Broadcom DX Application Performance Management Reviews

For APM, the most valuable solution is being able to do a root cause analysis quickly, and find the root cause visually so that we don't have to hunt around for the actual cause of the problem.

Our organization has over 21,000 agents running. Being able to monitor all those agents at the same time, with the ability to be alerted when thresholds are exceeded. We can know when we are having problems without having dedicated people to watch monitoring screens all the time.

I would like the ability to see a full end-to-end path of a transaction. I know the next version will be getting closer to that. I’d also like to see it get to the root cause of the issue faster.

Some of the visual aspects of the current version and reporting need to be improved. I know that you are fixing all this. It's a little harder to do some of this because I know so many of the things that are coming up.

Stability is pretty good. They are improving it with every version. I'm hoping that when the latest version is out, we will have a really stable environment that we can rely on 100%.

It is very scalable. As I said before, we're running more than 21,000 agents in all of our development operations. We feel that it could scale very well by just adding more servers and enterprise managers.

Technical support is very responsive. They will work with us to solve any of the issues that we are encountering.

I'm the administrator for our environment, so I do all the installations for our environment and also set it up. The setup is fairly straightforward. There is some complexity to understanding some of the tuning mechanisms that you can do to it. But that's with any enterprise-level software.

You definitely need to understand the size of your environment. Try to get a plan together before you start implementing it. It is a big help because then it goes a lot smoother.

The most valuable features for us are the visibility it provides, increased production, Command Center, and WebView.

As our production increases, we have visibility of everything that's going on, especially since we run a lot of applications and we're able to monitor all of them. If something goes wrong, CA APM plays the primary role in helping us perform root-cause analysis.

I have a hard time upgrading CA APM. When I upgrade from one version to another, everything must be done manually. If CA either had or let user create a tool to help with the upgrades, that would be a great improvement, specifically with something like a net command or automatic update.

We've been using it for almost 5 years.

We've had no issues with deployment. It's the upgrades that are the issue.

It's a stable product. We've had no issues with instability.

It needs to scale according to the CS support set and we can scale it as our needs require.

CA support is a little bit slow. I usually check with the CA community first before opening any support ticket. It takes a long time because support is based in Plano, TX, and the time zone difference causes a delay in them providing us a response that I can implement the next day.

Doing an upgrade is very complex, but afterwards the product operates in a very straightforward manner.

It'll build your confidence in your application server or whatever application you're monitoring.

• Provided greater visibility to IT regarding necessary actions on its governance and relationship with suppliers and business areas. In the previous scenario, IT was surrounded by tools, but did not possess a vision focused on quality of service delivery and end-to-end. With the adoption of CA APM, we have accurate mapping, we're updated on what supports each business service and what, when, where an incident occurs and how it affects the business.
• Regained credibility of IT's role as a driving force for improvements result in greater business performance. In the previous scenario, IT was surrounded by tools, without any integration which forced us to dispense resources with a late result and sometimes without solving the issue. With the adoption of CA APM, there was a change in the relationship of the areas of IT, its own role and value to the success of the business.

The features which were instrumental in our choice of CA APM include:

• The options that we have to create use cases providing synthetic vision when applicable to the needs of the business
• The ability to accomplish the identification of the root cause of problems with applications in drill-down level by integrating the suite with tools for managing and monitoring.
• The existence of components for collecting information from other platforms and applications.

From my perspective, as I had the opportunity to evaluate CA APM compared to other vendors, one of the improvements we highlighted which would be necessary to improve the targeting interface is to make it more user-friendly and current.

No.

No.

We selected CA APM as opposed to other solutions in the market because it has a solid install base and is notorious for integration with other products including monitoring platforms, service desk and ERPs. We had the challenge of promoting a radical change of posture of the IT organization from reactive to proactive. One of the biggest factors was that the impact was a heterogeneous IT environment!

It was a simple initial configuration. In order to minimize impacts on the operations of the business, a strategy was adopted taking into account the application of low-impact stretching forward to the greatest impact. During this process there were continuous disclosure processes and changes to management which enriched the lessons learned that contributed significantly to the achievement of success.

The implementation was carried out by the CA team. We had difficulty finding professionals to deploy and maintain the solution in Brazil.

I also evaluated AppDynamics, BMC Software, Compuware - Dynatrace and Microsoft – SCOM Avicode

To have a proper result, consider:

• Spend time to do a proper mapping of your business processes, interfaces, dependencies carried out and the support (IT). In certain situations we are faced with a fragile and inadequate monitoring which doesn't amount to any APM!
• Any APM tool will not perform a miracle, it will only be an instrument with other existing tools, which should have processes and people behind them to reach the desired results. In our case, success occurred only when there was a fusion of interests and efforts of the areas of IT infrastructure and systems development.

This is a very particular vision of the existing IT environment in Brazil, however one can not generalize based on this.

Before APM, all the support/information diagnostic retrieval was post-mortem. Logs retrieval with tons and tons of useless info would generate a report after several days of an issue, with no clue as to a root cause, but with several hypotheses on what was it. Now, different teams can get info even before the system crashes and can take proactive steps and find the exact point to focus their efforts to fix it.

Also, not only are the main services now monitored, but the main website with no transactions at all are included. This helps us to monitor customer experience and verify the correct functions.

There are several types of products implemented and on each one there are different features used to remark the value of it:

• In an initial pilot it helps with Error Collection, Transaction Traces, and providing general info such as Average Response Time and Responses per Interval.
• Once it's implemented with application and backend services. After the initial feedback, almost all the other app owners start to review all the info compiled from the Application Performance Monitoring (APM) platform and they also check if their architecture maps are as stated and found by APM.
• Service maturity when you can retrieve the normal metrics for every major aspect of each module and delivering this info to the correct eyes.

