Broadcom DX Application Performance Management Reviews

Every component has its own value. Investigator is the most valuable feature for me because we have deep visibility for application performance via all agents. We can capture the in-depth transaction trace and error trace which helps us to provide RCA to the customer.

We have deployed APM agents on multiple applications for our customers who had the worst performance. The application team was unable to pinpoint the problem and that was the main pain area of the business. We have collected and shared RCA for some problems with the business and application folks. Now, the application team has more visibility in regards to their application performance and they can easily pinpoint to the problematic area by transaction traces.

There are various areas which have room for improvement:

• First of all, the product team has to design something with which we can showcase the complete call graph of any transaction and overall health of the application.
• There is a need to improve the Team Center functionalities and performance, as it doesn’t work properly in a vital environment.

• There is a need to develop any utility to auto-schedule the Investigator report.

• There is a need to design a function with which we can export the transaction trace in PDF or in any other format.
• There is a need to increase the traffic-handling capacity of TIM and discover another way to monitor business transaction via CEM instead of port mirroring (SPAN). Hence, some clients don’t allow mirroring traffic that has confidential data from the business perspective.

• The product team needs to work on the product’s architecture because the number of server requirements is very high compared to the other competitors. For example, if we need to monitor a large number of agents, then we require 4-5 machines for the APM solution installation. On the other hand, the competitor can handle the same number of agents by using only 1-2 servers. (I am aware that the APM capacity planning and hardware sizing depends on the number of metrics that will be monitored.)

It has been almost three years that I am using this solution. I am working as a services consultant with an organization since December 2013.

I have faced scalability and stability issues. When we needed to monitor a large number of data metrics, then these kind of issues occur.

The customer support is very good and active. I would like to rate it a 9 out of 10.

Professionally, I have worked only with CA solutions but I have tried different solutions in test environments.

The CA APM installation is very straightforward. It is as simple as stated in the CA documents.

I don’t deal in pricing and licensing so I don’t have any idea about this aspect much. However, the best thing about APM licensing is that it is a trust-based licensing, so monitoring will never have any impact due to licenses.

I would like to advise everyone to try this solution. It is best APM solution in the market, as per my knowledge.

The alert, action, and dashboards features are the most valuable to us. The alert capability of the CA APM solution is helping us to identify and react to issues before they happen and affect our services. The dashboard features allow us to see the health status of our applications visually; thus, it helps us to identify issues faster and easier.

Using CA APM has allowed us to know about the performance of our applications and servers and also to identify issues before they happen.

It helped us be proactive and resolve problems before they become system-wide issues.

The dashboards should be easier to build.

I have used this product for four years.

Sometimes, we had stability issues.

We did not encounter any scalability issues.

I would give the technical support a 10 out of 10. CA has excellent technical support.

Previously, we were using a different solution. The reason we switched was because CA APM fits better to our monitoring needs.

I think initial setup is a little complex.

Pricing and licensing is reasonable.

We did not evaluate any other solution.

It is a good product and comes with great features.

• CEM helps us to deliver faster responses, and manage the end users’ response and reliability.
• Introscope helps our application team proactively identify and resolve problems fast. It helps reduce application downtime and improve application development based on the real-user experience.

It helps us to meet business transactions SLA for our critical end-user applications; proactively identify the issue and helps the application team make its diagnosis before it impacts the end-user experience.

CA APM currently only supports Java- and .NET-based applications. Pega application metrics should be included in CA APM. It should also support non-Java and non-.NET applications, such as SAP, etc.

I have used it for seven years.

We have not encountered any stability issues.

We have not encountered any scalability issues.

Technical support is 7/10. It needs to be more proactive. Sometimes, it takes a long time for them to provide solutions.

We previously used IBM Tivoli and BMC products.

Initial setup was straightforward.

Before choosing this product, we evaluated other vendors, e.g., HPE SiteScope, and SolarWinds WPM/TraceView.

I recommend adequate server sizing and capacity to avoid HTTP/HTTPS packet drops and performance issues.

I think the most valuable feature is the deep dive feature. It has the ability to provide in-depth knowledge on the application code. It's invaluable.

