Broadcom DX Application Performance Management Reviews

• Historical metrics
• Transaction tracer
• Dashboards

We can monitor several application in the same manner and same site.

• Presentation
• Integrations
• Historical metrics management

We've been using it for nine years.

We sometimes have issues with deployment.

We sometimes have issues with stability,

We sometimes have issues depending on how many agents are involved.

7/10

6/10

There was no previous solution in place.

Initial setup is easy, but after that it needs a very complex tuning that is easier in other tools.

We used both a vendor team and our in-house team. The level of expertise was very nice, but it was lower during the first implementation without CA's involvement.

It is similar in pricing to its competitors.

• Dynatrace
• AppDynamics

Take a nice view of the metrics you are getting, and specifically instrument only all the methods you need.

Its ability to deep dive into the application code is the most valuable feature for us. It has help us to be more proactive instead of reactive when it comes to incident management.

It's improved our ability within the instant management realm. We are able to get the root cause faster than we had done before. We had to uninstall it two years ago, it was a matter of looking through log files and then making basically and guessing as to what the root cause was. It allowed us to avoid the same incidents occurring over and over.

Continued improvements with the integration of the URL and the ability to use AWS would be great. Understand that it may at first potentially break your application, but it might just be a case that maybe it's just poorly written and it's not Interscope that's the issue.

We've been using it for about eight years.

We ran into all kinds of problems and most of it was because of just the onboarding as our new-product education was a huge issue.

It's pretty stable. I just don't think that we've done a very good job of lifecycle management of the product.

We've had no issues with scalability.

We had nothing in place previously.

The setup was straightforward, but the interaction of it initially with our applications was the tough part. We needed to make sure the instrumentation itself did not break our application.

We did use some professional services to assist us in getting both the buy-in and in helping us to set up some bells and whistles to really get people excited about the product.

Our ROI is the fact that our applications have the ability to stay up longer because we are more proactive in how we monitor and performance test our applications so that when they go to market, they're fully functional.

I was not part of the process at that time.

If you purchase this product, work closely with their technical teams to help plan and deploy it. Make it as much of a repeatable process as possible.

The ability to quickly create alarms, actions, and dashboards is very valuable to us.

We have a key APM dashboard that is the primary dashboard utilized by IS Operations Center. We use it to evaluate the health of our primary customer and associated impacts on the application suite.

The documentation on customizing instrumentation of methods and classes (derivative files) could be improved, as well as some of the documentation interfacing into other APM products (ADA, CEM, ABA).

We've used it for three-and-a-half years.

Excessive errors in the application being monitored caused us to back off the level of monitoring due to the amount of traces being gathered.

The application has been very stable for us.

We've not had any issues with the scalability.

Customer service is excellent. Every time we have opened an issue, it is resolved quickly.

Technical support have a very high level of knowledge.

There was no previous solution in use.

The initial setup was straightforward. The biggest issues were getting internal people knowledgeable about the application to assist with defining methods and classes for instrumentation.

We used a CA team for implementation who were outstanding.

You should be aware when dealing with VM guests that you are required to license the entire VM host.

We also looked at Oracle Enterprise Manager.

Have your team who will operate be actively involved in the implementation. Get your application and infrastructure teams actively engaged in utilizing it for troubleshooting and analysis.

The Introscope feature is the most valuable for us, specifically the part that shows us errors in the application.

We are a government IT company that provides services to the government. Because of that, we're required to use a very wide range of products and applications. We also need to have a multitude of interconnections with diverse systems, and one of the biggest difficulties we had was how these interconnections were made. CA APM has provided us a solution for this, allowing us to discover the root cause of some speed issues we had in the systems that were very difficult to diagnose.

• Report
• Management module
• Dashboards

I've used it since January 10, 2014.

We can't implement the TIM in our environment because we have issues with a virtualized environment. VMware and TIM was not thought of in a way that could receive the data in a cloud environment.

There were issues, but we have fixed them now.

There have been no issues scaling it.

10/10

10/10

It's very simple, as we are an IT company and we are accustomed to new system implementations.

We did it through a sales team, and without their support we would not be as we evolved in APM as we are today.

We did tests with AppDynamics, but had to discard the use of this software because to do analysis of a user experience we had to submit the data to the US, and then only return with the answer.

Prepare a team to manage this tool, as if you don't have a full team to review the APM data, it will not work as it should.

We are using APM for troubleshooting and because of this product, the delay to solve and to fix issues has been reduced by 40% on average. We also use the APM data to analyze and predict if an application will work.

For us, the application is a new eye on the same data. Its quality and the way we access it is going to make the difference between an application you keep using and an application you won't. There are a lot of DevOps methodologies to improve the time to market and to deploy applications quicker. Sometimes it's not enough because at the end, the application expands some issues and the isolation of a root cause is quite complicated. We analyze about 3,000 incidents and predictions, classify them, choose our toolbox, including APM tools (the CA APM solution), and we are able to predict, to anticipate incidents and to assess a risk for an application to go live.

An application is quite complicated in the environment of a software reliability engineer, because our applications are like a black box. Thanks to CA APM we are able to transform this black box to a gray box by using the transaction trace functionality services. For me it's the most valuable service of the solution.

The product displays some graphics and sometimes we want to have some different metrics in the same graphic but it doesn't display in the same scale, so it's quite complicated to see the metrics. If the product would be able to manage a double scale, it would be perfect.

