Broadcom DX Application Performance Management Reviews

The most valuable feature for us with APM is the depth to which you can go into the actual instances that are occurring. So, whether it's SQL or the Java agent, you're able to get really deep information.

We're just now adopting APM, but we anticipate that it'll be very helpful with level-3 and level-4 triage.

I'd like to see more source code at the exceptions level. I'd like to be able to get down to the actual code-class file and know what the issues are there. With APM, we stop at just a hair above that, but to be able to get down to that specific level would be nice. I'd like to be able to get that granular.

We've had no issues with deployment.

We've had some challenges in the integration with the agent. It's had some conflicts from a Java-server perspective, but outside of that it's been very stable.

No scalability issues so far. That's been fine.

I don't use tech support for anything. We have our own internal team.

I wasn't involved in the setup.

Take a look at what you're using it for because it's not for every application.

I think that the most important feature is the freedom to construct the workloads for the database size we need according to number of users, data, and other criteria. The process to build with this tool is easy and very user-friendly.

In our company, we have several simultaneous projects. We need the ability to manage all of them in terms of dates and costs when we deliver to our clients. APM allows us to analyze data and find problems that may affect delivery to them.

I think that the tool has all of the components we need, but the individual components could work better together to provide more accurate predictive analyses.

We've had no issues with deployment.

It's been very stable for me.

This tool has supported our growth anytime we've scaled.

Technical support is good. Importantly, they have a lot of experience with being discreet in our use of their services for our customers.

The initial setup was totally straightforward.

I have a certification background and have come to realize that nothing is perfect. But you should just buy it and use it as the tool is very, very good.

What CA APM really does is that it allows us to see the inside of the managed code application, taking our performance to a more mature level. We're able to see things as they start to load up before we have a failure.

I don't know if I would call it proactive, because typically in our environment, things move so quickly. Only upon post-analysis do you see the actual build-up. Only then can we act and we end up having to build in thresholds.

It's not as agile in keeping up with the direction that CA is pushing it. They're trying, but it's still two or three years behind the curve.

We're really looking at being able to deploy it, say, in the cloud. We'd like it to have automated deployment, self-instrumentation, and a self-generating dashboard.

There are a bunch of workarounds, but after a while, you're just applying Band-Aids to the platform.

We're using version 9.6 with some patches. We have not gone to 10 yet. We typically run shipping minus a version. We're getting ready to go to 10 because, I think, CA is getting ready to do another GA release of 10. We'll probably jump to 10 at that time, but we've got some preparation work for it.

We have had a lot of challenges with APM. We've been using it since it was called Wiley, and the CA team has been absolutely wonderful. They've really stayed with it, they've researched, they've helped us. We've gotten custom patches, custom solutions that then get worked into the next product release. It has been a difficult maturation process. Now we're in a really good spot in terms of stability. We're happy with it.

I've been with the company for about four years. There was an installation of Wiley that was kind of done haphazardly and we were having a lot of stability problems. I wasn't there at the very beginning of it, but we did take it from essentially a single-pointed presence to the size where it is today. According to CA, we're probably in the top five in terms of installations, so we're one of the big ones.

For us, we rarely -- I don't think we ever, actually -- call the 1-800 technical support. We have a lot of experience and knowledge in-house. We have our entire CA support team that ranges from executive level to the highly-technical level. We can normally within a day be in touch with a developer. A lot of times the problems that we have will blast through the help desk pretty quickly. Our CA support team is vital to the success with APM.

When we made the decision, at the time there were no other vendors in this space. Periodically, we do a reassessment of the portfolio. Unfortunately, CA did not do well recently.

Actually, folks who originally were with Wiley Tech, their start-up companies have finally matured enough to the point where we can seriously consider them as alternatives.

Vendors like AppDynamics and New Relic, we're starting to see more and more of our internal customers move away from the white-glove, fully-managed model to a staff solution where they're managing their own little pieces.

The APM piece is really good for deep-dive. It is, as we like to say, the Cadillac of APMs. It does everything. It goes very deep and very wide. It does take dedication and you have to have some dedicated resources on-site. You have to be able to know it, and you have to be able to work with the developers in order to properly instrument it. It's not something that you can just throw out there and expect for it to work in an afternoon. You do have to learn the product. If you do, there are a lot of good rewards for it.

We've found Team Center a very innovative and intuitive interface. It gives us the ability to link applications to other applications and services all the way down to the database.

We're just now upgrading to it, so we haven't gotten into Team Center a lot. For now, we've mostly been using Investigator in order to triage performance bottlenecks and other problems within our enterprise systems.

We've had some hits and some misses, but our successes have been well-noted. Overall, APM improves our total customer experience and reduces our operational costs.

That said, the downside for APM is, in our case, end-user acceptance and use. We're trying to expand to other departments, show them what the value points are, and show them that we can help them with their jobs, performance, and efficiencies. With version 10, CA shifted its marketing plan and its persona, and that's been rather disruptive. I'm hoping a good disruption, but a disruption to my end users, whom I'm still trying to get turned-on to performance monitoring improvements.

We'd like to see full integration of Unified Infrastructure Management to take over the infrastructure monitoring from APM. They should have APM sterilized away from the infrastructure using the custom scripts through the environment performance agents. CA should go over and use the technology from Nimsoft or Unified Infrastructure Management to gather that information and marry it up back to the application.

