DX Performance Management Reviews

Our primary use case is for network operations. We use it for customer information, as well as for information for our operations team. We are a service provider and we give our customers access to the Performance Center interface because it gives them information about the health of their network in different locations.

For example, for a large customer with, say, 100 locations, each of the customer's employees can see the network health in his area. That means that they provide them, for example, the WAN bandwidth and DNS requests and network-related metrics.

The first-line operators, who are sitting in front of the monitoring consoles can easily see if a problem is related to a customer location or to the complete customer network. It's very easy to see because you have the top-20 views of metrics. It can highlight where the problem is. It's very easy for them to see.

Also, the capability where not only the traditional SNMP information is captured but also the netflow data; who is consuming the data on the WAN, and voice-related information, is helpful. The voice quality makes it very easy for first- and second-line operators to see where the issue is, and who is impacted.

For us, the multi-tenancy is very important, of course. 

The scalability is also important because we have customers in the system with only a small number of devices, say, 50, but we also have customers with more than 10,000 devices. The scalability is very good, amazing.

There have been a lot of changes which were very good in the last few years of development. One of them is that they brought together Spectrum and the performance data, since Performance Management 3.6. They also have the alarm information in Performance Center which is very helpful to have in one tool.

Every product has room for improvement. It could be a little easier to integrate new metrics.

In the beginning, there were some issues with the Vertica database they were using. There were some issues with stability and memory leaks, more related to memory leaks, but this was fixed in the past. At the moment, it's all very stable.

Especially for the issue with the Vertica database, we contacted the support, of course, and it was okay, it was good. It was not negative. The response is typically very good, especially in this area. Of course, because it was the database behind the issue - it's an HPE database -
it took a little time until it was fixed. But that had nothing to do with the support guys.

Before this solution, CA didn't have an equivalent solution and we used open-source solutions. But the capabilities weren't there in the open-source solutions. With this solution, we reduced about 15 performance management to only five machines. The open-source tools were not able to deliver this performance.

It was quite easy. The setup was done in a couple of hours.

Not in the first version, but since, the integration with Spectrum has been quite good. It's more or less fully automated, which means that we get new devices into the network monitoring. It's also synched into the Performance Center. Similarly, if there are new routers sending natural data, it's automatically be coming in, which means that it reduces our administration costs.

With the capabilities of the open API and the web service interface, we're able to automate some other things. For example, we have one customer, with more than 1,000 devices, and there are a lot of changes in infrastructure every day. We automate the menus and the groupings of the devices. We can automate that via RESTful web services. That capability is quite good so in this case, it's all more or less automated.

The deployment, for new customers, takes less than a day. Typically, the products are not the problem. Usually the problems exist in the network by itself: They don't have access to the devices or the like. In the case that the infrastructure is ready, so that you can run your setup, it's quite easy. After a couple of hours, you see the first data.

My colleague does the deployment. Just one person does it.

I like the licensing model because it's device-based. It makes it easier for us, as a managed service provider, to bill our customers. We are paid per device and the license per device makes it easy for us.

You have to think about what you want to capture. You can capture a lot of things, but you have to make sure you capture only the things you need. We have had situations where a customer has said, "We need this, this, and this," - hundreds of parameters. But that would mean their infrastructure needs are growing massively. You have to think about the metrics you really want to capture. You can capture everything, but it doesn't make sense because then you pay a lot for hardware.

For our customer with 10,000 devices, there are more than 700 registered users. That doesn't mean 700 users at the same time, but we see 700 registered users using the tool regularly. On the other systems, there are around 200 users, including networking guys, first-line guys, second-line guys, etc.

The maintenance for Performance Management is quite easy. You have to do one to two releases a year. Testing it on a test environment takes one to two days. And then we'd need about five to ten days a year for maintenance.

We aren't using it as extensively as we could. It could be used more. It's a process to bring it to customers and show them the improvements, especially in the last versions.