We measure the limit of a solution by the number of users. The application is developed in Java and only 10 to 15 users can connect to the application. It's quite a limit for massive deployment in a huge company like Orange.

Our scalability is great because you can add servers. It works.

I don't use support, I do everything myself.

It was the only tool in 2006 to provide the transaction trace feature. As mentioned before, it transforms an application from a black box to a gray box, that's why we knew that we needed Introscope (now CA APM).

It was quite easy. The solution is easy to deploy and we had the support of a vendor team.

We deployed it on 5 or 6 applications and now it's deployed for over 200 applications.

• APM status console
• Traces
• Triage Map
• Application overview tab
• Dashboards

CA APM always helps in finding problems quickly rather than requiring us to check logs to pin-point the issue. The turnaround time to resolve the issues has improved after we started using CA APM.

Also, by looking at the dashboards, application teams are able to find the problematic component by just having a quick look at traffic lights and dial meters.

SmartStor database requires lot of improvement where we need to have an admin console to maintain the SmartStor DB. The functions that we'd like are removing data based on time and removing selected metrics for specific agents in an easier manner.

Also in terms of capacity, I would expect CA APM to handle quite larger metric load than the current architecture. For instance, our applications teams expect a single collector to handle thousands of agents with heavy metric load as well.

We've used it for five years.

There were no issues and deployment was very smooth.

If proper CA recommendations are followed, there is no issues in stability. But CA should consider the capacity issues. There are times where capacity is reached and we face performance issues where the system becomes unstable.

We've had no issues on scalability because CA APM is able to scale up well and good on increasing load. But when capacity is reached, the system breaks completely.

The customer service was fantastic.

The technical support is good in guiding in the right directions to figure out the root cause of APM so quickly.

We used a vendor team to implement it.

CA APM is a nice performance monitoring software, especially if an organization wants to monitor the end-to-end architecture of an application.

It monitors the environment from mobile to mainframe. The user interface is prescriptive to understand the problems rapidly without any technical knowledge.

• Thread & Method level tracing from within the app engine (JVM or .NET) from Introscope Agent
• Easy isolation of business transaction defects from CEM
• Fantastic delineation & TCP analysis from ADA

Introscope was our first modern APM tool, and the application deep dive capability gave us visibility into behaviours of requests from within the app engine & code. CEM was the first Business Transaction monitor that could report response times for every data hop. ADA reports TCP statistics that are app specific but still match command line output NW Engineers expect, and the tool revitalized a difficult relationship between app monitoring teams and Network support experts.

The main improvement areas for all three tools in CA APM are licensing, licensing and support. CA APM Introscope agents are licensed by CPU count which is fine for 1995, but in 2016 CPU is a less applicable measure for modern virtual and cloud hosting environments – not to mention MF IFLs used instead of CPU for zLinux.

CA APM licensing for CEM is tied to Agent licenses, and this prevented my team from leveraging it separately for broader benefit. The rationale from CA was that CEM was most valuable when integrated with Introscope, which is true. However, CEM has value on its own and could have justified additional spend on agents if we were allowed to configure it to capacity and use it broadly even where no agents were deployed.

ADA is not truly integrated with CA APM suite, and there should be both real-time data feeding from Collectors into APM consoles (not CAPC) & historical data from all APM tools in a single reporting repository (not separate DBs).

Go ahead and buy CA Professional Services, but expect CA to continue asking for additional purchases to deliver on committed APM functionality. Their APM solution is already one of the most expensive, and the extra spend should give you enough weight to get what you've paid for - support without hidden price tags.

If you have a large web firm or a group of servers, it does a great job of aggregating performance metrics into single viewable graphs or dashboards.

We're primarily using it for production-system monitoring of application errors, slowness, things like that. I identify issues for our customers.

It's a very manual process, I believe, in the current version that we're using, which is 9.5. So you have to spend a lot of time analyzing the metrics to determine what thresholds you want alerts on. For example, you want response time for an application. You have to baseline that response time and then develop your systems around those. Sometimes the baselining is more difficult because you have an expectation of a response time to be slower during some periods of times than others, and you don't want to set off false alarms. So it would be great if that process did not have to be done manually.

There's a lot of improvements that could be made. I think the newer versions that are coming out go a long way towards that. Back to the baselining thing, there's a lot of automated baselines now, and they provide differential analysis of whether or not something's going wrong as compared to how it normally should be running.

Also, it could use better views into the system, of a transaction flowing through the system.

It takes a long time to get it set up and configured in your applications and running. And out of the box, what I have found is that when you take the system, if you just drop it on your application, the overhead of the agents and the monitoring and the collection of all the data is out-of-the-box, and it's too much and will impact your application. So, what we have done, in the most recent deployment, is gone to a very scaled-back version of the application and sort of added in until we were satisfied that we were collecting the data that we needed, and balancing that with not impacting the application to the customers.

For the most part, it's been stable. It's an agent product, so there's agents out on the servers. We've found that they run in services. There has been situations where the agent will disconnect or things like that, and then we're not getting metrics until someone notices it.

I'm using it primarily for our front-end websites and our mobile-banking sites. So we're probably running 250,000 clients through the system.

Technical support is really good. I'm very happy with them.

It wasn't my decision. When I joined the company, they already had it, but they weren't using it. So, some of the applications that I was responsible for, I saw that we could leverage it and so I began using it.