Broadcom DX Application Performance Management Reviews

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.

• CEM helps us to deliver faster responses, and manage the end users’ response and reliability.
• Introscope helps our application team proactively identify and resolve problems fast. It helps reduce application downtime and improve application development based on the real-user experience.

It helps us to meet business transactions SLA for our critical end-user applications; proactively identify the issue and helps the application team make its diagnosis before it impacts the end-user experience.

CA APM currently only supports Java- and .NET-based applications. Pega application metrics should be included in CA APM. It should also support non-Java and non-.NET applications, such as SAP, etc.

I have used it for seven years.

We have not encountered any stability issues.

We have not encountered any scalability issues.

Technical support is 7/10. It needs to be more proactive. Sometimes, it takes a long time for them to provide solutions.

We previously used IBM Tivoli and BMC products.

Initial setup was straightforward.

Before choosing this product, we evaluated other vendors, e.g., HPE SiteScope, and SolarWinds WPM/TraceView.

I recommend adequate server sizing and capacity to avoid HTTP/HTTPS packet drops and performance issues.

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.

The Introscope feature is the most valuable for us, specifically the part that shows us errors in the application.

We are a government IT company that provides services to the government. Because of that, we're required to use a very wide range of products and applications. We also need to have a multitude of interconnections with diverse systems, and one of the biggest difficulties we had was how these interconnections were made. CA APM has provided us a solution for this, allowing us to discover the root cause of some speed issues we had in the systems that were very difficult to diagnose.

• Report
• Management module
• Dashboards

I've used it since January 10, 2014.

We can't implement the TIM in our environment because we have issues with a virtualized environment. VMware and TIM was not thought of in a way that could receive the data in a cloud environment.

There were issues, but we have fixed them now.

There have been no issues scaling it.

10/10

10/10

It's very simple, as we are an IT company and we are accustomed to new system implementations.

We did it through a sales team, and without their support we would not be as we evolved in APM as we are today.

We did tests with AppDynamics, but had to discard the use of this software because to do analysis of a user experience we had to submit the data to the US, and then only return with the answer.

Prepare a team to manage this tool, as if you don't have a full team to review the APM data, it will not work as it should.

The CA Introscope dashboard of applications is the view our operations team uses to quickly identify any issues within the application space especially during peak trading season like Christmas/Easter. It is extensively used for quicker root cause analysis within the application area.

Introscope along with CA CEM and ADA is expected to further decrease the time taken for root cause analysis for critical customer facing incidents and also to identify bottlenecks before they impact our customers.

CA CEM's customer transaction view is valuable because it gives an insight into how our customers networks are performing. The ADA helps in isolating any response time issues on the network and hence, aid in root cause analysis (but we are yet to realise the benefit of it in production). Also, the transaction recording feature is valuable in understanding the paths our critical business transactions take within our IT environment.

The APM tools themselves work well within their respective silo's, but they need to work better in an integrated manner to give the end to end view of any business service.

CA Introscope has performance and data collection issues.

CA Introscope has had performance issues due to large number of metrics collected though it was scaled accordingly.

Customer Service:

Good.

Technical Support:

Average as they need more experts in APM technology.

For cloud monitoring, we had another tool and we had to switch because of the costs and features. Introscope has been running for a while.

• Too complex to get an integrated outcome
• ADA/CEM is complicated as it requires an understanding of networks
• CA Cloud monitoring is complex when creating customer journeys
• Introscope is complex when presenting and grouping metrics for dashboards
• The triage process is complex

It was through a vendor team whose expertise was above average.

Yes we did.

• You need strong architectural skills along with tool-set skills to implement such a tool
• You need to focus on integration as without this, the value might not be as expected
• Start it simple and then add more complex scenarios
• Document and design the system according to requirements
• It's easy to get carried away with all the features, so keep it simple to fit the business need
• Make sure what metrics are required to be monitored is clearly defined. Do not just collect data for all the metrics
• Make sure that RACI is clearly defined with various owners as this can easily slow down the implementation if it is not properly documented and agreed
• There is a lot of external team dependencies, like the application team, support team, network team, architects, an service owners, so make sure that this is documented along with RACI and efforts agreed
• A top down approach is always good, from the end users to actual technical metrics

We primarily use this product for monitoring our IBM WebSphere environment. It more generally monitors all of our JVMs for our web environments, used for all of our websites.

JVM memory monitoring and connection pool monitoring are valuable features.

It provides visibility into the performance of SQL statements, allowing for the identification of those that are performing poorly.

With respect to SQL monitoring, it would be nice to have a little more information because it doesn't provide the full statement all of the time. If it's really long then it only provides part of it.

It would be nice if the parameters that were used could be reported, as currently, it doesn't.

