Broadcom DX Application Performance Management Reviews

• Deep-dive application instrumentation allows us to diagnose application performance and availability problems.
• Powerful querying capabilities of the metrics data.
• Ability to build custom dashboards and reports.
• Ability to create custom metrics using calculators or custom JavaScript calculators.
• Ability to capture and feed custom metrics into CA APM. This same capability allows us pull metric data from other monitoring tools and feed that into CA APM to provide that single-pane-of-glass view.
• Metric Data API that allows querying and extraction of metric data.
• Java and .NET application monitoring.

It has provided application teams with another tool in the tool box to diagnose complex performance and availability issues. It also allows for the early detection of an issue before we hear about it from our customers. CA APM reduces our time to resolution and improves our customer confidence.

While calculators are present, they don’t support the ability to create a custom calculation on a metric. To do this, a custom JavaScript calculator must be built.

The dashboard functionality is what one might expect from the early 2000s. The dashboard tools need a significant update in terms of the widgets that are available, usability, and ability to modify how data points are labeled.

The custom report functionality also needs to be updated with the ability to apply different widgets, rather than just a line graph, and the ability to modify how data points are labeled.

The capability to execute a shell command on an alert condition is present. However, the implementation makes it difficult to find potential use cases. In our environment, it’s unfortunately something we are unable to make use of, at least directly. In short, CA APM is not a tool I would recommend for implementation of self-healing. However, it can be used to automatically advertise that a condition under which self-healing should be kicked off exists.

.NET agents are not at par with Java agents and there is a gap that needs to be closed.

We’ve been actively using CA APM 10.2 in non-production and production environments since March 2016.

We have had stability issues, but we have worked out the major issues with CA and are working towards resolution of the minor stability issues. The fixes for the stability issues we experienced have been implemented in versions of CA APM following APM 10.2.

We have not had any scalability issues. I will note that it is important to have an understanding of how APM works and, if you’re new to the product, to work closely with CA on environment sizing, optimizing the configuration, and understanding how much load an environment can handle.

Initial technical support is excellent for common, easy to identify and medium complexity issues. For difficult, complex, issues it’s necessary to escalate things to get the experts from development and engineering involved to get traction on resolution. Otherwise, things can get stuck and drawn out.

Initial setup is moderate to complex (there are a number of factors in the complexity of setup) and needs to be done with someone who has experience setting up and configuring CA APM environments.

No other products were evaluated prior to using CA APM.

Having expertise from CA to help you with implementing CA APM is essential. It is also essential to understand that deep-dive instrumentation can have a significant impact on an application and even enabling or disabling certain agent features can cause significant impact. It is critical to understand how to configure the agent, what to configure, and test out a configuration before deploying to production. Also, any updates to applications must be tested with the agent in place, before deploying to production. If there are issues, it’s important to know how to start tuning down the level of instrumentation.

I will note that CA has, and continues, to bend over backwards in responding to our needs and requirements in ways that few vendors do.

The most valuable feature of this product is the CA Customer Experience Manager, as it shows the real impact on the customers.

We are constantly looking at the customer experience. Thus, in this aspect, it has helped us to improve the execution time and get real access to the problems.

I would appreciate an easier way to record transactions, i.e., in the CA Customer Experience Manager (CA CEM). One difficulty I have is to identify the fields that make the transactions unique, so that APM can identify them in the probe. If they look at other transaction recording software, they can take some ideas from there as to how to simplify the process. I have a lot of arguments from the HTTP packets and also matching the fields requires a deep knowledge of the app that is being monitored.

The other thing that can be improved is that the dashboard edition in the CA APM is very limited and basic. It is almost impossible to create a dashboard with some graphic complexity and the diversity of the tools is also limited.

I have used this solution for two years.

We did encounter stability issues in regards to the DB access and the time it takes to navigate through the application.

Despite the complexity, we did not encounter any scalability issues.

The technical support is very good.

Previously, I have used another solution but in a different institution.

I did not do the initial setup. It was hard to catch up with the setup process when we were presented with the solution.

You should create a user manual according to your system.

The best features are the workstation and dashboards, and the newer WebView with CA APM Team Center, which shows dynamic status of the relevant environment.

CA APM gives us more transparency about our website environment and reduces time for root-cause analysis and minimizes service downtimes.

CA made a big step with version 10.1.0.15, so there are just very minor parts that can be improved with more web technology and more interfaces to other tools.

We have used CA APM since about 2010.

We did not have any stability problems.

We have not had any scalability problems.

Technical support is good, but I don't require them so often.

In 2011, setup was a bit complex, because of our own web infrastructure, but then it became more straightforward.

It has been very, very productive for us. It helped us with number of challenges we faced in the past. It prevented a lot of downtime and a lot of outages with the Java side of the house. We are predominantly a WebSphere shop.

We’ve been very successful using version 9.7. We're still not up to the latest version, 10. I've seen a lot of interesting things with version 10 happening, which hopefully will address our problems. Some of which are the inability to manage multiple hosts at the same time, configure agents in an easy fashion. There's a lot of manual labor that still exists that hopefully will be simplified with the new Command Center. We’re looking forward to upgrading our 9.7 to 10 to start using the Team Center, which is a phenomenal product we've seen today at CA World.

It's been very, very successful using our NOC. We are using the console and dashboards.

Looking forward to the growth and maturity. We're looking to standardize, reduce the number of tools and collapse them into one. I think that CA's been listening to the customers and have been moving to that direction.

Looking forward to another journey.

