Broadcom DX Application Performance Management Reviews

CA APM gives a complete 360 degree view of application performance. You can measure important performance metrics related to application components and resources such as CPU, JVM, memory and back-end connectivity. I like the transaction tracer, tracer viewer and history event viewer in CA APM. Transaction traces are very useful and valuable to identify problem sources and isolate them.

Client user interface and user interface dashboard.

I've used it for three years.

No issues encountered.

No issues encountered.

It's very good.

It's very good.

I previously used Wily Introscope in 2008-9, which is now the core software of CA APM.

I searched for open-source software, but I could not find one that provides a complete 360 degree view of application performance.

Go for it as it is very good.

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 Introscope dashboard of applications is the view our operations team uses to quickly identify any issues within the application space especially during peak trading season like Christmas/Easter. It is extensively used for quicker root cause analysis within the application area.

Introscope along with CA CEM and ADA is expected to further decrease the time taken for root cause analysis for critical customer facing incidents and also to identify bottlenecks before they impact our customers.

CA CEM's customer transaction view is valuable because it gives an insight into how our customers networks are performing. The ADA helps in isolating any response time issues on the network and hence, aid in root cause analysis (but we are yet to realise the benefit of it in production). Also, the transaction recording feature is valuable in understanding the paths our critical business transactions take within our IT environment.

The APM tools themselves work well within their respective silo's, but they need to work better in an integrated manner to give the end to end view of any business service.

CA Introscope has performance and data collection issues.

CA Introscope has had performance issues due to large number of metrics collected though it was scaled accordingly.

Customer Service:

Good.

Technical Support:

Average as they need more experts in APM technology.

For cloud monitoring, we had another tool and we had to switch because of the costs and features. Introscope has been running for a while.

• Too complex to get an integrated outcome
• ADA/CEM is complicated as it requires an understanding of networks
• CA Cloud monitoring is complex when creating customer journeys
• Introscope is complex when presenting and grouping metrics for dashboards
• The triage process is complex

It was through a vendor team whose expertise was above average.

Yes we did.

• You need strong architectural skills along with tool-set skills to implement such a tool
• You need to focus on integration as without this, the value might not be as expected
• Start it simple and then add more complex scenarios
• Document and design the system according to requirements
• It's easy to get carried away with all the features, so keep it simple to fit the business need
• Make sure what metrics are required to be monitored is clearly defined. Do not just collect data for all the metrics
• Make sure that RACI is clearly defined with various owners as this can easily slow down the implementation if it is not properly documented and agreed
• There is a lot of external team dependencies, like the application team, support team, network team, architects, an service owners, so make sure that this is documented along with RACI and efforts agreed
• A top down approach is always good, from the end users to actual technical metrics

• I really enjoy the dashboards. The dashboards are flexible and allow me to do what I need and want.

• The quantity of metrics/info that you can capture. For example: metrics about the garbage collection, memory being used for Java agents, etc.

• Our customers are now able to figure out and better understand how their applications are performing. They can identify very quickly where the tension points are. It makes troubleshooting applications performance problems very quick.

• It allows our customers to quickly improve the process of their applications.

I like the product a lot. There are some areas which I'd like to see improved in 9.7 and 9.8. Issues with the workstation interface which could be more productive. Sometimes you have to go back and forth to do some tasks. The UI needs to be more intuitive.

Two years.

So far I haven't had any problems with stability.

I'm happy with scalability. One of our customers uses three collectors and another is using 10 collectors. We haven't had any problems with scalability.

I would like to see them resolve issues quicker.

This was the first one.

CA APM is a great product. I'm really happy that I'm using their technology. I hope to implement it for more customers. Once we provide the solution to our customers, they are very impressed since it provides them with a great deal of visibility. It saves a lot of money by increasing productivity.

The investigator section where we can observe the agent metrics.

We were able to use CA APM to help diagnose a vendor provided product where we were experiencing slower than normal performance. While using the product, we were able to see that the issue resided in the database and were able to make adjustments to correct it.

The cost of licensing of the product could be better. The overall cost has sometimes prohibited us from installing an agent to monitor an application.

I've used it for four years.

We did, although minor. We ran into issue with some of the rights with some of the back-end files used by the enterprise manager, although newer versions seem to have less issues.

No, the application is very stable in our environment.

We are experiencing an on-going issue with our CA APM to Spectrum integration where we are unable to send alerts to the Spectrum console.

Customer service has always been very helpful thus I would rate them 9/10.

Technical support, as with any company, is hit and miss depending on who is assigned to your ticket. Overall we have had a positive experience as we have had very technically proficient folks and have had a few people who seem to struggle with supporting the product. With that said I would rate them 7/10.

