DX Performance Management Reviews

It's a pretty complex product. There are a lot of parts to it.

The biggest selling point is putting the power of creating dashboards and reports into end users' hands. They can create views that are most pertinent to them. That's been the big one for us, and one of the reasons why we went with the product.

From a business standpoint, it's hard to quantify. It's been used in the capacity planning process, as far as our network infrastructure goes. We've been able to utilize data that's been collected by the tool to more accurately predict usages.

The one area where I think it could be improved is the reporting capability. The dashboard features are very function rich, but the reporting feature is probably not as rich as we'd like it to be. There are some limitations in using it.

For example, the number of objects that you can simultaneously show or display in a report is limited. The reporting capability needs to scale up a little bit higher.

Compared to eHealth the reporting is limited. For example the number of graphs in a report is limited to 15. Another limitation is that you cannot copy or duplicate reports.

The whole non-root installation really needs to be clarified a lot more than they did.

We've been using it for just under a year.

We haven't really had any significant stability issues. I'd say that maybe we've had one issue in all that time, where there was data corruption. But we were able to solve that with the help of technical support.

One really needs to make sure that you follow their guidelines and recommendations regarding the database size and performance. They give you certain guidelines that you need to follow regarding the database. For example, given your size environment, this is the size of database you need, and this is how it will perform well. If you want to have good performance, you need to meet these specific requirements.

We have not had an issue with scalability other than in reporting. I would not necessarily say that's a scalability issue of the product, but that's scalability with respect to one of the functions of the product.

I've called technical support on different occasions. Sometimes just for assistance and sometimes to report an issue. They have always been very responsive and quick to call back. I prefer a phone call and I rank them very, very high.

We were using a different CA solution. Specifically, we were using a product called eHealth.

The reason why we migrated was a recommendation from CA. Their focus was going to be on the CA Performance Management product, and less on eHealth. They were trying to migrate users away from eHealth.

The setup was complex. There are a lot of components that had to be installed. The biggest issue that I had with the installation is that it's very much geared to a root installation.

In other words, if you use the root ID to install the product, you're most likely not going to have issues. We just ran into numerous issues because we did not have root access.

While they made some effort in the documentation to describe how to go about doing that, internally it was less than complete. We kept on getting issues that we could not complete because we didn't have root access.

It was a collaborative effort. Through support's help, a lot of time spent on this side, and with support personnel over here and on the server side, we were able to figure out what the issue was.

However, it wasn't a matter of, "Run this script and you're done installing." In no cases were we that fortunate, because we were not doing a root installation.

I wouldn't say it's too expensive. I'd say it's comparable to what you're going to find in the marketplace.

You have to make sure you have an accurate count of the number of devices, and more specifically, managed objects. I'll use that term. It is the devices and the managed objects that you want to put in your CAPM system.

We evaluated other options in the past when we selected eHealth. We did a full evaluation and we went with the CA solution.

After we had only been on it for two or three years, we felt comfortable with CA, their approach, and their strategy for handling network performance management. We just decided to stick with CA and migrate to their next generation, the CAPM.

I would definitely take advantage of the training that CA offers. Certainly take that training, just prior to, or just after you've done the installation. That will put you in a position to really exploit the features of the product.

There's so much you can do with the product and not just the dashboard and the reports that users can generate.

There is more customization that you can do to the product and tweak it to your site's needs.

• Multi-tenant platform
• User-configurable roles & permissions with granularity
• Dashboard-oriented
• Easy enough to customize

Mainly as an MSP configuration, the multi-tenant model helps us to segment the customer and users, as well as providing our operation the capability to oversee all tenants.

Today, tenants are bound to a data collector which requires a lot of networking and resources to configure.

In the context of the multi-service provider and the need to have customer segmentation either for IP overlapping or Security (data protection), multi-tenancy is required. However, in order to do this, the tenant (IP Domain) need to be attach to one Data Collector by Tenant. In the MSP context, it is equal to 1 DC per customer and even for small customer (couple device) this is not too scalable or rather expensive.

I have used the platform since the beginning and in production for at least two years.

Our multi-customer configuration is challenging, as well as to have redundancy over two data centers.

We encountered database issues due to the IOS speed requirement of HPE Vertica, as we are on a VMware environment.