I would rate the solution a nine out of ten. It could be a little bit easier in the administration or in the creating of new metrics. The really deep-dive administration could be a little bit easier.

We use it for monitoring up/down, fault management, and trending.

Although it's a really good tool, it very much needs to be rebuilt so that it can be updated on a regular basis.

One of the ways this product has improved things would be disk space. Since it is monitoring a lot of our infrastructure, I can get it to run a report showing, for instance, what root drives are in the critical range in terms of being full, like 90 percent full, and disseminate that information to the other areas of the organization. I can let them know that there is not a problem now, but there will be in the near future and that if you run out of drive on your root drive for your OS, bad things happen. It's not a pretty picture, when that kind of thing happens, to recover from. Running that report showing which servers and file systems are almost to the critical level is a good, proactive use.

Also, the ability to very quickly and graphically navigate around, being able to zoom in to a timeframe, apply it to all the other panels - things of that nature - are all very intuitive. When I give someone access to the system, the learning curve is pretty short and they very quickly start to discover how easily, with a few clicks, they can get to what they're looking at and understand how the system works with minimal effort, unlike some other systems where you would need some training to know what you're looking at.

The metrics that it's able to track and that it's able to trend,

Keep in mind, because we have not updated, it's to the point where I've got to build a complete separate system with the latest version, and then map over all the users and customization, etc, then swap IPs to bring the previous system down so that we'll be on the latest. There are about two years worth of updates that I'm missing out on at the moment. I'm hoping that there are a lot of updates and nice, new features that have been added. So, really, I've been in the dark ages as far as running for a while now, but the feature that is inherent to its core, of being able to graphically represent a trend and status, is nice.

This may be available by now but for server space, when it comes to the disk file system, I'd like to see that graphically represented, or the trend, rather than what I'm seeing now. I don't know what the latest version has, all the nice, new features, until I get that project underway.

It's fairly stable. This still falls under the issue that the current version I'm running is two years out of date and is less stable, I'm sure, than the very latest version. But stability has been good.

One of the best features about it is that it's a ground-up application from CA. So, there are typically more features added more quickly and there are more updates to the product on a regular basis, unlike some other products.

We have never had a problem with scalability. We've always been quite well under what it can do.

Tech support has always been good. A lot of the people that I've known for many years working on the Spectrum side of things have moved into the Performance Management side of things. So tech support has been good.

The response time is good, and typically, with any case with CA, I am sent surveys that I fill out on a regular basis to evaluate performance, how it was handled.

They will come by and visit occasionally, and they're really good about being available when I need help with looking at new systems, to show us what they have to offer.

We did not have anything previously, except maybe something along the lines of the free MRTG. But previous to that, we were on a Unix-based system. The biggest thing is trying to tie them all into a centralized database, or a CMDB, which is a project that we're still working on, making progress on, so that everything feeds from a centralized database and is aware of configuration items. That way we can interconnect all these applications so that we can add automation and things of that nature.

It was a bit complex to set up. I don't know how much that has changed. But it was fairly complex to set up.

I didn't get any training or have assistance setting up and it did take a while to do. I followed the directions. It was straightforward but there were a lot of steps to set things up at the time. Keep in mind, again, it was quite a long time ago that we set the system up.

I believe the product's pricing is a good value at this point. We're currently trying to internally evaluate everything that we use. It's moot in that it falls under the same umbrella that Spectrum does, and Spectrum is an integral part of the tool. It is used by a lot of departments within our agency to monitor the network up/down. So, it's a part of that umbrella, they're included together. With that, the pricing is fine.

Many years back they changed the way that they did licensing and that was good. Since then, everything has been just fine.

I would give Performance Management an eight out of 10, and I might even move that to a nine after I've had a chance to upgrade it to the two or more years' worth of features that have probably been added.

It's quite usable. It's quite good to see something graphically, it's a very graphical application.

The primary use case is to report on performance metrics of routers and switches.

We used eHealth beforehand, so the improvement was mainly within the GUI.

