Broadcom DX Application Performance Management Reviews

My use case is that we have system called "Systemwalker", so we are trying to collaborate that product with APM. We are trying to use the triage of the APM, and we are still evaluating that system. 

It is performing okay. We are waiting for the new release. They have not released that yet. 

We want to sell the project in Japan. We have users in Japan. By combining the APM and our product, CA can sell it. 

We are a partner. We bring our customers to CA, and they can sell the product. Recently, CA is focusing on customers in Japan, the Fujitsu customers. 

The triage can find the root cause for pent up issues.

I created my own program to test the triage, and it works.

It should be easier to install or set everything up. 

I think that they are trying to add the artificial intelligence to the triage, so we are waiting for that. 

We are doing the PoC phase, so we have not done any of that kind of stability test. 

Not sure.

We have used the Japan CA team. They are helping us. They have been helpful and responsive.

We are also in contact with the people in Santa Clara, and they are also helpful.

We tried, but we could not do it ourselves. Japan CA did the initial setup themselves. They were helpful.

We have just so many settings. We could not figure out what were the right settings. We could not get the data fast in store. 

No. The president, my boss, told me to test APM, and find a solution with our product. 

If people are looking for the solutions from a big company, maybe I would recommend the CA. 

We are using multiple functions like monitoring applications, files, storage, and DBs.

Performance is very good.

It helps us change from being being reactive to proactive.

We're working in a huge environment. It enables me to cover all functionalities and monitor all selected elements over multiple servers, multiple applications, multiple IT resources, and to cover multiple users.

There are some issues, including required additional features. But we're not prepared to list them here.

It's stable, it's good enough.

It needs more features, more performance, especially in a huge environment.

We get support from Future Systems, a CA partner. The support is good. Sometimes the response is quick. We are working in a bank, a huge bank, with multiple branches related to the main center. When there is trouble, when there are problems, a business interruption, we need fast support, immediate support, strong support. Future Systems, in our opinion, covers this, but only somewhat. We would rate them "good" to "very good."

Our CA partner suggested we use this product.

Somewhat easy, but some steps were more difficult. It's easy if you install using the default settings. When customizing the installation, you need multiple scales and more knowledge.

When choosing a new vendor the important things for us are the product and the company's reputation.

It's not a 10 out of 10 because the list of features we need. We're always looking forward. But it does cover most of what we need.

We recommended this product to two other banks and both purchased it. We have also recommended it to several other banks.

We are using it for application performance management (APM).

For example, before each upgrade of critical mission application, we have the APM set for prep, and all administrators can do a stretch test, and they see how applications are working under the load. It is great, because they see which part of the code, network, or any programs on the database are slow. We are using it, not for productions, for the testing in pre-production.

We are using the web view for the displaying the data and interpreting the dashboarding for the customer.

The product fits its functions. The presentation layer is nice for me. However, what I would like to improve is its integrations with the dashboarding of other CA products.

It is very stable. We have not experienced any crashes. If we have any performance issues, we just edit some manager and we can continue.

The scalability is really fast. Though maybe it should be faster. Maybe it is still some point for improvement for the APM if CA would provide some docker installation, this would make it even faster. 

Because the docker container is a coached service, and if it will have a some performance issue, we will automatically deploy the new docker installation and a new docker agent to the endpoint and do everything possible without installation. 

When I catch the right Level 2 engineer on the APM site, everything is fine, and I would give them an eight out of 10. They are great. 

If you will ask me about the general Level 1 support of the CA, and I would give them a two or three out of 10 because it takes a long time to get to them to focus on the program. Also, it takes a long time to redirect to the right Level 2 engineer. 

The setup is complex. It is a little bit difficult to explain to our customers what APM is because we have problems to find the right people on the customer site. CA could provide a simple explanation for the technical customers.

AppDynamics.

Anybody can work with the APM, because this solution is so flexible.

Right now, it is the standard product for the application performance management RAR. There a lot concurrent solutions from different vendors. It is a really good, stable, flexible product, but there are no special features when I compare it with with the other solutions from the other vendors. 

Before CEM, we didn't know when the users were having issues. We always learned about issues when the users called management and the managers informed us about the problems. That was an embarrassment.

With CEM, we call the users, help desk, and application support before a situation becomes problematic. Therefore, problems are deflected and embarrassments of not knowing what is happening are avoided.

The CEM (Customer Experience Manager) allows us to see user errors and proactively react to issues before they become problems.

Presentation and reporting should be improved. Very often, we use tools such as Kibana or Jaspersoft for dashboards and reporting on CA APM data because CA APM’s old interfaces do not reflect well in modern displays, compared to those new tools.

However, we are seeing an improvement with the introduction of Team Center. We would like to see the same type of graphics in the old reporting facility.

We have not had stability issues. The product is very stable and corrective maintenance is provided regularly.

We have not had scalability issues.

Support is average, but there is a great community that provides solutions almost instantly to any query.

We previously used IBM ITCAM.

It was a straightforward initial implementation. We started small and grew bigger.

Negotiate, negotiate, and negotiate.

We also evaluated IBM ITCAM.

Have a dedicated monitoring team.

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.

The monitoring features - transaction tractability and visibility.

Also, BRTM in v9.x and the differential analysis in v10 are valuable features that are very helpful in monitoring and maintaining the application performance.

In the market, the CA APM 10.x is already out and doing well. It is much improved and meeting customer’s expectations. Moreover, the implementation is bit complex for a distributed environment.

The tool has improved a lot and still updates are there on the way. It would be easier to understand if the components involved could be less about providing the same capabilities as it already does.

I have experience of approximately two-and-a-half years on CA APM.

The issue we faced was on sizing and implementing the APM architecture as it involves multiple components in a distributed environment.

The monitoring stats we get are only 70%-80% reliable. We cannot depend completely on the monitoring view provided.

I have experience in AppDynamics, BMC, and HP APM. It all depends upon the client’s requirements. I chose this product as it was fulfilling all the stated requirements.

We have implemented the clustered architecture of CA APM. Initially, there were less complexities but when it comes to distributed deployment, it was complex.

I have experience of implementation of in–house as well as through a vendor also. Both are equal, just experience and a clear understanding of all the tool components is a must.

Expected returns gained.

CA APM is a brand name. It is easy, proactive, intelligent and collaborative. All of these features leads every business transaction, it's a loyalty-building interaction.

• Very powerful and flexible suite of tools which provide great insight into application and network performance.
• The features we use most are the introscope agents and CEM real business transaction monitoring.

Introscope Agent management is very manual, although the next version is looking to improve on this situation.

Dashboards are powerful but clunky and time-consuming. Again, the next version is looking to improve on this.

CEM/ADA are extremely powerful, but they require a lot of networking knowledge.

The user management for these tools is poor and we've found the EEM product to help with this to be quite flaky. Again, this is due to be improved upon in the coming version.

Cloud Monitor system seems to be pretty good, although I haven't used it as much as the other components.

Architecture of the OPMS (on premises monitoring system), which integrates with Cloud Monitor, seems over-complicated and doesn't integrate well with the main system.

Approximately 1 year.

Customer Service is excellent. They're very fast and provide knowledgeable responses.

The support personnel I've dealt with have been very responsive and professional.

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.