We used an in-house developed application before CA APM. Our monitoring needs had grown and the solution we previously used no longer could meet our needs.

It was complex for we had to have some custom modules developed for us. We required the monitoring solution be able to monitor IBM's DataPower appliances, which CA APM could not do right out of the box. We were able to work with CA to have a custom module developed that provided us all of our DataPower monitoring needs.

Our implementation was accomplished by a mix of CA and PHI employees.

Our ROI has been high. It has allowed us to adjust applications to perform better, thus reducing our need to install high-end servers.

We did evaluate several other products. Solutions from BMC and Microsoft were evaluated but fell short of our total monitoring needs.

Keep on top of the amount of metrics that you are accumulating and make sure you have enough disk space to accommodate.

• Proactive alerting is one of the key elements of APM and works really well. The ability to detect problems before they become widespread high severity incidents is critical when you are managing production systems. All of our APM is visible to our global support operations centres, and each service is represented by a RAG summary alert button. Any AMBER/RED status alerts are checked instantly by our 24/7 support teams.
  
• Ease of deployment
• Product stability

APM is the tool used by all support areas to monitor Java application and infrastructure performance. We have standardised support for the services running on the Java platform into one tool.

Dynamic instrumentation, at the moment, I think it is a bit clunky to use and it should be available outside the transaction tracer. It can only be enabled during a transaction trace session. Ideally it would be nicer if this could be done via the Investigator view, and the available options are shown with a right click. That way they could be done without having to invoke a transaction trace session.

I've used it since 2004.

No issues encountered.

No issues, it's one of the main strengths of the product.

No issues, the product has evolved to increase scalability on existing infrastructure which is very good.

Excellent, really top quality always.

Same as customer service, top quality.

No, but we have retired similar solutions in favour of APM, e.g. Tivoli.

Straightforward, but we had professional services from the vendor to guide us as well.

Combined, and the vendor team was top quality.

It's not easy to quantify as the product is used to prevent mission critical services from going down. We can’t really put a figure on it.

Two full time employees are needed to manage the whole operation, which covers all production environments and two test environments.

Not before, but we have evaluated others since, such as AppDynamics, Optier, Dynatrace and others.

• Stay close to the vendor guidelines at all time
• Don’t customise it too much
• Always patch
• Join the user community

• Applications graphs
• Dashboards
• Error snapshots
• Ability to receive metrics from various ways

An example would be the error reports, which shows the services with the higher error percentage and which errors occurs most, to they can be easily spotted to improve the application performance.

The application's discovery/triage mapping.

I've used it for seven years in three different companies.

Had some performance problems with a few applications and had to disable some probes.

Yes, but due the product being installed on a VM environment without the proper I/O speed.

No, it's pretty easy to add more collectors/servers.

10/10, CA is pretty close with our company, and they are actually in the same building.

8/10.

Only open source solutions.

Only open source solutions.

Both with an in-house and with a vendor team. They had the necessary expertise for the installation.

Could be better if other teams were convinced to use the tool, but it's good.

Make sure to test to see if there's any performance issues and do use a physical server.

• Policies
• Audit feature
• Warning mode policy
• APM

Application suite was installed to bring in compliance with international security standards like ISO 27001 and SAUX

Integration with other applications and easier log management via automated procedures. Also needs an easier way to be able to segregate app admin duties.

Integration of CA AC at first and then APM/ELM/PMDB was initiated in 2008 and finalized stage was in 2012 for a major telecom provider.

As I implemented the additional tools, I would rate ELM as 6/10, and PMDB 8/10.

In earlier versions like 8.5 and 12 we ran into many incompatibility problems while a lot of other problems existed with JBOSS and assigned certificates.

No. Application was stable enough after APM installation.

No. There was a 3 phase staged expansion of this application which did not need any additional planning other than installing new agents on computers and servers.

Good enough, although I would have expected a better way of dealing with cases than having to explain every time from the start when a ticket was paused or opened in relevance to another one.

7/10 - They need to leave the automated way of asking from a client all tech details from start when a ticket is opened under his account ID.

No. Telecom clients (more than 3) were not using a solution similar to this one.

Initial setup was very hard due to lack of proper phrasing and instructions in manuals. It became even harder when there was a need for transition from older versions to newer ones.

I certified by CA on installing/integrating/developing the application as an outsourcing consultant.

A client claims that they have had better management and administration along with advanced reporting capabilities to the Privacy Authorities of State.

Original cost of licenses and working labor was estimated at €500,000 - €600,000 for a 4 year period. Day to day cost is not known to me.

Need to build questionnaires to establish priorities in policies and resources which are going to be developed and applied to his company. CA has no template/questionnaire in place and this is additional custom job needed by vendor (plus additional cost in money and time)