DX Performance Management Reviews

• 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. 

Performance management for capacity monitoring of the Wells Fargo network. 

Performance-wise so far, so good. We have been ramping up close to the limit of the application: four million polled metrics. We are at approximately 3.6 million. So far, it has been doing alright. A couple of hiccups here and there, but overall we are happy with it.

It saves time having it all on one place, so you do not have to jump around from different tools and try to merge the data. It is already done for you.

It does not really affect how the company functions, but it gives us insight into  performance slow downs, and if we need more bandwidth and more larger, heavy-duty equipment.

The integration with NetFlow, the NFA solution, so we can have our flow forensics paired with the SNMP polling performance metrics on the same page. Everybody throws around single pane of glass, but this is really the benefit that we see from it. Have it being able to have everything there in one application UI. 

• Global synchronization errors. Sometimes it just does not finish in time due to the load. 
• When it goes through discovery, or whatever it is doing on the back-end that slows it down, sometimes we get some failures with it. 
• On the NFA ipv6 support, they still have not fully supported it. It is huge for large enterprises. Since we are out of registered IP space, we are moving to ipv6 and we expect our vendors to move with us, and they have not delivered yet. That is a contention point for us. 
• They need to improve on response times for development stuff, bug fixes and enhancement for the turnaround times.

Stability is good. There are definitely some areas where you have patching or a planned outage. There is no solution right now to avoid data gaps. I know they are planning on it and that it is in the development life cycle for the next year or two that they are going to be releasing a solution for it. 

Scalability is great. We would like more because we are almost at the limit or at least the advertised limit for the system. I know they are working to move their four million data pulled metrics up to 10 million. So, that will be a lot better for us, just because we have such a large enterprise. 

Technical support is good and very responsive. We have weekly calls with our account team and the staff. The development piece providing what we are asking for, maybe an enhancement request and stuff like that, is a little slow. However, we like to think that we are the most important customer for CA, but I know there are other customers out there.

Because of security requirements within our infrastructure, the setup of Vertica was horrendous. It was really a lot of work. Vertica is Micro Focus, but it was really hard. 

Upgrades are great. They are very easy.

We were looking at other vendors in the marketplace for NetFlow, and CA just beat everybody else in price, cost, and the size to implement. The infrastructure investment that you have to put into installing the systems. 

We looked at InfoVista. We already have InfoVista at the bank, so we looked at them, but their solution just was not viable for us. 

Most important criteria when selecting a vendor: For Wells Fargo, it is being able to handle the size and scalability. Most vendors out there cannot for large enterprises, because we are pretty much a small Telco in our size. Therefore, being able to scale up to 40,000 to 50,000 network devices is extremely important for horizontal scalability and the layout. 

Our primary use case for the product was to actually monitor the devices in our network. To actually help alert on problems and issues, then do some type of self-healing for the issue. It was also there to find a way to build trends and look at our network to see what we look like now, and where we may have to plan going into the future.

The tool does pretty well. It is pretty new to us. We are still learning it. It is a broad value. People were a little hesitant when they started using the product. Now, it has become a vital tool for our use in the company, from a network perspective. 

Since the implementation of the tool, it has cut down on probably 60% of our outages and letting us know what is going on. That little component has created significant improvement for us that we were able to put in place. 

There is another component of the tool called Network Flow Analysis. It gives us the ability to troubleshoot issues which do not appear right away. It was actually an added benefit to the tool for us.

Its ability to probe the POLAR Network and tell us about a device. That is the most valuable. It is important we are able to alert based on what we find. It has become useful, because we can interact it with another tool, like Splunk, to actually do other parts of alerting.

Since the direction is more cloud-oriented, I would like to see what modules or functions they are putting out there to say, "Hey, this is what we are doing to monitor your cloud or help monitor that issue." As we move more towards the cloud, we have to monitor what in that space can I do with the CA PC tool in that environment.

There are versions that are better. One of my concerns was it did not have a built-in HA component for availability, which was somewhat of a challenge for us. Because as we became more dependent on the tool, we had to find a way for it to be up all the time. So stability, I give it about a 85%, but we are getting there.

They have actually announced other versions that we need to get to. The challenge we find is, because this tool gathers so much data, which makes it hard to convert over. To upgrade it, you really need the solution backed up. That is the issue that we are facing right now.

I am happy with the scalability for right now. It is better in the later versions.