• Dashboards - They look nice and fancy and are pretty impressive.
• Alerting - This helps the admin save time.

It's not only interesting to know if routers and switches are up or down at the moment, but also when a specific interface is filled to the max. You can create intelligent alerts so you have enough time to replace the router or interface before it's full. The same is applicable for CBQoS channels.

The quantity of views which are tied to specific metric families is too high. Also, the problem is the view doesn't tell you which metric family it uses, so you don't know why you don't see data.

No issues with stability.

No issues with scalability, and we even worked with a customer with more than 20K devices within the system.

Technical support is good.

Yes, CA eHealth. We switched because eHealth went EOL.

Initial setup was straightforward and pretty easy.

My advice would be start today. The tool is great and is pretty flexible, also for integration in other tools using OpenAPI.

I rate it at nine out of 10. It's pretty good in doing the things needed, but there are some small pitfalls which are not necessary.

Most of of our CA suite is for network infrastructure monitoring, reporting, and fault management.

The most valuable of CA Performance Management is consolidated network infrastructure monitoring and reporting.

For CA PM, there should be a way of easily migrating the reports coming from eHealth going to CA Performance Center, since CA PC is replacing eHealth.

With CA PM, I haven’t encountered any stability issues.

I haven’t encountered any scalability issues.

The CA support team has been very helpful, including chat and engineering support.

We haven’t used a different solution.

Initial setup is complex.

I do not handle the pricing, but they should provide more scalable licensing for the product.

Since I inherited CA products in this job, choosing CA PM was the first choice for compatibility.

You need to have a CA support representative on the call during implementation and upgrade to eliminate issues.

The benefit is bringing all the performance-related data and gathering of our environment with the customer's environment together. Therefore, we can analyze it over all the tenants and the tenants can also analyze the performance data by themselves.

It is the gathering of the whole performance data in our environment and our network environment, for us and our customers. Also, a multi-tendency insight, SCN, and Cisco ACI implementation, which we need very urgently.

 What we want to see:

1. More integration inside of Spectrum and integration of role-based access.
2. Our admins must be able, not only, to analyze the data, but combine the data.
3. Admins must be in a role-based administration feature. 
4. That is looking at the site under administration, and saying, "What is the daily job if an alert is coming on?"

In the last three years, it has had a great improvement in its stability. It is great that is works and we have had no outages in this time. That was really great.

It has high scalability. You can have thousands of devices inside and hundreds of thousands of interphases without a problem.

We have some premium support, which was created to talk to the technical support and the product management when we have a challenge. I don't want to say an issue, when we have a challenge inside of the product, like an enhancement. It is great to see that the product management hears us, too. We have received more out-of-the-box solutions inside the product.

On our side, it depends on the customers' needs. We test on one customer to be honest, as a solution. However, we are thinking pricing, scaling, and so on. Also, to use PM for all other customers.

I would say a seven to eight out of 10, because it needs role-based administration. They ceased integrations. That is why I say a seven to eight.

Probably the most valuable feature is the integration that the tool provides for us. We're able to present data from multiple back-end collection sources into a single dashboard for the users. So they don't have to go to multiple locations to get data about a particular item, or device.

Stability has been fantastic so far. We've got quite a few different options available to us for business continuity, things like that, and the just inherent stability has been fairly impressive so far.

Scalability is the reason we bought the product to begin with. It was designed from the ground up for carrier-grade services, and we are in effect a MSP ourselves. So we were really interested in looking at something to be able to handle the multi-tenancy and scale as large as possible. This was the only solution that we really considered at that level.

Everything has been very responsive to us so far. I've been impressed with the followup that the engineers have as well. Even after we have fixed whatever issue has come up, it's not uncommon to get a followup email a week or so later just checking to make sure everything is still all right, and I appreciate that.

Previously we were using multiple products, multiple individual point solutions, and it was getting to the point where it was really difficult to maintain every one of those individual products. That's the reason we looked at Performance Management, because it gave us one location, one place to do all of group administration, and to build dashboards, and device administration, inventory counts, things like that. So it really reduced our overall administrative overhead.

