Broadcom DX Application Performance Management Reviews

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.

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.

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.

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.

It provides transparency into what's happening when there are problems that occur within applications.

It helps us identify and isolate issues when trouble arises; keep services up and running, basically.

I'd like to see the REST APIs, and specifically, refined. I believe that is one of the newer things that has been polished with the 10.5 release that's coming out. I look forward to that.

Other than that, I'd like to see more integration between nodes. For example, if there's a problem that arises in one server, I want to be able to drill down into it and have it automatically jump over to the next node and to see the continuation of the issue.

I have not rated it higher because I’d like more integration and more bells and whistles.

I'm pretty happy with how stable it is.

We have scaled it and we have not run into scalability issues yet; maybe we're close. We have a cluster of about five or six servers, I believe. So far, it's hanging in there.

Technical support has been pretty good. They respond pretty much in the same day. They've been very helpful. No issues to report.

We were not previously using a different solution.

I was not involved in the initial setup, but from what I heard, it looks pretty straightforward.

I have looked at other products. I've looked at AppDynamics. They have a pretty interesting looking product, but as far as for our organization, I think we're pretty happy with CA APM.

When selecting a vendor, support and the relationship are very important – we have a good one with CA – as is familiarity, as well. We have a lot of people who are familiar with CA's products, and they're fairly happy with them.

Do your homework. The tools pretty much open up a lot of possibility. You need the manpower to take advantage of that, so make sure you have the right skill sets in place to do so.

CA APM gives us a holistic view of our applications, specifically regarding performance monitoring. We are able to see errors in the code that users would experience and then give that information to our developers to troubleshoot. For example, some of the errors we see are error 404 or 500. There are also "stalled transaction” errors that pop up. The fact that APM collects information every 15 seconds is a good thing.

We're able to remediate issues with quicker turn around time. So instead of taking a couple days to figure out what the issue is, we're able to figure that out probably within half-an-hour.

It helps us by simplifying the triage of application performance issues. We have a buy in from our developers that they're able to trust the information that we provide them. It has proven itself. It's really a trusted source of monitoring.

I would like to see better integration with third party monitoring applications from an API perspective. We could inject information, such as metrics, and state health, and be able to put it into one view.

For example, we have SolarWinds, Microsoft SCOM and Operations Manager. I think those are the three biggest ones including CA.

There are a couple of improvements that could be done on the agent side of APM. The agent stops collecting data if the machine is under stress. We lose that visibility at the worst time that it could be happening. I understand the agent works according to a store-and-forward type of architecture, so there's only so much it could do. Perhaps there is a different way that they could collect the data, rather then depending on whether the machine is up or not.

It scales okay, but there are some limitations as far as the amount of collectors you need to be able to scale.

I would say technical support is pretty good. I don't have any complaints. I get a response time in a fair amount of time, depending on the issue.

I was not involved with initial setup, but I have been involved in multiple upgrades of the APM product. It has been pretty straightforward.

We've checked out AppDynamics, and Microsoft Operations Manager, which is an APM solution as well, but it leans more towards the cloud.

I would definitely recommend CA APM to anyone that's looking to triage any kind of application performance monitoring.

For APM, the most valuable solution is being able to do a root cause analysis quickly, and find the root cause visually so that we don't have to hunt around for the actual cause of the problem.

Our organization has over 21,000 agents running. Being able to monitor all those agents at the same time, with the ability to be alerted when thresholds are exceeded. We can know when we are having problems without having dedicated people to watch monitoring screens all the time.

I would like the ability to see a full end-to-end path of a transaction. I know the next version will be getting closer to that. I’d also like to see it get to the root cause of the issue faster.

Some of the visual aspects of the current version and reporting need to be improved. I know that you are fixing all this. It's a little harder to do some of this because I know so many of the things that are coming up.

Stability is pretty good. They are improving it with every version. I'm hoping that when the latest version is out, we will have a really stable environment that we can rely on 100%.

It is very scalable. As I said before, we're running more than 21,000 agents in all of our development operations. We feel that it could scale very well by just adding more servers and enterprise managers.

Technical support is very responsive. They will work with us to solve any of the issues that we are encountering.

I'm the administrator for our environment, so I do all the installations for our environment and also set it up. The setup is fairly straightforward. There is some complexity to understanding some of the tuning mechanisms that you can do to it. But that's with any enterprise-level software.

You definitely need to understand the size of your environment. Try to get a plan together before you start implementing it. It is a big help because then it goes a lot smoother.

The feature we've found most valuable in our daily use of it is the deep-dive analysis of Java-class transactions performance.

It's important that our managers are able to measure the SLAs of our applications. They're able to do that with APM as it provides both real-time and historical performance data so that adjustments can be made accordingly.

The biggest area of improvement of APM is with the GUIs. Many of them are quite clunky and dated. For example, there is the thin client which doesn’t have all functionality, and then there's the thick client which has three different modes -- investigator window, management module window, and console window.

I've used it for 18 months.

We've had no issues with deployment.

We have had issues with APM's stability, but it is sometimes hard to tell if this is due to our virtual infrastructure or in the product itself.

We have had some issues with historical metric limits as the agents get load balanced between collectors.

In our experience, technical support has been excellent. They have very good turnaround time and very good technical knowledge.

The company has used a different solution previously, but I haven’t personally.

The initial setup is complex. It’s a large suite of products that need to fit into a large, complex organization.

This is not something I deal with, but off-hand comments seem to indicate that it is more expensive than expected.

Dynatrace and a few others were looked at by my team. I wasn’t involved in the evaluation, however.

Keep the deployed agents up to date in a large organization. You’ll need mature automation and configuration processes and techniques.