They need to add support for new frameworks, or at least provide a broader guide/perspectives to add them to monitoring specific agents to retrieve metrics with thresholds as a reference to guide the customer as to where they must go to achieve this.

The only issue is when the customer platform is really old. For example, where people are using client server apps developed on Delphi 1.0.

There are more issues with the app monitoring itself, since the architecture can be a little bit confusing, and in some ways even incomplete on paper. Several times after an implementation, there are a lot of other services involved and supporting the main app with the service owner not knowing, or to the contrary, the documentation doesn’t include this info.

Excellent, they are always calling and resolving issues. If there is a need to escalate it internally to get a fix or a workaround, they will do it quickly.

Several customers were using others like IBM Tivoli or an HP solution, but they don't offer an easy way to quickly check the state of the monitored app. Also, they didn’t offer a good customer experience.

Everything is swift and smooth, even when a PoC is developed, it only takes five days to complete.

I just implement it and make it work to fit the customer requirements

We didn't look at anything else.

You need to check the requirements, such as the network ports, traffic forwarding, and the supported apps. Do not be afraid of the initial response from the stakeholders, and they will quickly become supporters.

It’s used internally to help us get a grip of our infrastructure environment, including datacenters, network, applications, voice solutions etc. and to help serve over 10,000 customers utilizing the CA framework.

In-depth functionality, standard available reports and the dashboard.

Standard available reports provide us with an automatic insight into the top ten situations to watch. It would have been extremely difficult to program such a report ourselves, and to my knowledge no other competitor can match this functionality.

Dashboards are easy customizable and vary per persona, thus showing different kind/levels of information.

User interface - CA is moving towards HTML5, but still a lot is Java, old fashioned, non-customizable and not user friendly. It’s look and feel is still too technical.

No issues if you make sure you align the underlying infrastructure with the capacity needed.

It’s very scalable.

Customer Service:

9/10

Technical Support:

8/10

We have had numerous solutions. We are in a process of moving over towards the CA framework.

Complex, deep functionality matching with business requirements and design of platform.

We implemented it in-house with the support of CA.

Depends on the size of the product you need.

We evaluated many other vendors. We considered AppDynamics APM.

Plan before you act. Do not fall in the pitfall that you have extensive user requirements and try to implement this at once in the tooling. Start small and simple and gradually expand.

CEM (Customer Experience Manager) and Introscope.

With CA APM, we can see the performance regarding the transactions of our applications and analyse the availability and quality of our environment to provide the best experience for our clients. With this product, it is possible to resolve the problems faster because all of the features are connected.

For diagnosing problems, and considering that all products are connected to CA APM, it could indicate in the initial view or dashboard which layer - front end, middleware, back end - is most likely the source of the problem. Today, we can find the problem, but it requires three or more clicks.

Regarding creating dashboards, CA APM needs an enhancement to support building models in HTML5.

More than 2 years

Sometimes, the solution uses Java and this means you need a great environment to deliver high performance.

With CA APM, you can’t scale the ‘webview’ (Team Center), the feature that provides you with the views/dashboards. To do this, you need to build a new environment and start manually.

On a scale from 1-10 (1=worst, 10=best), I rate technical support a 6.

We switched because the product we used before CA APM didn't show application/transaction performance.

It was simple.

The price of the product is close to other similar products, but I think CA needs to change the licensing options because of the high price.

Oracle BPM, IBM Tivoli BSM, Compuware BSM, and BMC.

Get input from your different IT areas. Get help from your IT operations and, more importantly, get help from your business/production IT areas to map how critical it is to monitor applications and your transactions.

Most important is transaction traces, and we appreciate the integration with service tools like SOI, the ease of creating Dashboards and in the new version the team center.

The mean time to resolve has reduced dramatically since we started using CA APM Introscope. We found it very important for our DevOps strategy for resolving issues and for pre production tests.

Standalone workstation interface is most of the time slow. The licensing model and the prices are above the average.

3 years.

Yes, as any implementation of this level we found issues, but nothing worth it and the support has been as expected.

At first we had some, but we had months running this solution without interruptions. As far as the scalability, it's an important factor.

This tool is scalable as expected, we had to make some fixes to metrics explosion, and afterwords we needed to add a couple of enterprise managers.

Above average. We always get answer in less than 15 minutes, and the personnel are very kind as well.

Very proactive and with noted knowledge about the specific topics. It is 24/7 with people all around the world.

We have New Relic as well for a specific monitoring need.

It is very complex indeed, but we always had support.

In-house.

The price is high and the licensing is restrictive.

Yes, IBM and New Relic.

The feature we've found most valuable in our daily use of it is the deep-dive analysis of Java-class transactions performance.

It's important that our managers are able to measure the SLAs of our applications. They're able to do that with APM as it provides both real-time and historical performance data so that adjustments can be made accordingly.

The biggest area of improvement of APM is with the GUIs. Many of them are quite clunky and dated. For example, there is the thin client which doesn’t have all functionality, and then there's the thick client which has three different modes -- investigator window, management module window, and console window.

I've used it for 18 months.

We've had no issues with deployment.

We have had issues with APM's stability, but it is sometimes hard to tell if this is due to our virtual infrastructure or in the product itself.

We have had some issues with historical metric limits as the agents get load balanced between collectors.

In our experience, technical support has been excellent. They have very good turnaround time and very good technical knowledge.

The company has used a different solution previously, but I haven’t personally.

The initial setup is complex. It’s a large suite of products that need to fit into a large, complex organization.

This is not something I deal with, but off-hand comments seem to indicate that it is more expensive than expected.

Dynatrace and a few others were looked at by my team. I wasn’t involved in the evaluation, however.

Keep the deployed agents up to date in a large organization. You’ll need mature automation and configuration processes and techniques.