At this point I would give it an eight out of 10, but that's only because I know of a lot of really cool new stuff that's coming down the line, that's not available yet. So that number is subject to change.

• Troubleshooting
• Capacity planning
• Alerting

It gives multiple groups the ability to view dashboards and quickly obtain data about historical performance of network gear, with near real-time data.

Historical data, to help with trending and capacity planning.

The dashboards are easy to use and can be viewed on any web browser.

Product has issue collecting IP SLA data.

No issues yet with stability.

No issues with scalability.

Good.

Previously we used eHealth which is a CA-owned product. We moved because they are phasing out eHealth.

Complex. Install is done as root, which is a security no-no, and the database IO requirements were not stated correctly, which lead to a year of instability.

Do your homework and know how many devices you will be managing out of the gate. Be sure to project what your growth will be each year.

I think the product has matured a lot, and I’m impressed with CA when I hear about new features. The product continues to improve and the future is looking bright.

• Network performance reporting 
• Incident monitoring

The network teams have transitioned to becoming proactive in responding to network performance issues, rather than being just reactive to outages.

CA PM is the single pane of glass, providing consolidated views for all of the CA tool sets, for viewing all reports.

CA PM Business Hours Filtering: I understand that all monitoring systems have defects. The Business Hours Filtering does not always function properly. Sometimes, when applying business hours to CA PM reports that are 30 or more days in duration, the report generation times out and does not display results. 

We have other CA PM reports that, when we apply Business Hours Filtering, the report results displayed are the same as without the filter. We are not sure if this is a defect in CA PM or if it is a result of our complex configuration (folder structure) and application of business hours.

We would also like to be capable of reporting network performance with a report strictly focused on the times outside business hours, which CA PM does not currently support. We have discontinued the use of the Business Hours Filtering until CA engineers are able to resolve or offer guidance.

Initially, we had under-sized the ADA and NFA.

No issues with scalability.

Good.

NetQoS was acquired by CA.

Complex. CA PM can be complex to build and configure. Creating the folders / groups / sites required establishing many rule sets.

I have no experiencing with pricing.

Netcool, Solarwinds.

Instrumentation could take some time, depending how much reporting customization you plan to employ.

We are gathering the SNMP data from many input devices, especially those which are used to monitor the status of the switches, the routers. It is very helpful to know about any CPU spike, rate of the CPU memory utilization of the network devices, along with interface utilization.

Also, we are using this product to get some QoS metrics from the network devices within our network. We are also using the Network Flow Analysis, to analyze the traffic, the conversation between the offices.

We have one more product called SNMP Trap Explorer which we are using to receive the traps from the network devices. The network devices are configured to send these traps to the CA application, which is all set on our internal network. Then we use the traps to send out the notifications to our internal support teams.

It is very easy to add devices; just be aware that it requires SNMP to be enabled.

It is very easy to use because most of the administrative tasks through the UI are documented. If I have any doubt, I can just go to the CS support. In the UI itself, you have a lot of helpful information on each administrative task, such as adding a special profile, conferring the vendors' specifications.

The documentation is very good, they have the documents up to date.

It would be helpful if CA provided online training for its customers. Whenever a release happens, the latest version, we have meetings with CA meeting and they explain the latest features and enhancements, which is really helpful. But then I'm training my internal support on our tool, if there were any training that CA provided directly, online, that would be good.

It's very much a stable product, because we are running it stand-alone. We have a two-tier architecture we run on. It's a stable product.

Currently we're not facing any issue with our infrastructure. There are around 5000 devices monitored using CA Performance Management. To be frank, I don't have any idea what the capacity of the product is, going forward. But currently, I don't see any issue with the capacity, the amount of devices. 

The 5000 devices are monitored from data collectors housed in three datacenters.