We're not really having issues. We're only half way through the total capacity that we've projected. We're currently at about 800,000 metrics. We originally wanted about two and a half million. We're getting there, slowly, but we're getting there.

We're hoping to scale it out to the entire IT staff with about 1200 total servers including a mainframe, which is massive, through four call centers. We've got it scaled to that, but it's our end users' uses of the technology in order to improve what they're doing in the varying departments that will ultimately determine how well it scales. And so far, so good.

We only had one main issue with our upgrade. It took longer than I would have liked. I pushed the issue up through our account manager, got a call, and within an hour, we got it fixed, though that took us a week-and-a-half to get to that point. We expected it to take an hour-and-a-half.

Other teams have their own products -- Splunk, NetFusion or NetQoS -- but we're slowly hoping to turn them over to CA.

When we first installed, it took us six months to install it and get it somewhat usable. Our upgrades, because we're having to step development or step environments, usually takes us about three months.

The step environment is where we do dev tests. This involves stress and QA cycles, and then production. Each one has to have a month to get everything installed, tested, and verified to make sure it doesn't impact our core applications.

We just now finished our Phase 2 upgrade to our second tier, which is our performance test environment and our QA two environments. It went really well. The reason why it took us a month to do our test was because we had to get everything lined up with CA support and to get the install and upgrade completed.

When we first installed, it took us six months to install it and to get it somewhat usable. Because we have to step development or step environments, it usually takes us about three months.

No other vendors were looked at. APM was part of an enterprise contract deal. We had several other CA products and CA offered APM as an add-on to our contract, which increased our costs, but the vice-president and CEO and CFO thought it would be worth it. It's been five years and we're doing pretty well.

The most valuable features are:

• It's simple to use,

• The interface is a light engine,
• It uses almost no Java, which for us is excellent.

It's provided us with consolidated reports and a monitoring dashboard. With the monitoring dashboard, it’s easy to monitor things all in one place.

Also, it's helped us greatly that the dashboard allows us to create very customizable views that give us the information we need to determine the overall status of network health.

I'd like more what-you-see-is-what-you-get functionalities. That is, I want more customizable features that require less back-end configuration.

Once we moved past the basic setup and customized it for our needs, there have been no issues with deployment.

It’s very stable. It at least works to the specs. But we plan to push the solution more and, eventually, find out more about it.

It’s scalable, but not right out of the box, even though we were told it was designed to be out-of-the-box scalable.

The support is superb. They have the technical knowledge, but you just have to get to the right person. They are very quick to respond and follow up as promised.

It was a management decision five years ago as they wanted to work with CA. It was because we wanted to keep our IT management software under one umbrella. This was a high-level decision.

The basic steps are straightforward, but there is probably more documentation for customized set-ups that they should provide. We needed support, so, yes, the basic setup was straightforward, but not in customizing it.

It was a management decision 5 years ago as they wanted to work with CA.

Research the logistics of the implementation specific to your needs. See how other customers are using it, so go to them and find out about implementation and see how it works in real life.

This solution gives feedback exactly the way that we need it with data specific to tasks, timelines, and analyses. It ensures we are making the most of our production and QA stages.

They tried to streamline the organization, that was the initial point of using APM. It led to so many internal changes, but it didn’t affect the organization much at all in the end.

But the good thing about the solution is there is little overhead. It has a very small footprint on the system and it doesn’t affect the performance of the CPU.

We will move to version 10.1 when the time is right, but we're exploring our options for something that will in-fact streamline our organization.

We have no issues deploying it.

It’s very stable. We haven’t had a single problem with this product.

This solution is entirely scalable from our point of view.

I think it’s very good, you can talk to them and you get good support. We have never had an issue with the support from CA.

We used when it was still Wiley Interscope. Then they were then bought by CA, so it was a natural progression into the CA product.

The setup was quite complex initially. They came to us and worked with us in-house, which was great to learn from them.

We have had big discussions about changing, but we have recently decided not to. We are staying with them for now.

I recommend that they should look at their options deeply.

It helps us to monitor our infrastructure by providing us insight into issues and giving us metrics for various data points.

It helps us to troubleshoot issues or to isolate issues faster, and we can then take the appropriate actions to resolve those issues.

Mainly, what we are seeing are problems with our ability to manage all the agents across the board. That's just one of the problems we are seeing with this solution.

I wasn't involved with deployment.

We've had no issues with APM and it has, in fact, been quite stable for us.

We had no problems scaling it.

I haven't yet had to use technical support for APM.

I wasn't involved in the setup.

APM is quite nice, especially with the new features in version 10. It's quite an impressive solution, and you should give it a shot.

The most valuable features are performance monitoring and alerting. You can set baselines and anything above them will trigger an alert.

The monitoring tool is able to monitor many teams at a time. We also use it to monitor our web agent. It’s also Java-based and versatile.

The documentation could better. It doesn't provide good descriptions of what some data are doing, and there's no good place to see what all the data might mean. You just kind of have to understand how everything works and make your own interpretations and draw your own conclusions.

It’s great, there are no issues with stability. We've just installed it, turned it on, and it just runs.

There are no issues there. It’ll run on as many platforms as you can run it on.

Technical support is quick to respond and very knowledgeable.

I was not involved in the initial setup, but I've not heard that it wasn't anything but straightforward.

CA is great to work with, but to use it, just learn the product suites and how they interact. Make sure you have a good layout and make sure you have everything you need.