.

• Transaction traces
• Team Center
• Dashboards
• Alerts

Dashboards need to be improved in order to make them self-explanatory.

Technical support is very helpful and supportive.

We did not use other solutions, but we have some ideas about other solutions.

Other solutions are very much self0explanatory and easy to understand.

Others have on-premises as well as SaaS solutions.

The setup was straightforward and simple.

The implementation was done in-house.

Pricing and licensing are not issues.

I was not aware of any evaluation of other products.

They need to come up with a SaaS solution. The current requirements are full of SaaS solutions.

• View the smallest component and how it's performing
• See how all the components are connected
• Have a predictive alert
• To customize alerts and reports
• To use attributes to 'mark' and group components

We're CA partners and we work with their product and we deploy the solution to our customers. Working with CA APM is effective, simple, and the customers are satisfied with the solution.

The new experience center needs some improvement to works with all the attributes, but it offers great potential.

We have been using this solution for about six years.

There have been no issues with stability. Sometimes there is something to fine-tune, but you have the help of the CA communities and eventually, the help of support.

There were no scalability issues. We performed large installations without any problems.

Technical support is good and they are quick to respond. It would be better if they can create a different, more technical approach. Maybe they could go directly to second level support for partners.

We did not use another solution, although I know of other one. I think Introscope is a more complete solution.

The initial installation was easy. The fine-tuning of the environment can be tricky, especially for big environments.

I'm not the right person to ask about pricing, as I am in pre-sales.

I know the competitor's solutions, but CA APM is more complete and they have an interesting and challenging roadmap.

CA APM is based on a solid solution that could be helpful for everybody. It has a technical view where you can check every single bit of information and a map view with all the components. On top of that, Experience View can help you to look at the health of your environment and quickly identify problems or performance issues.

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.

It gives us insight into the functional health of the application, if we have any hot spots. For distributed applications we need those insights. We like the dashboards where we can consolidate different metrics into one view. Also, it tracks back-end service calls and it gives us insight into any issues with the services we are calling, as we use distributed application technology. Also, alerts and notifications.

The organization becomes quick in assessing hot spots and attacking any issues that are bringing down and application. It means meeting SLAs and reacting to issues quickly before they become problems when we see patterns, before the whole system becomes unusable.

It is a technology with a lot of things going on. We'd like some use cases to help us configure APM for dashboards and reporting.

Migrations from one version to the next are always a battle and we have to involve architects and other consultants to help us with upgrades, which is expensive.

It’s enabling technology, so we shouldn’t be spending so much time and resources managing the application.

We had some hiccups, and still are. When we implemented agents for one of our applications, the agents had a memory leak and halted the application, so it was unstable. We were told to upgrade to a new version of APM which mostly addressed the issue.

The issues are ongoing to an extent, and we’ve been working with CA for a while on a trial and error basis, which has been painful.

It is scalable, but we have to go through a lot of pain in configuring agents. Agent configuration has been something of a mystery because of poor documentation. We talk to CA and we get some guidance, which often doesn’t work. When you’re rolling out agents 4000 JVMs, it is a painful process, and that’s only one application.

We don’t have dedicated resources, but we open tickets and they come back. For example we’ve seen a lot of errors in our logs, and they’ve provided patches and configuration changes, but we’re still seeing those errors. It’s not bringing down the system but we don’t know what lurks, and we want to make sure that it’s stable. Sometimes we go to our account manager to escalate, which does get us an answer.

Still this has been a nagging pain overall, although the solution was more solid after upgrading to newer versions. We do seven to 10 billion dollars in revenue in those applications so we need to ensure those systems are as available as possible, and that hasn’t happened.

It was already in production when I joined.

It’s been a battle with upgrades, stability, and, to an extent, support. We also gain some from it – I will say it it’s been very helpful for us to identify issues but it could be better. The industry is evolving and there are pretty good cloud-based tools out there that offer me more than the current version of CA APM offers. Based on prior experience, we are dreading the upgrade to the next release. In a cloud environment, we don’t have to upgrade or manage servers.

The most valuable feature is the flexibility and how you can get any data pretty much anywhere. They have a lot of out-of-the-box solutions for applications, servers and web servers, but you can also use their APIs and their EPA to get additional data, building and correlating it altogether.

We have some applications from which we can't get data with out-of-the-box tools from CA or even AppDynamics, so we need the EPA agent to get that data and then compare them to those that are captured with out-of-the-box tools. We really appreciate that that's a strength and a flexibility of APM.

It's critical that we're able to find actual problems or issues with applications on our network. We use APM to do that, as well as to troubleshoot the causes or triage them so that we know where to look for the problem.

It's got a steep learning curve, although some parts of it are easy to use.

