Broadcom DX Application Performance Management Reviews

The transition to APM Team Center as the primary console in APM 10 will definitely be the most valuable feature.

The ATC shows a lot of potential on how we view performance metrics on the front-end and back-end connections in a single view.

An APM tool should have the capability to provide a high-level view of the monitored application and APM 10 is heading in the right direction by just doing that. A single-window view of performance metrics, timeline, applications, alerts and heat maps (DA) throw a lot of data to an engineer in a quick glance.

Another new feature may just have to be Entry Point Discovery. The capability of the agent to detect the application entry point and create custom pbd for this. Interesting concept of automatic discovery and prescriptive change.

CA APM strength is the Custom Instrumentation - just having the capability to capture performance metrics for classes and methods in the application makes this tool a elite candidate.

CA APM is the go-to tool for any performance-related issues. It is always there monitoring the non-production and production environment. It is becoming part of the DevOps stack and becoming a key support tool for Performance testing.

The tool has supported many times in identifying slow transactions and the bottlenecks in applications.

APM 10 has jumped leaps in feature improvement over the last few releases which in itself is an achievement.

The UI still feels a little outdated (though there is change) especially for Dashboards. New widgets and dynamic actions needs to be in place for this part of CA APM.

Integration with other DevOps toolsets. CA APM needs to provide easy integration capability with CI/CD and ALM tools which will provide strong value to all stages in an SDLC.

APM 10 Team Center provides a faster way to diagnose environmental issues and complements the existing APM WebView.

The enhancements related to Smart Instrumentation, Differential Analysis, and tracing will all contribute to enhanced troubleshooting during an issue and the ability to provide more intelligent alerting from the systems.

Implementation is underway currently, but there are various parts of APM 10 which will improve the use within the organization compared with APM 9.5.

Team Center requires a number of tweaks to allow per-user/group configuration to customize the interface for groups of users, though I believe these are already in the product roadmap.

In this version of CA APM team centre, everyone sees the same view of the server configuration. Ideally, groups of users would see a subset of the data which they are interested in by default. Currently, they can do this through filtering, but a user/group setup would allow pre-defined filters to be created for particular groups of users. Alternatively, users could be restricted to see a smaller section of the overall monitored services. In the current version, anyone who logs in sees everything, and can create their own filters.

I use it to track performance on the production environment and QA environment.

The time it takes to track problems in applications is the most valuable return that we have from this solution. 

The transactions rate feature is the most valuable feature. It shows the deep histories of everything that's running on an even transaction. That's why it is so useful.

I would like for them to develop a feature that controls .net agents remotely. It would be very useful and we don't have this feature now.

They need to improve the crossing over of data from large files and they should use LUNIX heavily. There's room for improvement there. 

I have a good impression of the stability. 

I use technical support a lot. They've performed well. They always respond quickly and they are assertive. We have had a good experience with support.

The initial setup was straightforward.

The quality of software is one of the main criteria that we consider when evaluating a solution.

I would rate it an eight out of ten. The reason it's not a ten is because they don't focus enough on improving over time like other competitors do who have a more modern and complete tool. 

They should develop the user experience so that you don't need to put in other agents. Today you have to use another host to bring up your vision. If they would have a single agent with all this information, it would be perfect.

• System incident analysis 
• Performance monitoring

We run a very large OLTP system: Six IBM AIX 780 high-end applications and DB servers. Daily transaction amount 100,000,000 per day.

WAS GC monitoring enhanced our application performance and DB SQL performance.

It is very useful and helpful with the analysis of historical performance data.

• E2E monitoring
• DB web WAS monitoring
• App crash report
• User customizing report
• DB connection usage from WAS

• System incident analysis
• Performance monitoring

Having implemented into production, we found that initially the application had quite a few incidents, alerts, and problems as we used monitoring to unearth some technical debt.

However, after implementing “smoke detectors” and resolving the technical debt, the applications have become much more stable, with fewer production incidents, fewer defects, higher reliability and quality of service.

Cross-platform business transaction tracing, custom triggers, thresholds and alerting, and deep dive root cause analysis are the most valuable features.

Cross-platform business transaction tracing supports the ability to monitor end-to-end performance across the stack, providing granular insight into customer experience KPIs, which are a critical success factor for organizations. Business transaction tracing also allows identification and drill down into problems within the stack, reducing the mean time to detect and resolve problems.

Developing custom triggers and thresholds for problem management allow the introduction of “smoke alarms”, which can prevent severity 1 system failures, improve productivity (fewer war rooms), and increase application stability, reliability, and performance.

I would like them provide more guidance on specific tuning of monitoring options to avoid unacceptable overhead. This has proven to be a little bit of a challenge, particularly in the cross enterprise CICS monitoring overhead, which we are currently working through with CA. They have been very helpful in advising us with this.

We have had stability issues. Not all applications are equal, and what works well for one app may not be applicable to another.

“Chatty” apps, excessive monitoring, or sampling can cause memory issues and server crashes resulting in a little bit of trial and error to determine monitoring levels that have minimal impact on performance and stability of environments.

We have not had any scalability issues.

Technical support is excellent.

Other parts of the organization are using Dynatrace, but both products are very capable.

The initial setup was relatively straightforward, with good documentation and technical support, both via email and on-site.

There is some research needed to determine licensing costs, based on the number of DataPower instances for the Nastel agent, for example.

We didn’t evaluate other options as this was pre-determined via our group administration.

• Make sure you sign up for the appropriate training
• Ensure you have dedicated on-site resources to implement, build, and maintain the tooling
• Make sure you extend training to the production support, developers, and business stakeholders
• Develop a monitoring and alerting strategy, with a supporting roadmap and pipeline for deployment across business-critical systems.

While out-of-the-box monitoring is relatively straightforward, the value comes from custom implementation of alerts and dashboards that focus on specific application functionality.

• Experience View: Provides a business-focused view. It answers the key question as to what is the customer experience, with a minimal amount of work required.
• Assisted Triage and Analysis Notebook: Answers the question as to why the experience is poor, without having to do all the manual digging around.

With Experience View, our operation team has all the required information in regards to the health and quality of transactions and applications. Thus, in turn, it improves collaboration and reduces the MTTR. It doesn’t require an expert to identify the RCA.

It needs to work on the mobility and the digital aspects, as they are currently getting merged in today’s scenario.

I have been using this solution for the past five years.

There were no stability issues, i.e., not with its current features.

We did experience some scalability issues, i.e., only at the mobility experience monitoring end.

I would give technical support a rating of 9/10.

AppDynamics and Dynatrace are equally good solutions.

The initial setup is straightforward. With the default dashboard and differential analysis, there is no need to configure static threshold. It starts to deliver the greater value to the customer from day one.

We are MSP partners, so we have been delivering the best licensing options for our own customers.

We looked at other solutions, namely AppDynamics and Dynatrace.

• Delivers an easy, proactive, intelligent, and collaborative (EPIC) solution
• Helps to deliver a flawless user experience
• Has end-to-end application monitoring coverage, i.e., from mobile to mainframe
• Available in the SaaS version

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.

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.