CA App Synthetic Monitor Reviews

If you are sending mail or browsing anything, you don't want to send your traffic without encryption. We use SSL for traffic encryption and ASM for SSL offloading. It is a proxy server for SSL. The goal is to encrypt outside traffic except our company. Traffic coming from the Internet should be first encrypted in our device in ASM. Once it will be encrypted, our device will identify whether it’s a threat or not.

ASM offers traffic encryption.

If you are responsible for monitoring the logs in F5, it isn't very easy. The format is complicated compared to different vendors. For example, Fortinet and Cisco have feasible formats for sending and fetching logs. Suppose I'm monitoring the logs and everything, and when I am retrieving logs from F5, I want to know whether it is regular traffic or any abnormality is happening. The logs itself is not user-friendly. It may not give you a clear way of what's happening. You have to go through different websites and work on it. You have to waste so much time on it.

400 users are using this solution.

We had different products before. We shifted to F5 and are planning to switch to another product because the product is expensive.

The product comes with expensive annual licenses.

The product is very good, very reliable but it costs a lot. Barracuda offers the same kind of services at a lower price.

CA App Synthetic Monitor is a model of F5. F5 has one dedicated box where they provide different kinds of modules like ASM for SSL offloading and LTM for load balancing. We are using both. Our feedback is excellent, and it is a fantastic product. Since our traffic is increasing, we are switching to another solution because it is expensive, but everything is perfect.

I recommend the solution if anybody doesn't want to compromise on services. Suppose you want to set up dual balancing or ASM or a reliable solution that doesn't have an issue daily. You can install it and use it. The services are reliable, and there is no issue. You don't need to contact the call center to fix the problem. If you have a budget, go with F5. If you have budget concerns, then you can go for other products.

Overall, I rate the solution an eight out of ten.

• Historical measurement


• Availability statistics

We had less debate regarding outage times, and less conversation and time spent discussing if the end user has been impacted.

• Ability to delegate and limit functionality


• Allow certain people to only see certain data

I have been using CA App Synthetic Monitor for one year.

There was a strange DNS issue in the southwestern US that was never found.

There were many solutions used across the company. We are trying to standardize.

Initial setup was straightforward. We had a coop student learn the skills and implement our test scenarios.

Pricing makes little sense. We had examples where it would be cheaper to have two basic accounts than one intermediate. CA is more expensive than others, but offered what we needed. I expect the others to catch up fast.

We evaluated three other options. Each had strengths in one area or another, but CA covered the majority of our needs end-to-end. The internal monitoring ability was a large contributor for us.

It costs nothing to try the 30-day trial. Setting up an internal monitor is more of a challenge. Make sure your DC setup supports the product requirements (OS, for example).

This solution allows us to easily set up simple synthetic transactions.

From our experience, it really helps managers in measuring application SLAs and viewing historical performance data.

The RBMS component is limited as you can only record using Internet Explorer. It's difficult to segregate the metrics coming from the integration.

I've used it for 18 months.

We've had no issues with deployment.

We've had no issues with the stability.

There have been no issues scaling it for our needs.

Technical support is quite good, but it often needs to go through to the second level or partners.

The company has used previous solutions, 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.

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