The company is 25,000 employees. Our department consists of two groups that work together. We are broken up into a monitoring group and a network group, both use the tool, probably about 20 of us. Maybe a little more that use the tool to get what we need out of it.

Customer service: I am quite comfortable with CA and love the people that we talk to about it. They are responsive working with us and made us feel like they really care about the product. I get that from the sales perspective, my representative. I would not trade him in for the world. He has done a really good job. I am really happy with him.

Technical support: I would give them about a "B" right now, because they do not respond as quickly as we like. They do get around to us with some issues. It seems like we escalate more than I would like to. If anything, they should look at how the tier support goes in place. 

If I call and it is critical, then I have to wait for someone to call me back with an engineer, I am not too happy about it. Because you only call when you need it, so if I need you, I need you right then. If it was some other issue, such as searching for knowledge, I can understand opening up a ticket.

We normally would not call unless we are trying to do something with the tool, and it is not performing the way that it is suppose to, and we are trying to find out why. Normally, I call because I need the tool up and working, then I need to know, "Why?" However, first of all, I need the tool up. 

The issue: There are sometimes they have to go and do research and get somebody to find out why the tool is down for a minute. That could be somewhat of a challenge for us, because we have people that are looking for the tool.

The initial setup, I wouldn't say was totally complex. I would give it on a scale of one to 10, it is about a six for the initial setup. Once you have the information, I did not think it was that difficult. The challenge was to find out what platform they were running on.

I come from a company that does both Windows and Linux. Of course when we asked them, which environment the tool should run on, they said they support both. They still support both. What I would like to know is, what is the most stable environment for the tool? 

That is where I am looking for them to say. I know no one wants to choose one environment over the other. I do not care what you say. I just need to know your recommended way from experience, which environment has less issues on it. That makes a difference.

We are using Linux, and I am glad we did. I think it would have been a disaster the other way.

We looked at SolarWinds. We looked Riverbed. I think we just looked at CA. We did not go looking at a lot of them. CA also came to us, because we had someone working on the other side to say, "Hey, we already had them in-house, take a look at a tool they had in place."

That helped them, because they were there. Once they could provide the tool that we wanted, and they were able to go through our use cases along with other vendors, that is how they got selected. They fitted with everything that we needed.

Kick the tires and get under the hood. Provide your use cases upfront, and tell them exactly what you need. Once you do that, it is fine.

They will provide you with what you want, and meet your criteria. Lay out everything that you need. Look at the sales person that you are dealing with (the sales engineer). See how knowledgeable they are about their product, and see if it does what they say it will do, and that it is available right now. Do not tell me something is here, then, "Oh, that will be available six months from now." That does me no good. Unless you tell me up front, "We're gonna have this in the future," then I will know.

We are still learning it, because there are still features that we need to implement. It is a slow learning process. Right away when you get a tool, you want it to be implemented to actually address the issue that you have at that time. Now, we are looking at it to see what else it can do for us. 

From when we first got the tool, it was there just to look and discover devices, and tell us if they were just available or not. Now, we are looking at it to say, "Well, we can trend on certain things." 

Most important criteria when selecting a vendor: 

1. Be able to meet my requirements.
2. Stability
3. Price. That makes a difference.

We use the Performance Center to do performance monitoring. It is used throughout the organization by both our engineers, our support staff, and our troubleshooters.

When devices are having performance issues, it proactively build dashboards, which allow us to go and do health checks, and resolve problems before they become an issue.

The ability to quickly do drag and drop customized reports for dashboards.

I would like to see open integration with tools like Splunk, ExtraHop, and NetMRI.

There are some areas in the technology right now, like with VMs, where we are lacking with our abilities to get inside the VM to monitor traffic within the machine.

It has gotten a lot better over the last five years. When it switched from MPC to Performance Center, there were some issues, but it has greatly improved.

I have mixed feeling about the scalability. I feel like there are things which are being put into UIM right now that are not being included in Performance Center that we need to see in Performance Center. We are kind of being driven to buy UIM, and I can't justify it.

There are just some charts and views that we can't build in Performance Center right now.

We have had a couple of instances with one support person that we've had some issues with, but overall I would say it is very good.

We brought a CA person on site to help us with the initial setup. They were helpful. They got us up and running.

Have an open mind. Look at what it can do for your folks. How fast and how easy it is for them to learn to navigate through the dashboards, and what you can do with the dashboards.

