Broadcom DX Application Performance Management Reviews

It helps you get to the root cause much faster when you have issues.

The visualization of the solution takes you to the problem areas much faster.

The GUI feels sort of archaic. It doesn't have a modern look and feel to it.

I'm looking forward to some of the stuff on the new version that automatically maps the topology. We're just getting started with the tool in my group, so we're not actually utilizing it yet.

It's very stable. We have had no incidents of crashing.

It does scale well, from what I understand. I'm not the person who does the deployments.

I'm not a person who gets to make the investment decisions. I basically get to use whatever the company provides or makes available.

Some of the previous versions were available, but they were much more difficult to implement. The newer version takes a lot of that complexity out of it.

I'm more of an end user of the product, and it's much easier. Some of it is automatically implemented. That's what I like about it.

I was involved similar to a customer. We have an internal team that does the deployments and they got it done. They don't really have issues with it. It's really a straightforward setup.

When selecting a vendor, accessibility is important. We've had issues in the past with some vendors who kind of disappear after they sell you a product. We like having a contact person who is readily available to guide you or refer you to somebody else who can help.

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.

The most valuable feature is the ability to find performance issue. It's a end-to-end software monitoring solution that uses an wide variety of technologies, which is also very valuable to us.

With this product, we were able to increase our applications' performance, their response times, and to improve the satisfaction of our customers.

The automatic identification of business transactions need to be improved. Also, the end-user experience and the web console should be improved.

We have been using it since 2008.

We've had no issues with deployment.

We detected some issues on the web console in regards to its stability.

We didn’t have any issues scaling it for our needs.

7/10

We used a different solution and we switched because this one was more stable and did not impact application response times.

The initial setup was straightforward. We just deploy the agents and started to have visibly.

Any company has its own needs we are not able to give any advice other than to make sure it fits your needs.

We checked all the major competitors in this area. We chose this because it was the only one that was compatible with all our technologies.

First, deploy the agents and get to know the user interface concepts. Afterwards, try to find the root cause of your biggest performance issue and you will see that it is very simple.

The most valuable features are:

• It's simple to use,

• The interface is a light engine,
• It uses almost no Java, which for us is excellent.

It's provided us with consolidated reports and a monitoring dashboard. With the monitoring dashboard, it’s easy to monitor things all in one place.

Also, it's helped us greatly that the dashboard allows us to create very customizable views that give us the information we need to determine the overall status of network health.

I'd like more what-you-see-is-what-you-get functionalities. That is, I want more customizable features that require less back-end configuration.

Once we moved past the basic setup and customized it for our needs, there have been no issues with deployment.

It’s very stable. It at least works to the specs. But we plan to push the solution more and, eventually, find out more about it.

It’s scalable, but not right out of the box, even though we were told it was designed to be out-of-the-box scalable.

The support is superb. They have the technical knowledge, but you just have to get to the right person. They are very quick to respond and follow up as promised.

It was a management decision five years ago as they wanted to work with CA. It was because we wanted to keep our IT management software under one umbrella. This was a high-level decision.

The basic steps are straightforward, but there is probably more documentation for customized set-ups that they should provide. We needed support, so, yes, the basic setup was straightforward, but not in customizing it.

It was a management decision 5 years ago as they wanted to work with CA.

Research the logistics of the implementation specific to your needs. See how other customers are using it, so go to them and find out about implementation and see how it works in real life.

The most valuable features are performance monitoring and alerting. You can set baselines and anything above them will trigger an alert.

The monitoring tool is able to monitor many teams at a time. We also use it to monitor our web agent. It’s also Java-based and versatile.

The documentation could better. It doesn't provide good descriptions of what some data are doing, and there's no good place to see what all the data might mean. You just kind of have to understand how everything works and make your own interpretations and draw your own conclusions.

It’s great, there are no issues with stability. We've just installed it, turned it on, and it just runs.

There are no issues there. It’ll run on as many platforms as you can run it on.

Technical support is quick to respond and very knowledgeable.

I was not involved in the initial setup, but I've not heard that it wasn't anything but straightforward.

CA is great to work with, but to use it, just learn the product suites and how they interact. Make sure you have a good layout and make sure you have everything you need.

The system monitoring is one area that we like. Transaction tracer is another area that has worked well. The platform monitoring features is great, as APM integrates very well with some of the application server performance monitoring interfaces.

The alerting part – if the system goes down we get an immediate notification that a resource has gone down, so it reduces the impact on the business.

The end-to-end monitoring is not good. For example, a user reports a slowness issue, but we don’t have an option in the pool to find out which layer is causing the problem. The system doesn’t break down the application performance to show you what’s happening and where.