For us, it's given us completely brand new visibility that we never had before. Application owners are able to completely understand the application better now on the back end, as well as on the front end. It’s pretty much an eye opener for them.
A lot of it, we try to do it through alerts and dashboarding. You want customers to spend a lot less time poking around and we want the dashboards to be a tell-tale sign of what is going on in their environment.

I think my biggest feedback from a negative perspective would be the presentation layer, which I think they're already working towards. The user interface, that presentation layer, I think that's already coming in the next few iterations, so I'm looking forward to that. That has been a big challenge for them.

Then also there's a lot of integration right now from within, which will be very helpful also. Mainly, on the customer experience manager side, it would be great if they could integrate that into the existing user interface.

It's pretty robust and scalable, so I haven't had any issues. I've been using these products for the last seven years, so stability-wise, it's one of the better, scalable products I have worked with.

The tech support is great. Yeah, actually, I know most of them by name since I've been there. They're very helpful, very intelligent, very professional; great customer service.

My experience has been mainly that an existing solution did not work as well, or doesn't scale as well, and so this one, CA APM, was looked at, evaluated, and decided. Some of them were above my pay grade. Once the decision was made, that's when I was involved.

I was involved with the CA professional services from the start of the deployment. We did the whole architecture and deployment. Once we were in ops mode, I also did an upgrade earlier this year. It's been pretty smooth.

There are competitors out there. When selecting CA APM, a lot of it is also the fact that, I think, it's scalability, usability, and the amount of data that it provides for the application from end to end. I don't think there are a lot of products out there that can do that.

I would definitely encourage others to evaluate it first, see what works for them. It's not for everyone. It all depends on the size and what you're trying to accomplish. I would definitely encourage them to evaluate the product as much as they can and decide from there.

It does a lot of good things. There are a few challenges. Mainly, I think it's the amount of knowledge that it provides to the application team; it's vast. I worked with two or three other products and I don't see them providing that much metric tools and information about that application the way APM does.

It show us a clearer view of our business and we can take proactive decisions using data collected by CA CEM.

With the CA Customer Experience we take Marketing actions, for example, we know how many transactions ocurred in our internet banking.

With the CA CEM value settings we can measure the size of ours earnings and even more of our losses caused by defects.

CA CEM show us a business vision from the transaction hierarchy. It provides easily understandable information to users with little or any knowledge. Assigning a monetary value to transactions is very useful for understanding the amount of money being lost by an organization because of a problem or even the total gain for a specific transaction.

The icing on the cake is the troubleshooting tab that helps us see possibilities for the continuous improvement of the business.

With the new feature CA Team Center is much easier to view the information of my user experience, with this unified vision, it was even practical for lay users to use the tool

The CA APM workstation (console) connection is too slow with some metrics.

The integration with CA Spectrum is quite difficult to create, and it is also only one way, only being used to view alarms coming from CA APM. It would be interesting to visualize APM metrics in CA Spectrum OneClick. I see a need to improve this integration.

The CA APM Comand Center is very good, on paper, but in pract does not work in the best way, this promises to be a and indispensable feature of the product, but has much to evolve.

I have not encountered any stability issues, in the newest version Workstation Works fine

I have not encountered any scalability issues.

Customer Service:

Customer service is excellent.

Technical Support:

Technical support is high quality, but little quantity... I'd like to have more APM support.

No.

If you have a Postgres DB, is annoying to Update CA APM, i have some difficults to update this, but if you can simply forget the previous base withou need to save previous data, it is much easier to install directly.

I implemented the solution in my enviroment, but following the advice of a Support team of the manufacturer.

I neve calculated my ROI, but i have date on how my transaction improved, in a more Technical way, I hada a 25% rection in defects and 37% redection in transactions response time, as well as a nearly 100% increase in the number of transactins ocurring on a daily basis.

Althougth it is a bit expensive, it is really worth it

Yes, Dynatracer and AppDynamics, but i prefer CA APM because of the Customer Experience feature, we are a financial institution, we use the CA CEM to Marketing actions, financial and etc. I think the Customer Experience of the CA CEM is the best in the Market.

During the implemetation, you must understand "where you are today". From that, you should think about "where you want to be" in a certain period of time, and what you have to do to get there. CA APM will help you get there, but you must first draw up your goal. This tool requires a certain maturity to deliver the expected results, so start with a less-complex enviroment, mature the use of the solution use and from there, add the more complex structures.