The integration to the other products that we use: NFA, we use ADA, we use Spectrum; and CAPM integrates all those into a single pane of glass, for performance. CAPC is good for developing reports around those multiple data sources and giving us a single vision on what's going on in our environment.

In the past we've had multiple monitoring tools and products being used simultaneously. The goal of the product - and we're still working on eliminating some of the overlap that the other products have - is to allow us to have a single monitoring system, or as close to a single monitoring system as possible on network performance. That way, the network engineers don't have so many places to look for performance data. Prior to using the CA tool suite, we probably had - and I would hate to say this - but we probably had a hundred monitoring tools.

Some of the individual report views, the way some of the columns sort, there's room for improvement in giving us more flexibility in being able to sort reports based, for example, on what columns the metrics fall under.

I would say for the most part, most of the improvements I would identify would be on individual reports that are produced by PM, that we instrument to be produced by PM. They may not necessarily do everything we want them to do.

We've had CAPM deployed a little over two years. I have experience with CA's NetQoS NPC for about five years prior to that. CAPC basically replaced NPC.

Not really stability issues. We've run into bugs but I wouldn't call those stability issues with PM, specifically. We have run into software bugs where certain features weren't working right, in the past, that CA would have to address. I don't think that would fit under stability. Stability's like crashing.

Now, the one thing I will say. When our CA performance management system is on a Linux system, when that Linux system needs to be updated with patches - and this is the server itself - of course PM has to stop. All of our monitoring stops while that patching is going on for those services, while they restart those servers, but I don't know that that's a CA thing. While that reboot is going on for those servers, for those patches to take place, of course the system has to restart.

No issues with PM. We use other products like NFA and ADA. We've had scalability issues in those areas, but with PM we have not. I don't think we've run into a situation where we have too much. We actually designed our system around a million interfaces to monitor, and I think we're probably less than half a million at this point.

I would probably give them an eight out of 10.

We switched because there were multiple other solutions, and we were already using CA Spectrum, so the natural progression was to go to CA and use their performance management tool, also known as CAPC, Performance Center. We used multiple tools. We had NetCool out there, we had SolarWinds out there, CiscoWorks, numerous tools.

For us, I would say it was complex. But I think a lot of customers that use the tool rely heavily on the out-of-the-box reporting that CA produces with the tool naturally. For those types of deployments, it might go easier. For our needs, we highly instrumented reports. We have built literally hundreds and hundreds of individual reports ourselves, for our own needs and, I would say that that comes with a level of complexity to accomplish.

I was not on board at the time that they were doing of the selection of this tool set, with Anthem. I'm aware that they were also looking at NetCool as another option, and I am not sure why CA was ultimately selected. I also don't have any information about pricing. I'm not sure what they spent on it.

On the positive, if you can rely on the out-of-the-box reports, it should be a fairly straightforward deployment. If you're looking at instrumenting your own views and stuff, it gets more complex the more views you want, the more complex your views, and the more you want to instrument the tool for your environment, versus using the out-of-the-box solution. My advice would be to understand how you're going to implement this and what you're expecting from it.

You're going to go one of a couple different ways. You're either going to instrument it to satisfy some specific needs that you have, or you're going to depend heavily on the out-of-the-box reports that only do instrumentation in a few examples that you find you need. When they demonstrate it to you, you should ask those questions about the differences.

In follow-up to my rating it an eight out of 10 overall, I've used a few other products. There aren't a whole lot of other products I could even give a five to, to be honest. I've used SolarWinds, I've been exposed to NetCool. I've heard horror stories about HPE OpenView. I would give it an eight, which isn't perfect but it's high on my scale.

The auto-certification is valuable to us. It reduces the time consumed to certify a new device, as in the past with CA eHealth.

CA PM is able to monitor more equipment, or only specific requirements, as necessary.

The database should have higher availability in case of an incident.

We have been using the solution for six months.

We haven't encountered any issues with stability. So far, it's been working properly.

It requires higher availability in case of any incidents with any of the servers.

The technical support is excellent.

Previously, we used CA eHealth, which was changed to CA PM.

We would welcome some online demos to be available, or something similar to CA UIM Snap.

CA's support is 24/7 during the entire year and the tools are guaranteed.

We looked at some open code tools. However, they don't have any support or guarantees like CA.

It's a solution which is highly recommended. It will meet and exceed your expectations.