Broadcom DX Application Performance Management Reviews

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.

One of the great features of CA APM is the analysis of application performance problems. This allows us to find problems quickly so that we can resolve them before larger issues arise.

It helps speed up the identification of the cause of performance problems, making us more efficient in terms of cost and time spent resolving issues.

I think that the agent installation process needs to be streamlined. It could be a lot easier. In fact, it would be even better if it could be automated and allowed for remote installation.

I've used it for five years.

We had no issues with the deployment.

We have had no stability issues.

There have been no issues scaling it for our needs.

The technical support is good. We have always had good interactions when we've needed them.

We did not use any other solution.

The initial setup is very simple. We had no problems whatsoever with it.

We implemented it on our own with our in-house team.

Once you try it, you'll see that this product is easy to use.

• The detail it provides, allowing teams to perform root cause analysis effectively
• The proactive monitoring and automated alerting
• Dashboards tailored to specific roles/users
• The ability to integrate, allowing for more of a complete picture

MTTR has greatly improved. Teams are now better focused on the cause of application performance issues, much earlier into any event. Additionally, development teams now leverage the data gathered in lower environments to ensure that a better quality product reaches production.

I think CA is on the right track. They’ve listened to their customers. They are working on making the product so that the data is more effective, the interface is more intuitive, allowing users to use the product successfully with less need for training or for monitoring teams to be experts in their applications. Work is also underway to improve the tasks of administration and deploying/maintaining agents.

I've used it for four and a half years.

My experience with stability issues have been mostly “self-inflicted”; poor configuration, insufficient hardware etc.

Only in instances where recommended limits regarding agents/metrics were exceeded.

8/10

No other solution has been used.

A mixture of both. The installations are pretty straightforward. Determining sizing, agents, agent configuration, upgrading, migrations, etc. can be more complicated.

Determine what needs to instrument/monitored based on priority, then work with your sales contact to determine options.

The product was being utilized when I was first exposed to it.

Understanding your needs, and having a thorough plan and buy-in from stakeholders is essential. Additionally, utilize your CA partner, their knowledge and experience will fast-track being able to leverage your APM solution.

Most valuable features and characteristics for me are:

• Quick setup and good out-of-the-box value provided
• Usable interface and navigation
• Variety and value of the provided metrics
• Qualified and motivated Support services
• Customization options, you can monitor almost everything with EPAgents

Most of our customers use the tool mainly for incident diagnostic and incident early detection. In this sense, I know that is quite useful for customers. Sometimes it is used to validate results of stress tests before going to production.

In my opinion the are some areas for improvement:

• CEM setup is significantly more complex to set up than Introscope, more automation of transaction detection will be useful.
• Command Center should be integrated in the Web environment and the server part should be integrated in the MOM.
• Support for commercial solutions (Oracle Coherence, e-Business Suite and other market leading solutions) is sometimes limited. Official fieldpacks from CA can surely improve this point.
• TeamCenter needs a little more maturity, although I know it is a new feature. CA is working on it. CA should provide new use cases for this new feature in order to adopt the new Team Center.
• End-to-end visibility of transactions in complex environments is not always satisfactory (for instance, transactions crossing OSB).

I've been using it for the last seven years.

Overall, we've had no issues with deployment.

I think stability of the CA APM software is one of the strong points of the solution.

We have managed environments up to five Enterprise Manager instances which can be considered a middle-sized environment. We have not find any problem with scalability.

SLAs are great. Technical level of the technicians is quite good and the level of motivation in resolving cases is very valuable.

It is the first APM suite that I have used.

The setup is quite straightforward, but in middle-sized environments it could be long. It would be interesting to have some kind of “cheat sheet” to hasten the initial setup, especially for non-experienced consultants. Documentation is good, but it can be costly to read.

This is a management role, but as far as I know pricing is in line with other top market tools.

No other options were evaluated.

I would advise them to look for an experienced partner, have clear objectives and expectations of what they need, and take a time to obtain the most of the tool.

It gives us a 360 degree view of application performance. We can see the frontend, backend, middleware transactions, and URLs all in a single dashboard.

I have personally audited the number of incidents opened for the Application Support Team before I implemented CA APM for one of my clients. The incidences raised by end users for application performance-related issues decreased from 1700 per quarter to 250 per quarter. CA APM/Wily was proactive in its monitoring.

It needs better documentation to help make the implementation easier.

We've been using it for five years.

The issues during deployment were with the documentation. Documentation needs to be improved.

It is the most stable tool I have ever used. We've had no issues with instability.

We didn't have any issues scaling it to our needs.

I rate technical support a 9 out of 10.

There was no solution in place previously.

The initial setup was a little tricky, and not too easy.

We're implementation partners.

We also looked into Aternity.

You should just go for it.

The ability to deep dive into the root cause of any given issue has always been the most valuable feature. JAVA and .NET applications are black boxes without any sort of monitoring. Being able to determine which component is causing the issue helps to pinpoint the issue and allows the triage teams to focus on the actual component causing the issue. The feature that helps the most in the triage is the transaction trace component. The transaction trace feature allows us to look all the components that are called during a particular transaction.