I also know that CA is doing a big push to play catch-up to get the UI to be a little more streamlined, easier, and intuitive to use. Hopefully when they do that, they'll have an advantage over other solutions out there, like AppDynamics.

I haven't had issues with deployment.

In the previous releases, that was an issue for both my current and former companies. There was a conflict between the Java agent and our app servers. It was conflicting with some of the web services and so it crashed our servers. In the current release, however, I'm not aware of any such stability issues.

So far, scalability has not been an issue. There's a limit on the number of enterprise managers where the data goes to be reviewed. The solution, however, is that if you reach the single-cluster limits, then you can federate other clusters, so that way you can view up.

The main issue with scalability is, however, that there's a lot of overhead required to keep it expanding. With AppDynamics, on the other hand, you at least only need one server in order to accommodate a lot more agents. With CA APM, you need a lot of central servers and enterprise managers to have that same load. It is scalable, but the maintenance or the overhead to maintain it is a lot higher than other products.

They've been slow at times to get us answers and solutions, such as a few years back when we had the issue of the agent pressuring our servers. I haven't had to submit many support tickets, though, as I have co-workers who do that primarily. The feedback I've heard from them is that AppDynamics has done a better job than CA with support.

We also use AppDynamics.

It was all set up before I joined.

Both CA APM and AppDynamics have their place, but just do your research. CA, I think, has demonstrated their commitment to the product and improving it and playing catch-up in areas where they need to.

It gives us the overall capacity measurement for our current environment.

We're able to determine where there are bottlenecks in our system. To some extent, we're also able to see what might be causing some of these issues.

We are also using the tool for determining performance bottlenecks in our Java-based applications. It provides us with performance metrics.

It provides access to problems, but not to the problem analysis. You cannot track the problem to the root cause. For example, you can see that the applications have a performance bottleneck, but you can't perform a drill-down analysis into the actual code of the problem.

Also, it doesn't provide dynamic analysis. This may be OK for mainframe customers, but for those with distributed systems, DynaTrace may be the better solution. 

I have to test it from version to version first before we implement to make sure it can perform for us.

Setup for a limited scope is easy, but it's difficult for a wider scope, in which case you need a longer deployment time. We have a mainframe-oriented system, so we can scope the old activity to the mainframe. but if we were fully distributed, it's a little bit complicated because we'd have more than 100 servers.

The usability and dashboarding. That's how our clients see the information. Also, deep trace analysis is valuable because that's how we figure out where our problems are.

It's helped us improve in terms of solutions by displaying key system data easily.

Data organization and creation of those dashboards. These seem to be getting better in the newer versions. Also, distribution and version control.

I’ve been using CA APM for between nine or 10 years.

The performance issues we have are on our end and we don't hold CA accountable for that.

The only problems we have are limited by our hardware.

We don't usually end up calling support because the other guy that works on it does a lot of high level development and he's out in Colorado. If there is an issue here I can't figure out, we usually end up having to go to engineers to get it solved. In the past when we've called them it's been really hit or miss. Like on a scale of one to 10, I'd give it a six.
Usually to get our questions answered because we consider ourselves pretty advanced users and we're kinda on the edge of what's going on. We usually have to get a couple of tiers in before we can get the questions that we have answered.

I personally haven't used other solutions. I was hired here specifically because I have experience with Intrascope at my previous job and we had actually deployed it there as our first APM solution.

I've set it up on new systems several times. It's pretty straightforward.

I don't remember back then because I actually wasn't involved in the decision making process. Since we've used it, we are constantly looking at other tools. We looked just to evaluate. We've evaluated a new solution at Dynamic and Dynatrace and a BMC solution or whatever they call it. We were impressed.

I would suggest that they don't underestimate the overwhelming amount of data that will come through and have their clients prepared for that. Because we end up spending a lot of time interpreting data for other people and really getting the users of the application involved is probably the most important thing in order to be successful. Then from a technical standpoint, just don't think for a second that you can skimp on some specifications because you will need all the resources you can get.

It's awesome. But I think CAPM is a little behind, at least up to this point with the versions we're on. On displaying data and making it easier to use for people that aren't in the tool eight hours a day.

The CEM end-to-end transaction feature is the most valuable.

I like APM because it is a complete solution that helps the production environment to identify the root cause of problems before affecting the application or services.

QA and production.

I have been using CA APM for three years.

The QA environment helps us to identify and fix stability issues and release it to production.

We have not had scalability issues. You can scale up to 10 collectors.

I would give technical support a rating of 10/10. The technical support is always really amazing.

I tried different solutions, but CA APM is the most complete solution on the market.

It was complex configuring the service transactions from CEM.

I have no information about pricing.

We did look at alternatives and all customers made bids.

Being a leader in the market for more than 14 years is one reason it is the best choice.