It's been a great five-year tenure with the APM suite. We're looking to expand that now that version 10 is out, 10.5 GA by the end of the month; looking to start using the new Team Center, which hopefully will greatly reduce mean time to repair. Makes our NOC as well as the SMEs more productive; repair issues much faster; and it's been a great run so far. CA has been listening to our concerns. They have been addressing some of them. There are unfortunately sometimes shifts in paradigms as CA is known to be a dynamic company. Sometimes the direction is not always clear.

Some challenges are maintaining the growth of the environment; a lot of manual labor is involved, which again is being solved with the new version that came out. One of the products we use, the real-user monitoring, has been very successful, but at times challenging to implement. There's some shift in paradigm using it today, moving to a more mature model within the APM umbrella, and again, start using a lot of the stuff with their new solution, AXA; some of the mobile platforms, which will help us to move into that direction, to unify the APM solution which we heavily rely on today.

Support from CA has been really, really phenomenal. We've always applauded CA as being one of our top vendors, compared to many others, such as HPE and Microsoft. Many times when we had an issue, it really was really, really phenomenal support. From a CA standpoint, any bugs, any issues that we typically have, we would have pretty much a few engineers involved and at times solve an immediate need, which is something that we cannot experience with other vendors, such as, again, like HPE or Microsoft, or what have you.

From other competitors and other competition that we looked into, such as Dynatrace and other vendors similar to CA, CA was a clear winner for us. Again, it's been a great product.

There's some deficiencies to their product. But again, they are being addressed, as CA's been very responsive to the customers. One of the most important things is they do listen to customers. If you have a major problem or major concern, CA try to address that. If that cannot be easily addressed, they try to lay it on the roadmap, and we've seen some stuff delivered that we requested in the past.

Application triage is the most valuable feature. It gives precise insights about problems and leads to the root cause very quickly. We use CA APM internally to monitor and diagnose Java-based systems.

CA APM helps to identify problems and make faster decisions so as to re-establish the service in a precise way.

It would be very helpful to have transaction insights with a more transparent configuration. If we could have user experience information without using a network tap, then the use of this feature would bring more value in more cases.

I have used this solution for four years.

I have not encountered any stability issues.

I have not encountered any scalability issues.

I would give the technical support 10/10 rating; they are very good. They have highly skilled staff and are available 24 hours a day.

We did not use any other solution.

The setup was straightforward; with the latest versions of CA APM, it is even more straightforward.

You need to think cost versus benefit. It is an investment and can address almost any application issues within many IT environments.

We did not evaluate other products before choosing this product.

You should consider using CA APM even in the cloud. CA is focusing to deliver full APM stack in the cloud and not just on-premise. It is a complete solution.

APM is a master in monitoring application performance. When we emphasize performance, it focuses on business transactions and helps provide a good amount of successful transactions. In order to enhance application availability, rigorous monitoring of its components’ performance is very important.

APM helps in monitoring performance of application with end-to-end application component visibility.

• Reduced troubleshooting time by identifying the exact point of failure
• Capacity planning of infra based on application performance

Out-of-the-box report templates need to be incorporated. Agent performance reports and transaction statistics report need to be incorporated. Agent performance reports will help us to monitor agent communication and availability. Transaction statistics will help us to monitor what are the transactions flowing into the system.

LDAP and EEM integration should be simplified like in other CA Solutions.

I have used it for one year.

Until now, I have not faced any stability issues.

Until now, I have not faced any scalability issues.

Technical support is mind-blowing. They are really a big helping hand with administrating the application.

This is the first time I am working with an APM solution.

Initial setup was very simple. We did our implementation in a day and were able to provide output to our management in a short amount of time.

Pricing and licensing are straightforward. It is very easy to plan the license requirement, as the license terms are clearly documented.

Before choosing this product, we did a proof of concept for Zenoss. We felt CA APM is agile and aptly engineered to meet our requirements.

It is the very best solution. It will surely enhance anyone’s application performance and resource utilization.

APM agents are able to monitor Java and .NET applications out-of-the-box, with limited configuration, and are able to provide Operations with insight on application performance.

Operations are able to view the performance of their applications and the real-user experience in business transactions, all through a single solution, CA Application Performance Management. Customers are able to understand when applications have issues and which component is causing performance degradation. From the end user to web servers, app servers and backend components, all components are monitored.

Reporting capabilities require improvements.

I have used it for four years.

We have been using CA APM for more than two years in production environments and no stability issues have arisen yet.

CA APM is able to monitor hundreds of servers and applications.

Technical support responds fast and solutions experts are available to join in if issues are complex.

I did not previously use a different solution.

Initial setup is simple and straightforward because agents are able to monitor applications out-of-the-box.

The license model is really easy to understand.

Before choosing this product, I did not evaluate other options.

CA is looking forward to minimizing the effort required by implementers to build custom dashboards as the Team Center feature is able to provide out-of-the-box dashboards that depict performance of applications through many perspectives, covering all of the different user needs.

It provides less critical incidents for gold-category applications. We get proactive resolution for events.

Command center is a new feature that provides agent maintenance and support without involving the application team. It saves lots of time for APM team.

The front-end representation should match other competitors such as AppDynamics.

Earlier, there were an Android- and iOS-accessible tool for APM. That was Executive Insight, and it is discontinued now. So, I would like to have the same type of tool again for CA APM.

I have not encountered any stability issues.

Scalability is very easy compared to other vendors' tools.

Customer Service:

Customer service is 9/10.

Technical Support:

I am very satisfied with technical support.

Initial setup was very easy.

An in-house team implemented it.

There are less-critical incidents on business applications.

It's completely trust-based. Use it in a sub-prod environment on an as-needed basis. It will help you to be compliant according to your license count.

Before choosing this solution, we tested AppDynamics.