Redundancy over two data centers is one of our challenges, as well as the fact that we use a lot of data collection, even using Docker containers for it.

Support is OK for the standard use of the product but as our configuration is complex, they often have to refer to engineering.

We were previously using eHealth and APG.

As we started from the beginning, it has improved a lot since; once again, our solution remains complex due to our usage.

Implementation was with a vendor team; at the beginning, with CA Service, and then with CA engineering, as we do DevOps.

Before choosing we also evaluated SevONE, APG, and InfoVista.

This is coming along; great progress. The "3 series" looks promising.

The most valuable features to date are the alerts, reports, and integration with other CA products:

• The alerting feature allows us to quickly identify and begin remediation on network devices that are experiencing performance/capacity issues.
• The reporting feature has allowed us to quickly share information with customers, keeping them up to date on critical devices that are being monitored.
• The integration aspect is also important, as it allows us to feed inventory to the system from tools designed to walk our networks, and also pull in flow data for additional troubleshooting in one place.

Utilizing the capacity/performance data alongside the flow we are able to quickly determine the root cause of impact. This allows us to reduce mean time to resolution on network impacting events due to capacity/performance.

There is always room for improvement, which CA continues to do based upon community feedback.

One of the greatest challenges we have encountered are the polling cycles. We currently poll at 5-minute intervals, but at times need to have up-to-the-minute data. Products we have leveraged from other vendors allow us at the click of a button to turn on up-to-the-minute polling for up to an hour. CA Performance Management does not have a similar feature. It may be emulated, however, by setting up a new group for one-minute polling cycles; however, leaving this rate on will impact data storage, so only administrators are provided this feature in our organization.

The solution has been in place for 15 months, and has already provided information helpful in network cleanup.

To date, we have not encountered any stability issues.

To date, we have not encountered any scalability issues.

I have not been required to work directly with technical support. However, based on feedback from the team that does, support often starts with the standard runbook, even after we have described similar troubleshooting steps to them. This results in lost time in resolving issues. Once we have moved beyond the basics, support has been handled well.

Our prior solution was dated and in need of refresh. We switched to the CA solution after going through a proof of concept and rating it against two other competitors.

The initial setup was mostly straightforward, with assistance from onsite technical resources from CA. The majority of issues we encountered were with our corporate requirements on server configurations and not the tools themselves.

Regarding pricing and licensing, keep in mind that bundling will provide the best value. As a result, doing your best to anticipate growth and future needs may save you money in the long run.

We did evaluate two competing options from HPE and Alcatel Lucent.

Take advantage of the professional services and leverage your solution experts from CA. They will help you define the right solution keeping in mind current utilization and future growth.

It is easy to use, and the performance metrics are helping us to know our network better.

It provides metrics to users.

The certificates are not complete. CA needs to provide more support for the product through certificates. They need to discuss this with their product team.

Certs are the drivers to support the devices. Some of the vendors are not fully covered. An example of this is Brocade. Certain types of Brocade used in our company is not in certs published. There are others as well.

I have used this solution for two years.

There was a big problem with HPE Vertica.

There were no scalability issues.

We always use CA.

The setup was straightforward.

The price is too expensive.

We looked at other solutions such as IBM, HPE, etc.

It is important to know what you need.

The benefit is having the one-stop shop where we can integrate all of our CA products into one dashboard. They can use that one dashboard as a portal to click around to wherever they need to go. The dashboard integrates our data from Spectrum and CA PC, like the data collectors.

It has improved efficiency because now there is the one-stop shop where you can view all your data, instead of needing to click around in four different tools. Everybody's looking at the same data. You don't have people using their own tools, or using a different tool. Everybody's using the same data to correlate what is happening.

I would like to see it integrated with UIM. That is the one tool that is not in there. Then I would like to see log analytics, which I know are coming; but are still not included.

Stability is good. It has improved; and we have not had any issues.

At our company, we have a large implementation, and we have not had any issues with scale. We just scale horizontally.

Technical support is pretty good. I would say that we always get to the bottom of the problem. The only reason it is not perfect is that sometimes it takes a couple of days; but we do get to the bottom of it.

I would say the initial setup is complex. CA does make it easy, but you need to have the right architecture for it to be successful. You have to design it correctly from the start.