Currently we're on version 3.2; we had some issues while upgrading to 3.2, but we received very good support from CA within a short time. They were able to resolve the issues and communicate to us without any delay. We are getting a pretty good amount of good support from CA.

Normally we submit a case using CA portal, their support website. They'll reach out to us within 24 hours after we submit it. If we need support from the local, India CA support team, they are very flexible and can transfer the case, based on the customer's time zone. Because I'm based out of India, I have some issues with working during US time. They will help me to work with one of the engineers who is based out of India, I think. That kind of flexibility is really very good. 

Also, documents are very available from support.

I wasn't involved in any decision on that. But it's all based on management's decision.

It took some time because we could not just upgrade production. We have CA PM on two environments, one is Development, and then we are running on Production. Whatever changes or upgrades need to be made, first we'll perform then on Development. Based on the results, if anything is found, or if the activity goes well, then we'll proceed with the Production system update.

There is a really good amount of documentation, and whenever we need help, they will set up a WebEx session directly, and they'll help us during the implementation, installation, or upgrade activity. 

If I were to talk to others who are considering this product, I would explain the features, that it's easy to use, and its scalability, stability, and about the capacity it has.

I would also tell them that CA is upgrading the versions to stay current in the market, that is done very frequently. Whenever there are changes made - take the example of a Cisco router - if there is a new series of router, CA will include that in the next release.

Also, there is a good amount of vendor certification which comes with the product. That's all factory-loaded, no need to load any custom-made files. Most of the metrics are calibrated and captured from the devices based on the defaults available from vendor certification. 

Considering all these factors, it's really a good and easy product for analyzing your network performance, health status, and the quality of services.

I rate it a nine out of 10, only because I still need time to explore it more. It has a lot of good features, but I am still in the learning phase.

Our primary use case for Performance Management is the health and performance of our networks. To be able to baseline, trend, historically view performance information, as well as to see in real time how the infrastructure is performing relative to what our expectations are.

It's performed really well. As a matter of fact, when we deployed it, right out of the box we were able to stand up Performance Management within two weeks, in our production environment, with full discovery and relevant information, actual information, that we could use in our command center, our 24/7 operations center.

To date we've been very happy with it, and we also use CA's Mediation Manager so that we can bring information in from non-traditional network gear, like layer 1 telecom transport, among others, using various protocols, and translate the legacy protocols to give us performance information for infrastructure that we haven't been able to see before.

The one thing it has helped us with, we're not in a completely predictive state at this point. Everybody wants to get to predictive now - analytics - and be able to stop the problems before they happen. What I will say is that we have been able to get a little bit better at seeing more things in real time and more just in time, so we're less reactionary.

The out-of-the-box dashboards, in terms of being able to visualize performance data in ways that we haven't in the past. As opposed to lines of threshold alerts or indications of degradation, we're seeing from a graphical perspective this information that's coming in, and visualizing it in a way that helps us to make better decisions.

I'm still working on consuming all the features that I have today, so ask me this again in a year. I would say right now, we're in the midst of adaptation and adoption with this tool, so everyday it seems like there's something new I'm discovering that helps us in our business.

I think it would be helpful having a more comprehensive set of certifications, if you will, so that I could natively deploy devices to my environment and the tool would immediately recognize and immediately be able to provide relevant performance information without a lot of tuning on my part. 

It has not been installed for a terribly long time. But, over the last 18 months we haven't really had any issues. The platform is stable, the application is intuitive, the way we use it is very simple, relatively speaking, so no problems with stability.

Scalability is yet to be determined, as we continue to build out our infrastructure. But so far, as we've been adding new portfolios, new domains, we haven't had any challenges with regard to the performance of the tool as it's managing additional devices in our environment.

I have not used tech support. I know our teams have, on a couple of occasions, regarding reports that weren't necessarily coming out they way they were expecting, or with some changes to how the application was laid out. From what I've heard the tech support was beneficial. It was quick. It was timely. No issues.

