Broadcom DX Application Performance Management Reviews

The thing that is most valuable to us is the desktop console application CA Introscope Workstation. It is very easy to use. We tried other tools before (IBM Tivoli, for example), but the console was very difficult to use. CA Introscope Workstation is the first tool that was quickly embraced by our developers and became one of the tools they use on a daily basis. This is very important because, in reality, only developers can really interpret the metrics collected by the tool.

CA APM is mostly used during production post-rollout week. This is when our developers can quickly pinpoint any performance issues we might be having in production. Since the tool gives us near-real-time information, we lag only 15 seconds, we can quickly see bad trends and respond to them. Before APM, we were more reactive then proactive.

We are constantly adding new technologies to our stack and monitoring those is sometimes a pain because CA APM does not support some of these out of the box. For example, we have recently added things like MongoDB, Elasticsearch, memcached, etc. All of these tools come with excellent monitoring APIs accessed using REST, but CA APM doesn't come with support for collecting metrics via a REST endpoint. This really should be addressed – too many services come with a simple REST API utilizing JSON which should be very simple to collect.

We have been using CA APM for over five years to provide real-time monitoring of our IBM WebSphere-based production systems. We're currently in the process of upgrading to v10.

No issues.

CA APM performs really well and I cannot remember the last time it crashed. Granted, we are not an enormous deployment!

No issues encountered with scalability.

Over all these years we really only contacted customer support once. The issue was resolved quickly and professionally.

This tool quickly becomes very important to your organization. It is ok to use a local partner or vendor to help you out, but use that for some knowledge transfer. In the end you will need an in-house expert or two. As your applications change, so will the tool's configuration and it is best if you can do that yourself.

The good thing about licensing is that you only pay for the application serving machines you monitor. That means that all other backend servers come for free – stuff like your RDBMS, NoSQL databases, search servers (lucene, solr, elasticsearch), cache servers (memcached), etc.

We tested IBM Tivoli based solutions – it was a logical choice since we use IBM WebSphere. However, the tools were difficult to use and the whole user experience was just awful. We then piloted CA APM (CA Wily back then) and everybody fell in love with the console and the information it provided.

Plan for the involvement of your developers. This tool monitors your production applications, but only the developers know exactly what to monitor. Sure, the tool can give you metrics for method call, but somebody needs to give you a list of methods to monitor – you cannot monitor every single method! You will need input from the people who created the applications you want to monitor.

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.

The transition to APM Team Center as the primary console in APM 10 will definitely be the most valuable feature.

The ATC shows a lot of potential on how we view performance metrics on the front-end and back-end connections in a single view.

An APM tool should have the capability to provide a high-level view of the monitored application and APM 10 is heading in the right direction by just doing that. A single-window view of performance metrics, timeline, applications, alerts and heat maps (DA) throw a lot of data to an engineer in a quick glance.

Another new feature may just have to be Entry Point Discovery. The capability of the agent to detect the application entry point and create custom pbd for this. Interesting concept of automatic discovery and prescriptive change.

CA APM strength is the Custom Instrumentation - just having the capability to capture performance metrics for classes and methods in the application makes this tool a elite candidate.

CA APM is the go-to tool for any performance-related issues. It is always there monitoring the non-production and production environment. It is becoming part of the DevOps stack and becoming a key support tool for Performance testing.

The tool has supported many times in identifying slow transactions and the bottlenecks in applications.

APM 10 has jumped leaps in feature improvement over the last few releases which in itself is an achievement.

The UI still feels a little outdated (though there is change) especially for Dashboards. New widgets and dynamic actions needs to be in place for this part of CA APM.

Integration with other DevOps toolsets. CA APM needs to provide easy integration capability with CI/CD and ALM tools which will provide strong value to all stages in an SDLC.

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.

The system monitoring is one area that we like. Transaction tracer is another area that has worked well. The platform monitoring features is great, as APM integrates very well with some of the application server performance monitoring interfaces.

The alerting part – if the system goes down we get an immediate notification that a resource has gone down, so it reduces the impact on the business.

The end-to-end monitoring is not good. For example, a user reports a slowness issue, but we don’t have an option in the pool to find out which layer is causing the problem. The system doesn’t break down the application performance to show you what’s happening and where.

I've been using it for over three years.

It is a long process. Use-case monitoring - you have to know the application in and out to make it work. Other tools allow you to create the profile and configure it later. With APM, we don’t have anything like that. Configuring the use-cases monitoring is a long, time-consuming activity, and not a user-friendly one. It requires expertise and knowledge of the applications, and CA APM.

Outages with the solution are very frequent nowadays actually. We see the APM solution going down two to three times a day. And it’s a long troubleshooting cycle, as the CA APM system seems to add a lot of performance overhead.

We haven't scaled it yet.

It’s OK. They respond and acknowledge customer requests.

We are not happy about it, because we have had more than five or six tickets open for some months.

Previously, we worked with Dynatrace and AppDynamics. We changed because our organization decided to go with the enterprise licensing options that CA offers.

It was neither straightforward nor complex, but with some effort we were able to get it right. The application configuration for system monitoring is a good feature. It integrates well with application servers, but the application use-cases and monitoring was time-consuming.

We implemented internally, partnered with a vendor team. The vendor team were good but they had to depend on CA service tickets to complete the installation. This is because they don’t have clear guidelines to configure some of the solution’s features; for example the installation guide for URI monitoring feature doesn’t cover all the use-cases, and the partner had to raise tickets with CA for assistance so there was an impact on time.

I think pricing is good, actually. That’s what made our organization choose this solution. We didn’t face many challenges with the licensing because of our enterprise agreement.

• AppDynamics
• DynaTrace

For traditional technologies it’s the right tool, but for the latest technologies it might not be the right solution. I would tell them to consider all their options before deciding on CA APM, because the configuration, installation, and maintenance are time-consuming tasks. There seem to be a number of technology & support challenges with this tool.

Introscope, CEM and EP Agents

We have deployed this product at many businesses and the reviews of the customers was that it increased the value and revenue for their business.

Integration with other tools and out of the box reporting. Customization should be there for reports as this is the main feature asked for several times by customers.

Approx. 4 years

No issues. Easy deployments.

It's pretty much stable tool.

No issues

8 out of 10

6 out of 10

No, I haven't used any other APM Solution.

We work with CA.

Yes, I evaluated others as well - dynatrace. I also read Gartner's APM report.

Use the product how it was designed to be used. It allows you to test your application in a QA setup before moving an app from test to production. And after moving the application to production it encounter the ongoing issues with application which are met when an application is used to it's highest use and you can modify your application until it becomes highly stable and you will be able to submit 100% availability reports for your application to your customers. It can give a good business aspect to your application with 24x7 monitoring of your application.

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.