Currently we have an issue where, if the store goes down, we get 20 tickets spread across different tools. We knew we needed to scale it back to only one actionable item. We needed to use one tool that would encompass everything and scale out, and be able to provide the flexibility to let us narrow it down to what we need.

Our most important criteria when selecting a vendor are scale, stability, and support. We evaluated CA, HPE, Riverbed, and BMC. We went with CA because of our partnership with that vendor. We are most confident in that partnership.

It is a good product that will meet their needs.

It allows us to have a quick, upfront view of our multiple data centers. We have multiple connections to hundreds of customers; and it provides us with a quick dashboard look at issues we might be having; bottlenecks we might be having; and things that might go wrong in our network without us needing to dig through endless screens of issues to get to the root of the problem.

It makes things faster when we have our network operations center. They can look at their dashboards that we've created for them, and they can see problems immediately. We can catch a problem before it really starts impacting the customer. It enables our network engineers to look deeper into the source of the problem after alerts are raised. So it's quick, it's fast, and it gets things done. We can get past a problem before it becomes a real problem.

What's missing is stuff that they're already putting on the roadmap: the quick dashboards that they're building; the ability to create dashboard quickly; for example, with ADA and NFA, has been pretty amazing.

They are starting to support additional products and every time we come out here, and every time there is a product release, something new is added to it. Honestly, CA should just keep doing what they're doing. I'm sure there's going to be stuff out there we haven't thought of; and I hope they figure it out first.

Stability has never been an issue. That's one of the things that's so great about CA products is that we've never had that kind of issue. We don’t have servers crashing on us for CA products. We're not dealing with issues with connections or whatever. CA just works. There are no stability problems whatsoever. So it's fantastic.

Things work. I get up in the morning, I open the console, and it's there. I don't have to worry about it.

We have multiple large data centers and we've never had any issue getting those data centers hooked into CA. If we have to connect to something with our ADA or NFA products, we find it: it's there. We don't have any problems with size or scalability. It's quick, and if we need to bump it up a little bit, we can do that as well.

We use technical support all the time. In fact, they just resolved an issue for us this week with a name tag for IP SLA products in Cisco. The nice thing about them is that they're so quick and responsive. When we have a problem, they will get on it, and they will find us an answer, usually quickly. They come back and fix problems and bugs, so that it worked great. Their technical support has always been fantastic.

Actually, I was not involved in the initial setup. I inherited an old mature system. It seems to be straightforward. I worked with a guy who did set the product up initially, and he had no issues with it. But again, I'm now working on a mature system, so I haven't done that yet.

Get CA involved up front. Let them help you. CA has done this for years. Let them help you with the things that you might not even realize that you don't know. Let them help implement it with you because they're going to know some of the bumps and hassles and pitfalls that are out there. That's what my partner did before I came onboard; and he said it was as smooth as pie. So, that would be my advice.

The most valuable feature to us is that it provides us with NetFlow data, which is essential to our business.

It allows us to see historical data that shows what type of traffic is going across the circuit. When we have capacity issues, we can isolate those issue and we can block when we get high traffic.

There are some issues. We started supporting UTA and began to see both major and minor problems. We're able to get support for these problems, though.

We've had no issues with deployment since implementation.

It seems stable. We're using NetQoS.

This is the scalable option, and it's why we need it and have it.

Technical support is very responsive and knowledgeable. We get tier-one support.

We had InfoVista when NetFlow was an emerging technology. CA really stood out and that’s why we brought them in.

Initial setup was pretty complex, but we were familiar with it and got help from CA.

Not too many companies would implement this. If you're a large organization, make sure you staff correctly. It’s a large application and you need a group of people who know Linux and NetFlow. Have the right skill sets.

The primary use case of this solution is performance management, and it can be useful to help teams with performance gains. This solution is deployed on-prem. 

One of the most valuable features is the ease of use. 

This solution's implementation process could be quicker. They could also optimize the hardware requirements. 

We have been working with this solution since 2004. 

This solution is stable. 

This solution is scalable. 

The technical support is fine. 

The implementation process could be quicker. For deployment, you need a team of one to three people. 

We implement this solution for customers. 

The licensing is very straightforward. It doesn't matter how many devices you have and would like to monitor—it's very straightforward. 

I rate DX Performance Management a nine out of ten, and would recommend it to others.