When there is an outage or performance issue, the on-call teams are called to a conference line where we can triage the issue. Before APM was used, these calls would require all areas of support, which include network, server team, middleware, database and any other areas of expertise. Now, the Incident Management team has a set of APM dashboards that allow them to narrow down the issue and call the specific team(s) to the bridge call. One of the first questions that is asked now on the bridge calls is, “What does APM show?” For example, if it was a database issue, we can tell which query or stored procedure is having the issue.

One of the areas that I think needs improvement is the central management of the agents. I know that CA has started working toward this in its current releases with APM Command Center, but it still has a long way to go. One of the hardest things about the upgrades is upgrading all of the agents.

Another thing that is difficult is when you need to make a configuration change to a set of properties, it has to be done manually.

I believe all these things are on the future road map of the product, but right now they are a major hurdle for us.

I have used this product personally for over 15 years. I have used it at three different companies which include a utility company, banking institution and a healthcare insurance company. The current company that I work for has used it for over eight years, and we recently upgraded to v10.1.

There have been no issues with the deployment.

The overall stability of the product is very good. The only time I normally see issues is right after an upgrade. Sometimes a few tweaks are necessary to stabilize everything after an upgrade. It might require a small change to the EM configuration or an agent configuration change. This is normally because of a new feature that was introduced.

We have not had any issues with scalability. We have been able to add Collectors as needed to support the growing number of agents that we support. I think in comparison to some other APM users we have a pretty small footprint. We have a staging and production environment. Each environment has one MOM and seven collectors with about 400 agents.

The level of support has been like a rollercoaster ride. Early on when it was owned by Wily, the service was great, but right after the purchase by CA it when downhill. I generally try not to go to support unless I have to, but I must say over the past six months, it has improved greatly. My cases have been handled very well and escalated to higher-level engineers when necessary.

There was nothing in place previously.

The initial setup was very straightforward. We only had three collectors with only about 120 agents. When we first starting using the tool, we only used the Introscope component. Overtime, we added the CEM and Synthetic Monitoring tool. So it got more complex over time but at each step we had the right support from CA to help us through the difficult parts.

I personally don’t deal with the pricing and licensing, so I don’t have anything to offer here.

It is a great product but not quite perfect. My advice would to be make sure you have a champion on the user side. It is a hard sell in my opinion if you don’t have someone from the application support side that will help sell the tool. It doesn’t do anyone any good if you have a monitoring tool and no one uses it.

• Quick triage of problems without finger pointing
• Proactive preventing of problems due to alerting and historical trend analysis
• Acceptable performance overhead in production environment
• Very flexible and extendable monitoring in accordance to business needs, possibility to instrument self-written frameworks, dynamic BCI (byte code instrumentation)
• Tacing of transactions accelerates the triage time
• Easy to install and to configure

We have reduced the triage times and don’t need long lasting analysis any more. It is one of the reasons we could improve and accelerate our development and operations procedures.

We don’t have performance bottlenecks or leaks in production any more. We act proactively to prevent their occurrence.

The main analysis is performed in a QA environment. We can eliminate the majority of problems concerning wrong configuration or capacity planning and even code errors before they go into production. We’re continuously working on improvement of our development and operations and Introscope helps us on this way.

• Automation of monitoring configuration for all applications
• Differential analysis

We've been using it for eight years, since 2008.

We didn’t have any performance problems or downtime with the tool.

This isn't an issue as it's possible to configure Introscope Enterprise Manager as a distributed high available cluster environment.

It's good to very good.

We switched to Introscope because of bad usability of our previous solution and its very restricted features. The price vs. service proportion was better on this product.

It was straightforward.

I’m responsible for technical solution, but not for account management. In my opinion the right investments return the favour.

Involve not only operations, but also development teams in order to get the best possible visibility in your applications’ performance.

The most valuable feature of APM is gaining insight into the application performance so we can proactively take actions before the customer calls to report an issue.

We have used CEM to get insights into what the user is actually experiencing.

There needs to be more ability to report on the performance of the applications, so you could easily have a report run and give you all your performance stats for an application at the end of the month, or week, or after a release. This currently is not easily done, and you can’t schedule it.

In the beginning, there were issues operationalizing CA APM to work with our company. I wasn't involved at the time, though.

We have encountered issues with stability when best practices were not followed. It became more stable after using best practices.

We haven't had issues scaling it.

I'd rate customer service an 8 out of 10.

Technical support is an 8 out of 10.

I was not working in APM when we brought it in, so I don’t know for sure if it replaced anything.

I wasn't involved in the setup.

It was implemented with a vendor team.

We have an ELA with CA APM and it is very competitive with their competitors from that perspective.

Our company did evaluate another option, but I was not involved at that time.

Make sure to test as many application types as you can in your POC phase so you can work out issues early in your implementation. Also, make sure load tests are included in that testing.