Broadcom DX Application Performance Management Reviews

Environment Profile Agents. I consider this as a trump card of CA APM. We have written almost 20-30 customized scripts to monitor non-Java/.Net calls. We have incorporated DB queries, shell scripts, curl scripts into EP agents involving business specific metrics.

Agent customization. Writing custom tracers, although tedious, gives a lot of flexibility when it's required to capture business specific information from the method calls. Interesting use case that we have also involved a work around to monitor asynchronous calls using custom tracers which would otherwise be very difficult to trace.

Customer experience management plugins. CEM plugins are another important supplement to the business appetite when it comes to business transaction data. Basically we have entire HTTP dumps coming onto the system. If one knows how to extract useful information from it, we pretty much get the entire picture of what's happening on the customer side. CEM is also quite handy when JavaScripts are disabled, although these days JavaScript is not blocked anywhere.

Using a combination of CEM plugin and EP agents, we were able to derive business specific metrics like day/hour-wise revenue opportunity, day/hour-wise conversion, and failure along with the reason for failure. So basically, a customer is able to identify that since opening of business hours, how much revenue opportunities came to the application, how many got converted, and how many failed, along with the exact amount each opportunity carried. This is also possible using customized agents, but it becomes difficult when these values are part of an object and not direct arguments or return-type method.

CA APM has a steep learning curve as compared to other tools like Dynatrace and especially AppDynamics and New Relic, but in return it is very customization friendly. You can capture what is important and leave the rest, but it takes time to identify exactly what is important and what's not.

4 years

Agents with certain customized applications can increase overhead. This then requires careful analysis and tuning. The probability for this case, though, is 1 in 100.

Stability becomes a issue if it's wrongly configured. Defining incorrect business transactions and irregular use of SQL normalization are common causes of instability.

Scalability is, I think, one of the strongest points of CA APM. You can control individual agents and control the infrastructure requirement at micro level. This reduces the chances of over expenditure of resources for the tool.

We deployed at a customer site where they were using ITCAM. It was incorrectly implemented, was cumbersome to deploy, and was not that efficient in providing deep-dive diagnostics.

Vanilla setup is easy and quick. It's easy to understand, too. Because it has so many customization options available, services generally end up writing customization. This can be simple to complex, but nothing is too complex here.

Custom Instrumentation is a good feature (instrumenting classes and methods).

The tools help us resolve issues with applications. For example, an application team had an issue with the slow average response time of their application. By using CA APM, we found an issue with backend calls, as well as with classes and methods within the code.

The web-view is a good app that needs to be improved. Also, it's a very useful tool but the architecture could be improved with better intelligence.

I've used it for one year.

No issues with deployment so far.

The tool is very stable and impressive.

One environment can only have a maximum of 10 collectors for supporting a maximum of 4000 agents.

They have very good technical support.

No previous solution was used.

It was a very straightforward setup.

We implemented it ourselves.

This tool has saved the organization a lot of money. I can see an improvement by a minimum of 3% in performance of any given application.

It depends on the requirements and varies accordingly.

We also looked at AppDynamics.

The architecture is very important, along with understanding your requirements.

The CA APM Introscope part is a must. We use is it as well in pre-production for deep dive diagnostics and in production to get a good follow up of application performances.

We had for several applications performance issues. With Introscope we were in many cases able to pin-point the bottleneck(s) and debrief it to the dev organization to improve their applications.

Faster deployments, in the form of a SAAS solution to support better POC’s.

1.5 years

Yes. Our first project was to get more visibility of our ‘Intranet solution’ based on WebSphere Portal. We tried to use CA APM CEM to get an understanding of the application performance around the globe. We needed extra code enrichments as CEM was not able to cope with dynamic URL’s.

No issues encountered.

CEM needs good follow up as it collects big amounts of data. Close follow up is needed for critical parameters. But you can easy scale up.

Very high. We were able to work with a very high skilled service force.

Medium level. Issue were so complex that first line couldn’t help.

Yes. Part of the organization uses HP BAC Insight. We switched to CA APM as HP support was not TOP and a new direction was chosen at the corporate level.

Setup of the solution was straight forward, but our first application was to complex and therefor the first initiative failed.

We did the implementation together with the vendor team. It was very useful to work together.

I was not involved in the selection process, but I know they also looked into the Compuware solution.

If you are new to the domain then I propose to start with a simple application in a SAAS approach.

It has improved our transaction monitoring significantly.

The most valuable features are the end-user experience and transaction monitoring.

The installation could be improved. Also, they need to concentrate more on the cloud for cloud monitoring.

I have not experienced any stability issues with the product.

Customer Service: 4 stars out of 5.

Technical Support: 3.5 stars out of 5

We used HPE Diagnostics earlier. But since the client already had an existing license of CA APM, he wanted to leverage the existing toolset rather than going for new tools.

The initial setup was slightly complex.

The implementation was done through the vendor. The vendor, of course, had implementation experience.

The ROI is good when you have more applications for testing.

We evaluated Dynatrace and HPE Diagnostics.

Definitely a good product, worth going for. Since I first reviewed the product here, about two years ago, I would currently not change my rating of eight out of ten. CA APM hasn't changed much in that time.

It is a monitoring tool used for business intelligence.

It is highly-customizable.

It alerts to application performance dips.

It has been used extensively in KPN's environment since 2013.

It is very stable.

Scalability is very good, because you can choose different amounts of agents.

When we were trying to restore historical data, we have reached certain limitations, which have restricted our historical view from being resized. Also, it change the data from one year into 200 days, historically. 

Technical support is excellent. If you opened a support ticket, you would get a reply within a few business hours. They call back and make themselves available.

Yes, I used a different company before, Dynatrace, who is a major APM player. I also used a bit of AppDynamics.

We switched because of efficiency and cost. I think CA APM is a very effective solution. 

It was complicated to build up an agent version that housed all the data needed. There are many varieties of agents for different environments. That is the hardest part, selecting the correct one. However if you have selected the proper agent that collects the data that you are interested in, after that, it is fairly simple.

This product was referred to me.

There are a number of valuable features for us:

• Dashboard
• Implementation of tool
• CEM
• TIM
• Alerts
• Actions
• Reports
• Triage maps
• Transaction tracers
• Team center
• EP Agent
• Management modules
• PostgreSQL backup

It has helped us to showcase business use cases better to our clients during demos or PoCs.

Application performance in terms of transactions is a bit slow and could be quicker.

I have been using it for a year.

There have been no issues with our deployments.

We have had no issues with the stability.

We have been able to scale it to our needs.

Technical support has been a 10 out of 10.

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.