Lifecycle came into that. We had an old tool. It was either refresh and get new hardware, update to the current version, or look at alternatives, and other solutions that were in the market. So we took the opportunity, based on our standard lifecycle driver, to look at various tools. We had some other tools that were native in our environment and did a comparison between several different solutions. And ultimately settle with CA. 

I think what surprised me the most was how easy it was to implement. This was my third migration for manager's console over the last 20 years in IT, and the previous two iterations made me fearful for this new migration. Just because of the amount of work that goes into tuning the alerts and insuring that the data is visualized in a way that operators and consumers of it are expecting. Quite honestly, within two weeks we had live data, we had actionable information, and our operations were so much easier. 

That was the most surprising thing to me, was how easy it was, with initial implementation, to get data out of the tool. Now there's optimization, and additional tuning that we're going to do, and continue to do. But, just getting it up and running was very straightforward.

The complexity was the back office systems, and the compliance, and security points that we have to live under, and finding a way to connect those in a secure way. That was the hardest part. Once we had the back office installed, the discovery and utilization went off very straightforward.

There were several.We had the IBM product, we had SolarWinds, and we had CA in our environment as well. So we evaluated all of these tools relative to the requirements from our 24/7 operations and for our tier-3 support teams, and made the decision to go with CA.

One of the key requirements was this notion of off-the-shelf capabilities, and the requirement for us to be able to use the tool, to use dashboards, to use reports, to be able to performance manage our solutions, without having to go in and write scripts, without having to build up reports, without having to search for data. This native capability out of the box was one of our prime requirements.

We had all of the technical requirements that you need for other tools. Does it speak natively, and standard protocols? Does it have certifications for all of the vendor models that we have in our environment? All those kinds of typical requirements.

For us, the ability to use the tool immediately, whomever we went with, was one of our main requirements. We wanted to be able to deploy the tool and make good use out of it without having to send teams to two weeks of training, and then go back and try to figure out how to use what Performance Management gives us.

In terms of criteria when selecting a vendor, for us, one of the most important is our partnership and their strategic outlook. A tool's a tool. You can buy a hammer that looks like a little different from the other one, but they all effectively do the same thing. Which is not to say that this tool doesn't have its benefits. There was a reason we selected it. But I think having a strategic partnership with a vendor, over the long term, has an interest in making your business successful. We have long-standing relationships, and that was a positive when it came time to make a decision.

I would say it's a solid eight out of 10 right now.

Given our success in our presentation and our being able to use it right away, I think that the capabilities that it brought to our business - we were able to replicate the capabilities that we had in our old environment, almost immediately. And then we were able to realize the additional features, the native reporting, the additional baselining in our environment. We started to be able to use enhancements over our previous tool set right away. 

For any tool to come in and be able to do what the business needs and what it has been using, foundationally, is the requirement for it to be considered successful. For us, it was a little bit more than just successful, because not only did we replicate the capabilities that we had, but we were also able to realize some of those additional features.

My tenure with the tool probably doesn't give me enough time yet to say it's a 10 out of 10. I do have more expectations for the tool. As it continues to scale, to meet our requirements, as we're able to bring in additional legacy technologies to baseline, with time maybe it could be a 10. But I think today it's very successful and we're getting a lot of use out of it.

As we continue to bring the new operation technologies that are out there, as we see how long this manager is able to incorporate these new technologies, in addition to the legacy stuff that has been around, then...

One of the things I mentioned in our discussion earlier, the discussion of certification transparency, I don't want to have to go build a model so that the tool can discover and give me relevant information and then I can take action. The ability for this tool to be able to discover and communicate with those new technologies that are coming is going to be one of the areas we're going to be watching.

This solution is definitely worth an evaluation, whatever portfolio - whether it's data networks, or telecommunication, wireless - I think that my coaching or recommendation would be: Don't overlook this tool just because it's incumbent, it's a big name, it's a tier-one brand. There is a cost when you try to cut costs. Nothing is free, you get what you pay for, and I think this solution has paid us full dividends.