Having it monitor more of the environment would be helpful because we use applications such as Mule and Informatica, aside from the JVMs.

We began using this product between five and ten years ago when it was known as Wily Introscope.

This is a stable product.

In terms of stability, with our current setup, it is not so much. Unlike a situation where it was on the cloud, we'd have to be involved and it would be difficult to scale it up.

We have about a dozen people in the organization who use it.

We have had to call them and I find that they are not very supportive now.

The initial setup is complex.

We had assistance from either the vendor or somebody that they directed us to and are affiliated with.

The licensing costs are expensive.

We did not implement the latest release because they made some big changes to the framework. They probably have some of the stuff in their newest release that we would like. However, we didn't do that because they went to Kubernetes and some other technology that we weren't ready to adopt because it isn't in our environment yet.

Since Broadcom bought it, I would no longer recommend this product to other users. I think that they increased the price and the support isn't very good anymore.

I would rate this solution a seven out of ten.

• Business transaction defects from CEM.
• ADA helps find response time issues in the network.
• Team Center gives an overview of whole system.

• It helps in proactive monitoring.
• We can assess a risk in a test environment if application is going live.
• We can do OS, application and EUM with some part of network monitoring on single dashboard.

• Documentation is not straight forward and it could be easier to understand and implement.
• Integration with other tools.
• Dashboard look needs to be more attractive and dynamic.

I have used it for seven years.

I have not encountered any deployment issues.

Stability will be an issue if you install and configure it wrong. Otherwise, it's good and stable.

We encountered a stability issue. A customer wants to see more metrics but performance will degrade if you disable Data limited to 100 matching metrics.

Customer service is 6/10.

Technical support is 6/10.

I did not previously use a different solution.

Initial setup was complex because we implemented it for the first time in 2010 and everyone was learning about it. :-)

A vendor team implemented it and I rate their level of expertise 8/10.

EPA provides more flexibility for meeting customer requirements. CEM and Investigator provide realistic data by which user feels more dependent on them.

The pricing and licensing costs are too high.

Before choosing this product, I did not evaluate other options.

We've found Team Center a very innovative and intuitive interface. It gives us the ability to link applications to other applications and services all the way down to the database.

We're just now upgrading to it, so we haven't gotten into Team Center a lot. For now, we've mostly been using Investigator in order to triage performance bottlenecks and other problems within our enterprise systems.

We've had some hits and some misses, but our successes have been well-noted. Overall, APM improves our total customer experience and reduces our operational costs.

That said, the downside for APM is, in our case, end-user acceptance and use. We're trying to expand to other departments, show them what the value points are, and show them that we can help them with their jobs, performance, and efficiencies. With version 10, CA shifted its marketing plan and its persona, and that's been rather disruptive. I'm hoping a good disruption, but a disruption to my end users, whom I'm still trying to get turned-on to performance monitoring improvements.

We'd like to see full integration of Unified Infrastructure Management to take over the infrastructure monitoring from APM. They should have APM sterilized away from the infrastructure using the custom scripts through the environment performance agents. CA should go over and use the technology from Nimsoft or Unified Infrastructure Management to gather that information and marry it up back to the application.

We're not really having issues. We're only half way through the total capacity that we've projected. We're currently at about 800,000 metrics. We originally wanted about two and a half million. We're getting there, slowly, but we're getting there.

We're hoping to scale it out to the entire IT staff with about 1200 total servers including a mainframe, which is massive, through four call centers. We've got it scaled to that, but it's our end users' uses of the technology in order to improve what they're doing in the varying departments that will ultimately determine how well it scales. And so far, so good.

We only had one main issue with our upgrade. It took longer than I would have liked. I pushed the issue up through our account manager, got a call, and within an hour, we got it fixed, though that took us a week-and-a-half to get to that point. We expected it to take an hour-and-a-half.

Other teams have their own products -- Splunk, NetFusion or NetQoS -- but we're slowly hoping to turn them over to CA.

When we first installed, it took us six months to install it and get it somewhat usable. Our upgrades, because we're having to step development or step environments, usually takes us about three months.

The step environment is where we do dev tests. This involves stress and QA cycles, and then production. Each one has to have a month to get everything installed, tested, and verified to make sure it doesn't impact our core applications.

We just now finished our Phase 2 upgrade to our second tier, which is our performance test environment and our QA two environments. It went really well. The reason why it took us a month to do our test was because we had to get everything lined up with CA support and to get the install and upgrade completed.

When we first installed, it took us six months to install it and to get it somewhat usable. Because we have to step development or step environments, it usually takes us about three months.

No other vendors were looked at. APM was part of an enterprise contract deal. We had several other CA products and CA offered APM as an add-on to our contract, which increased our costs, but the vice-president and CEO and CFO thought it would be worth it. It's been five years and we're doing pretty well.