I've been using it for over three years.

It is a long process. Use-case monitoring - you have to know the application in and out to make it work. Other tools allow you to create the profile and configure it later. With APM, we don’t have anything like that. Configuring the use-cases monitoring is a long, time-consuming activity, and not a user-friendly one. It requires expertise and knowledge of the applications, and CA APM.

Outages with the solution are very frequent nowadays actually. We see the APM solution going down two to three times a day. And it’s a long troubleshooting cycle, as the CA APM system seems to add a lot of performance overhead.

We haven't scaled it yet.

It’s OK. They respond and acknowledge customer requests.

We are not happy about it, because we have had more than five or six tickets open for some months.

Previously, we worked with Dynatrace and AppDynamics. We changed because our organization decided to go with the enterprise licensing options that CA offers.

It was neither straightforward nor complex, but with some effort we were able to get it right. The application configuration for system monitoring is a good feature. It integrates well with application servers, but the application use-cases and monitoring was time-consuming.

We implemented internally, partnered with a vendor team. The vendor team were good but they had to depend on CA service tickets to complete the installation. This is because they don’t have clear guidelines to configure some of the solution’s features; for example the installation guide for URI monitoring feature doesn’t cover all the use-cases, and the partner had to raise tickets with CA for assistance so there was an impact on time.

I think pricing is good, actually. That’s what made our organization choose this solution. We didn’t face many challenges with the licensing because of our enterprise agreement.

• AppDynamics
• DynaTrace

For traditional technologies it’s the right tool, but for the latest technologies it might not be the right solution. I would tell them to consider all their options before deciding on CA APM, because the configuration, installation, and maintenance are time-consuming tasks. There seem to be a number of technology & support challenges with this tool.

• Real-time information
• Historical info
• Smart instrumentation
• Customizable

• Centralized point to start studying a problem
• Fast analyses
• Getting quick solutions on most cases, but sadly, not for the hardest ones

• User interface customizable components
• Being able to establish relations with source code
• Being able to add some custom add-ons, such as graphical add-ons and/or computes
• 1.- To solve the lacks of nice graphical components i think that this area could be opened to parterns and community. If you develop some mechanism to add graphical
  components, with angular,etc, giving a template in some way that we can add your own html,css and javascript, community will generate his own widgets and share via marketplace, so they will improve your software and make it more visually appealing (same for java to workstation application). I attack some examples i have done to clarify objective.
• 2.- javascripts can be done now and added to introscope but it will better if you can add it and appear as an option same as sum, max, etc. I mean now you can create a javascript and select the metrics affected by one regex, but it will be nice to have the option to make a calculator that simply adds itself to the options and be applied on metric grupings just like sum, etc. And also share with all ppl.
• I will like to comment to you one more point. I think that introscope has to be more application focused, first question always is what applications are afectted/working,not servlets o jsp, so it will be nice that introscope has a mechanims to asociate a JSP, servlets, backend (DB schema), etc to 1 or more application or context, althoug it be manualy .

We have been using this solution for about four years.

Sometimes the workstation hangs or becomes unresponsive. However, the web application works worse, is ugly, and we prefer to use the workstation.

There were scalability issues. With a high amount of data, we found that there is some loss of information when asking for the CLW. We have an issue open on this and CA its working to solve it.

I would give technical support a rating of 7/10. They gave us fast answers when we asked for information, but there were delays to get a solution, even when the issue was clearly a bug.

The setup was easy. It was self-learning in my case.

I don't deal with pricing or licensing, but I think it is a bit expensive. However, the product is really good.

It is a very good product, but it has to fit their needs because it is mainly focused on JAVA/.NET applications, although it has agents for PHP and Node.js.

The solution gives us the flexibility to create new metrics and measure whatever we need. It makes it possible to monitor the full range of applications from the most complex to the most simple ones.

When the SAP requests start to become slow, I can proactively warn our internal customers to stay alert for any impact.

The customer experience management can be improved by making it possible to track down the user actions on a single page. I would like the tool to give me the exact path taken by my customer on my website, making it easy to understand his needs and the context of any problem that occurred during his visit. Then I wouldn’t need to ask him to run the same scenario again.

We have had this solution for three years.

We have not had any issues with stability.

We have not had any issues with scalability.

Technical support has been great.

I was involved in the installation and it was complex. Every APM environment takes time to make it trustworthy enough to create useful alarms and metrics.

Decide what you want to monitor. Improve the DevOps culture in your company. You need to know your applications before monitoring them.