I like the Transaction Trace Viewer and stalls feature on the front end/back end within the investigator.

It has helped to stabilize the environments and also quickly identify issues some while they are occurring and some proactively.

The extensive monitoring alert gave the ability to act quickly before an outage happens.

We haven't implemented the latest released version yet but I do believe there's a lot of improvement needed.

There's a lot of room for improvement in administration which I believe CA APM is slowly getting there, with their Agent Command Center. However, the interface and management of the entire APM infrastructure should exist via GUI.

I have used this solution for five years.

We have scaled CA APM a lot over the last few years. As time goes by, there is an increased demand for monitoring leads to underperforming enterprise managers and/or other memory issues. We are running on VM. However, CA recommends to run on a physical machine with lot of compute resources, which wouldn't be applicable to all companies with their standard environments and also in terms of the budget/funding that it requires.

The customer service is good but not excellent. I would rate it a 7 out of 10.

I personally didn't use any other solution, but my company did use the IBM APM tool.

The setup is complex. It takes some reading and understanding of the architecture along with some prior skills.

We have implemented it in-house. My advice is to install a PoC environment and familiarize yourself with all the components.

Compared to other competitors, this product is a little flexible with its pricing/licensing and is somewhat less than the other APMs in the market, with negotiations.

My advice is to implement the product and leverage all of the add-on free components. You should also compare it to other APMs in the market.

In many organizations I've seen this product working in, SEV1s have been reduced quite a bit. One particular organization, within the first 12 months, reduced their SEV1s by 90% just by introducing this product. They had previously been using a competing product, so it really speaks to the value provided by this one that they weren't getting out of the other products they were using.

Suddenly, we were able to evaluate based off how code was being traced. In one incident, it saved us 18 hours in finding the actual problem in the logic for that application once we had a problem.

The most valuable features I believe would actually be two things I would go into: The insight it gives into the applications that it's actually applied to, and the flexibility to do many things with those metrics, and also feed your own metrics from external sources.

I think as we're all moving forward to automated deployments, it'd be nice to have that out-of-the-box with this product.

Also, scaling it, the data nodes writing automatically would be a very nice feature.

We have had large environments, many millions of metrics feeding in, and never have we had to dedicate a single resource to maintaining it.

Actually coming in once in a while for maintenance, we do have to put some work into it once in a while, but there is nothing to the magnitude of having to have somebody dedicated to it.

It is scalable. We can keep adding collectors that store the data, as needed. We haven't had any issues with that so far.

Technical support has always been very happy to help us. They offer a community, which is often very helpful, where one can go to find their own answers if they'd like.

We already had a competing solution. We weren't getting the value we needed out of it. We were still having problems. We couldn't find the actual root cause very easily with that solution, so we started evaluating others.

We looked at many others and this seemed to be the best fit for our organization.

Really, the most important criteria when selecting a vendor is value for dollar. As any business, we're looking for values and it's not just, "Is it better?" But, "Is it better enough to be worth the cost?" Or, if it's cheaper, that's also great.

The initial setup is actually pretty straightforward. The install is very easy. I don't think one would even need a document for it. It's pretty straightforward and the questions it's asking are kind of self-explanatory.

My rating just reflects some of the features we'd like to see. I don't think I'd ever give anybody a perfect rating. There's always room for improvement, but my rating is definitely higher than any other competing products that I've used, against it.

What we're currently using CA APM for is to detect the kind of traffic that our customers are dealing with. How do we affect our customers in the way that they access our servers?

With some of the setups that we have on the mobile app, like, is there anything we can do to shorten the time that it takes them to hit and access their account information using the mobile app?

We've been able to detect a lot of anomalies, troubleshoot those and fix them. It helps us with where to look. We're able to find the key component that's causing the issue and drill down into it, get into the details, and then fix the issue.

I'd like some simpler dashboards; some easier reporting. Everything looks a little too technical. To show our executives, it needs to look a little nicer.

I think it's fantastic. Stability is really awesome.

I haven’t used CA technical support.

It takes care of our issues.

Let's up that user interface; make it look a little bit better.

It's better than anything else I've ever used out there.